To tie a bow on the Hindrance Section in the ITF Rules of Tennis, I want to share a video that the ITF published on Hindrance. I don’t know exactly when the video was made, but Tennis Australia posted it on YouTube in 2010.
Breaking down the video point by point is the perfect back drop for evaluating my own coverage of the hindrance rule.
The ITF video starts with two instances of chair umpire discretion on awarding hindrance after a overruled call on a serve. This illustrates the principal that if the player did not have a play on the ball that a bad call is not hindrance. I covered this aspect of the rule in “Hindrance: Some Things You Just Can’t Control.”
Another example of a wayward ball kid interrupting play was provided. “Hindrance: Some Things You Just Can’t Control” contained a much more dramatic example of such an event.
The ITF contains another overruled officials line call from a match between Amelie Mauresmo and Dinara Safina. This is a mid-point example of umpire discretion on whether a player was hindered by the call. This is just another example of the first hindrance point made in the video. For the record, I think the umpire was wrong on not granting hindrance and find it curious that the ITF included it as an example.
A ball clips a bird in the next example presented in the ITF video. This bird seems to have survived, unlike the one I wrote about in “Tennis Hindrance: Going a Little Batty.”
The next clip brings a scenario that I did not explicitly cover. In that clip former French Open Champion Gaston Gaudio stops playing because of a spectator noise. In this instance the umpire awards the point to his opponent. In the absence of an umpire, had I been the opponent I probably would have granted a replay of the point due to hindrance.
I have heard that Andy Roddick’s serve was like a cannon, so it is fitting that the next clip featured his serve being interrupted by a loud clash. Apparently this was a second serve because the umpire granted him a first serve. Taken together, the Gaudio and Roddick clips illustrate how arbitrary the hindrance call can be, showing umpires making opposite decisions on similar situations. Hindrance is in the eye of the beholder.
A players cap falling off is cited as the most common instance of hindrance. The narrator describes that the proper procedure is to warn the player the first time that it happens and advise that recurrence will result in loss of point. This clip also illustrates that a player cannot hinder themselves, which is an important distinction.
That segment transitions seamlessly into a ball falling out of a players pocket, which is also subject to the same procedure as the cap scenario. I wrote about both unintentional hindrance examples in “Hindrance: Unintentional Acts.“
The ITF video concludes with a player inadvertently spiking his racquet after losing the grip during the service motion. The point illustrated in the ITF video is that a player dropping a racquet is not ordinarily a hindrance because it is an advantage to the opponent.
In “Server’s Racquet Strikes Net” I talked about a time in one of my matches where I did pretty much the same thing on a service motion during one of my league matches. In that case my serve somehow landed in, but my opponent missed the return. In that case I granted the hindrance and we replayed the point.
This concludes the examination of the hindrance rule in tennis. The next rule section is “Correcting Errors.” Before I dive into that topic, I need to hit the pause button to examine some current and pressing issues in tennis.
- United States Tennis Association (2020) Friend at Court. White Plains, NY
