Culture
Why Draper and Auger-Aliassime's match point should change tennis' view on video replays
First as tragedy, then as farce.
Same tournament; same umpire. New players; new court; new call.
Same outcome: tennis shooting itself in the foot.
After midnight on Saturday morning in Cincinnati, Canada’s Felix Auger-Aliassime was match point down to Britain’s Jack Draper in the deciding set of their round-of-16 match. Draper served out wide and moved in to volley; Auger-Aliassime dipped a return at Draper’s feet. The ball spun up, clipped the net tape, and rolled over.
Draper smiled and walked towards the net for a handshake, believing he had hit a fortuitous winner; Auger-Aliassime walked across to the deuce side of the court for 40-40, believing the ball had hit Draper’s side of the court on its way over.
There was a pause. Greg Allensworth, the umpire, who was also in the chair for the electronic line calling (ELC) malfunction with Brandon Nakashima and Taylor Fritz on Thursday, spoke into his microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am ruling that that was a fair shot. Game, set, and match Draper, 5-7, 6-4, 6-4.”
Then it began.
“If there was a replay then I’d replay it, but I don’t know,” Draper said.
“Did you not see the ball bounce on the floor?” Auger-Aliassime asked Allensworth.
“Like after he hit it?” Allensworth asked Auger-Aliassime.
“You’re going to get out, and it’s going to be everywhere, and it’s going to look ridiculous,” Auger-Aliassime said.
There was no need to get out and wait for it to be everywhere. There was no need to wait for the four-minute discussion that inevitably ended in no reconsideration of the decision. It was already ridiculous — and not because of the officiating.
After Thursday night’s incident between Fritz and Nakashima, in which Allensworth was unable to intervene and reverse an incorrect non-call from the Hawk-Eye ELC system, the ATP Tour took swift action.
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“After recent technical issues with Live ELC in Montreal and Cincinnati, we have conducted a thorough review of our protocols. Going forward, if the review official determines during a rally that a ball was out earlier in the point (but was not called by the system), that decision will stand,” the tour said.
This incident should occasion a similar review of video replay in tennis. In the case of Draper and Auger-Aliassime’s match point, Allensworth has to decide the following things in a matter of milliseconds:
- Does Draper volley the ball or half-volley it? This affects whether or not the ball can follow the trajectory it ends up taking.
- Does he hit the ball into the ground?
- Does he hit the ball with his racket twice? If yes, Allensworth has to rule whether or not he has done so in the same motion.
Oh my! 🫣 pic.twitter.com/FazKHlOKY9
— Stefanos Tsitsipas (@steftsitsipas) August 17, 2024
Replays appear to show Draper knocking the ball into the ground on his side, before it spins back off his racket and high into the air. If there is a double hit, it is in one continuous motion, so would not be ground for losing the point under tennis’s rules. The ball hitting Draper’s side of the court after his racket, however, would mean Auger-Aliassime winning the point.
Instead, Draper wins the point and the match. But even with video, this decision is close; there are clues to the ball having hit the court after the racket in its final trajectory, including its arc and height, but not a definitive frame. What definitely unfolds? Another failure of tennis’ refereeing infrastructure to protect players and fans.
Draper, Auger-Aliassime and Allensworth were all let down (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
Draper should not have to defend his integrity when trying to pick up a ball, nor should he have to consider conceding a point. Auger-Aliassime should not have to explain to an umpire that he can be proven wrong after his opportunity to win a match is lost. Allensworth should not have to be the sole arbiter of an incredibly tight call with just his eyes, while fans watching both live and on TV can see replays he cannot act on — even if they are not conclusive.
Questions of sportsmanship and decency will necessarily come up — Andy Roddick memorably gave a point to Fernando Verdasco at the 2005 Rome Masters when up a set and triple match point, after the umpire refused to check a ball mark. Roddick lost that match — but players should not have to mete out their versions of what is fair in a sport that has rules and protocols to prevent them from doing so. Even if Allensworth were to have reviewed the footage and not overturned it, it would have allowed all three people in question more closure on the situation than guessing about their instant impressions of a moment.
“We can look at it after the match and if I see it wrong, I’ll admit it to you,” he told Auger-Aliassime.
“That’s too late,” the Canadian said.
There are good reasons the use of video replays sometimes meets resistance — one is that it cannot be in place for all events. At this year’s U.S. Open, which starts on Monday, August 26, only three-quarters of the singles matches will have video replay covering them. Situations may unfold when the same call gets overturned on one occasion because of video, but gets left in error on another because it is not available on a different court.
A wider introduction would see tennis reckon with many of the growing pains football has gone through, including a clearer realisation of how much is predicated on subjectivity that a camera can’t eradicate. But tennis creating problems for itself like this is a tragedy. To continue to do so when there are simple ways to avoid it? A farce.
(Top photo: Frey/TPN via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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