I Wuz Robbed

The Tennis Channel is having a contest, the grand prize for which is 2 weeks expenses paid to cover the French Open as a journalist, with press credentials and full access and everything. This, to me, would have been paramount to having died and gone to heaven, since this would have folded up some of my favorite things about life (i.e. tennis, writing, Paris with Wanda (oh yes, Wanda is with me this whole time - as if she'd let me go on my own!)) and put them all in my lap.

The entry for was 500 words or less on the topic "What would you do if you were commissioner of tennis?" This is an interesting question because currently there is no commissioner of tennis, just a bunch of governing bodies which squabble endlessly with one another. They asked for creativity and to show a knowledge of the game of tennis. Here is my essay, which I found out tonight did not place in their top ten, which was the requirement to move ahead to the semi-finals of the contest:

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Imagine a sports bar in Indianapolis on Super Bowl Sunday. Devin Hester of the Chicago Bears has just returned the opening kickoff about 287 yards for a touchdown, and everyone is already fearing the worst. Painful specters of failures past re-introduce themselves to people who had thought them long banished. The broadcast cuts away to a commercial involving a singing frog and some sort of marsupial. The bar is quiet, only the forlorn clinking of bottles audible over the inane sounds from the TV. The commercial ends, and this is what is heard upon return:

“Due to time constraints, we are moving ahead in this game.”

Upon return, the score has moved from 7-0 Chicago to 16-14 Indianapolis. You can imagine the pandemonium which would ensue, and yet tennis fans have had to endure it for as long as tennis has been on television. For some reason, it is acceptable to cut bits of a tennis match out in order to fit it into some pre-ordained time slot where, directly following, there is nothing to be seen but large men with chainsaws cutting wood, or an in-depth look at the sport of nerf-herding.

It’s not even as if the cuts are tastefully done. I remember watching a Sampras match wherein Pete lost the first set, and upon return from the commercial break, those dreaded words:

“Due to time constraints, we are moving ahead in this match.”

Upon return, Pete has evened the match at a set apiece, and the announcer, I believe it was Barry “7^th Game” McKay, chimes in with:

“That’s got to be the best set of tennis played by anyone this year!”

Well thanks for nothing, mister editing-room goon, I’m glad you got to enjoy that fabulous set of tennis. The rest of us will sit and wonder about it, perhaps we will begin to read that book about knitting we’ve been eyeing. We at least know that when we inevitably put it down, we can pick it back up again where we left off!

As commissioner of tennis, my first act would be to strike new TV deals which flatly prohibit the cutting short of any broadcast match, be it live or tape delayed. What do you mean there are aliens landing on the capitol? Federer and Nadal have split sets, we’re not going anywhere! Your local news is next but they’re going to have to wait, because Sharapova and some other Randomova are playing a 3^rd set tie-breaker - they’re already at 67-67 and nobody shows signs of being able to hold serve anymore. Are the manic fumblings of my local police force more interesting than that?

Furthermore, I will enact sharp penalties for those networks which tape-delay a match, but then pre-announce the score for you anyway. Perhaps we’ll sneak into the network president’s home and steal all of his faucet handles. I promise you, retribution will be swift, completely unpredictable, and painfully awkward. Just like the lobotomization of a tennis match.

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So now you can go to the Contest Home of the Tennis Channel's Contest, read the other essays, and explain to me how in god's Great Green Greasy Limpopo River of a fucking world did I not place among that group of essays. Granted, there's a bit of a bite-the-hand-that-feeds-me vibe to mine, but for one, I'm not talking about the tennis channel I'm talking about ESPN, which everyone who watches tennis knows is the worst instigator of this sort of behavior (but TTC is not above this behavior themselves and it infuriates me), and for another, fuck them if they can't take a joke. They have no idea I wrote a program which automatically sent e-mail every single day to Comcast's programming department which read, simply "Dear Comcast, Please pick up the Tennis Channel! Thanks, Ben", and that thing ran for the better part of 8 solid months before Comcast finally caved. I LOVE the tennis channel, I just need full matches, thank you very much.

I only like one of the so-called semi-finalists' essays more than the one I wrote. Can you guess which one it is? Double bonus for anyone who knows (and can say why!).

Fuckers.