After Atalanta

So I am forgoing a third post in three days about the Lambert-goes-viral situation to recount a recent moment of irk I had when reading Tennis magazine. It's been a while since I complained about Tennis so I was due. Said complaint comes from the US Open round-up which highlighted the top 5 stories of the 2009 tournament. And no, this post is not going to be about Serena Williams--directly anyway. Number 4 on the list is titled "The men can serve. The women? Not so much." Immediate grrr moment but I read on to discover that the theory behind this fact is that the women have more power due to improvements in equipment (like the men) and so they can achieve unprecedented pace (also like the men) but for some reason cannot generate the same amount of spin. No attempt at an explanation for this alleged fact. Also the new power racquets help the returner--again an effect experienced by both men and women. But apparently this switch makes has a greater psychological effect on t...

The NCAA has been meeting this week . They decided that 7th graders are now officially "prospects." Only in basketball and only boys; but still. The organization was concerned that college coaches were attending camps for elite 7th and 8th graders, something the NCAA could not monitor or regulate because the former cutoff for a prospect was 9th grade. The DI Legislative Chairman noted that it was "just a sign of the times." What times? Apocalyptic ones? Okay, that's slightly hyperbolic. But, come on--7th grade? This seems almost like the futile performance enhancers war. Someone finds a loophole, an administrative body addresses it, then there's another loophole, another rule and so on and so on. And all the while we do nothing to address the underlying problem(s). Have we learned nothing from the Elena Delle Donne situation? So many times since I started this blog have I wanted to title a post "You big stupid head"--except that's the cleaned u...

Peter Bodo who writes for TENNIS magazine and has an online column for them as well wrote, in this month's issue, about the mistake the WTA has made moving the year-end championships to Doha, Qatar. It was pretty easy to see that the move was about money--the money the organizers in Doha will put up for the tournament and the marketing plans of sponsors like Sony. The WTA says it is about bringing tennis to a larger market. Bodo writes that fans will not travel to Doha like they travel to the Grand Slams. True, but even when the year-end championships were elsewhere they did not get that much attention. I recall that when it was in L.A. there were many open seats. Admittedly Doha does not seem to be in a tennis-friendly region of the world but in November even tennis-friendly cities may not turn out for the championships. For most people, tennis ends after the US Open. Even I have trouble keeping up with autumn tennis. Part of it is lack of coverage but some of it is also my own s...