Serena Williams will finish the season 1st in Grand Slams won, 1st in titles won, 1st in match winning percentage, 1st in # of victories over top 10 players, 1st in Olympic results, 1st in Year-End Championship results, 2nd in prize money won, 2nd in longest match winning streak….and will finish ranked #3 in the world.
“Sports broadcasters are guiltier these days than sportswriters of the ‘grand metaphor’ approach where tennis is concerned. Following the major tournaments this summer on television, I’ve heard again and again of the history about to be made: Raphael Nadal’s seventh French championship (history made), Djokovic’s career Slam (history not made), Murray’s becoming the first Brit to win Wimbledon since 1936 (nope). Even Federer’s thirty-first birthday was seen as historic, according to a certain fan site: ‘God is too an imaginative word, rather I would call him a ‘Prophet’ / Someday the prophet will make Tennis the most loved sport, I bet.’ The language of ‘bravery and heart’ was applied particularly to Murray, whose loss to Federer in the Wimbledon final was vindicated first with Olympic gold, and then with a victory over Djokovic in the U.S. Open final. With Andy Roddick’s retirement during the Open, we were also treated to any number slow-motion montages of the American’s days in the sun. (Even Roddick remarked during one interview how moving those montages can be.)
“Magazine writing doesn’t do montage well. Instead, we’ve lately gotten storylines, and sometimes whole stories, that explore the quasimetaphysical existence of what has been variously called, among other things, ‘the kinesthetic sense’ (David Foster Wallace on Federer) and ‘physical genius’ (John Jeremiah Sullivan on the Williams sisters)—the very thing slow-motion replay is meant to reveal on television.”
D1 NCAA Tennis rules change starting this season
So it seems the ITA, which runs the college tennis regular season has altered the rules starting this year to speed up the play of games. This is just a Division 1 rule aimed at the regular season. Right now, college tennis is played with six singles and three doubles matches. The doubles matches are played first to 8 games and singles are best two-of-three sets.
The new recommendations by the D1 committee will change matches that go to a 3rd set to a 10-point tiebreaker instead. This will severely shorten match length and to change doubles from first to eight, to first to six.
A Facebook group of outraged players (presumably) and other interested tennis parties are complaining about it and there are tweets with the doomsday-like #SaveCollegeTennis.
First off, these changes seem only to be targeted at Division 1. While they might frustrate some, the concerns are real. Eliminating the warmup seems like a bit much, but there’s nothing in the legislation that prevents players from warming up with their own teammates before a match. The real issue is court space and most places don’t have an extra court for that to happen if it’s a smaller school, which could compound the situation.
So long as the road team gets a chance to warm up with themselves before the match begins — and 99% of coaches would allow this — then I don’t see a problem with that.
As for the rule changes, there are already a bevy of modifications that happen in college tennis due to time constraints, darkness and so forth. This just standardizes it a bit more. I don’t think eliminating 3rd sets will “kill” college tennis. I do think it’s a bizarre quirk, but I think when you consider more severe alternatives that could’ve happened (like dropping the number of matches, meaning fewer players get to make teams) this seems like one that addresses the real problems and ensures shorter matches.
No word from anyone official yet on whether this is being implemented for sure or not, and college tennis doesn’t get much ink anyway so I doubt it’ll bubble to the surface. It seems strange that high school tennis lasts longer than a college match would right now under these rules in most states, but I don’t think it’s a bad trend and think high schools should adopt similar rules.
Serena Williams and Venus Williams of the United States celebrate after defeating Andrea Hlavackova and Lucie Hradecka of Czech Republic in the Women’s Doubles Tennis gold medal match.
Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images
The Poetry of Tennis (and Swimming)
Why do the commentators and the players turn to similes and metaphors so often? Why do poets? Again, David Foster Wallace: “You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.” Having Serena Williams say, “I played amazing,” is true, but not memorable, whereas Maria Sharapova’s description of herself playing on clay as “a cow on ice” was so deeply evocative (because not despite the fact that she is decidedly not a cow and court surface is clay, not ice) that it has been repeated ever since. Indeed after winning this year’s French Open, her metaphor showed up in many of the headlines, such as “The Cow on Ice becomes Queen of Clay.”
- Matthea Harvey
Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books Olympic series, part 3 of We Can Be Heros.
(via heyhearthismusic)
