At the feet is normal, and accepted. At the body less accepted, but it’s always hard to tell what was intended with an overhead— they’re hard even for the pros to consistently direct where they want. And regardless of what anyone says: a play directly at the opposing player is never, particularly at net, actually disal…

Even the lamb rested; on broadway, I believe.

Sort of. I mean, *I* have fewer options off of a slice than I do off a drive (top-spin or flat) shot... but the thing about higher level players is they can 1) adjust to odd spin and 2) generate their own pace. I see those slices bouncing up to Granoller’s knees and I can only think that he’s strategically slicing for…

I feel like a top-spin backhand cross-court is also an option here. With depth, it puts more pressure on the opponent slicing. There’s no mandate to meet a slice with a slice, and these slices weren’t *that* spectacular, it wasn’t like shoelace level— I feel like either of them could have changed it up whenever.

Push the pusher

Yup.

The point isn’t that Serena would have won. The point is this:

In tennis, the umpires often actually have *more* restraint after an initial warning or violation, because the stakes go up so dramatically: warning; point; game. So it tends to take more to trigger the latter violations than the former. That said, there was nothing she said that warranted a violation at all, in my…

On the coaching violation, the problem is that it’s just never enforced, so starting to do it in the final of the Open is a little crazy. It’s not that the rule doesn’t exist, and not that he wasn’t breaking it (and I respect Moritoglu for his honesty, as I always do), but that if it’s going to be enforced, it needs…

The point is that on the men’s side, the men often don’t get even a *first* violation for behavior that’s more egregious (verbally) than what she did. It’s in any case a really, really subjective metric that varies with the referee, but it’s also pretty disparately enforced for the women and the men, and I think for…

Ditto, ditto. I’ve watched male players in full meltdown curse the ref through multiple games and changeovers without anything but a “chill out or I’ll give you a code violation”— much less a game penalty. The fact that it was pretty absurd to suddenly decide to call a coaching violation at random in the finals of the…

Or it’s just a simple misstatement: they meant to say “a cada de 40,000 espectadores” rather than “a cada uno de los 40.000 espectadores.” 

The original tweet is spanish, reporting on a promo announced in spanish, so there’s no language “translation” issue possible there, and there’s also nothing in that phrase that’s specific to promos— “one for each of the 40K” is both the literal, and the accurate translation of the tweet. What I was saying was, maybe…

“Cada uno de los 40,000" etc just means precisely “each of the 40,000 spectators.” It might be a mis-report, but it’s not a mistranslation.

Those are not apt comparisons.

Yes, the tour does penalize tanking. It’s something like up to $10,000 per incident (?) But I don’t know if it applies to qualifying rounds or challengers, futures etc.

I mean, boxing literally allows fighters to be knocked unconscious repeatedly and get up and continue fighting. I for one will go to my grave (ideally a very, very long time from now) thinking that might be unhealthy.

He seems to care far more than Kyrgios; is obviously already far more talented than Young ever had the potential to be; and has a lot more consistency (particularly on serve) than Janowicz had when he came on the scene. And he’s all-court, unlike Thiem obviously. To me at this point he looks more like a Zverev, with a…

Objectively, he’s incredibly talented; he has the full complement of very high-level traditional tennis skills, plus a bunch of unorthodox stuff that comes from having incredible coordination, reflexes, and amazingly good hand skills. But talented and accomplished aren’t the same thing.

I have a priest exorcise my racquets before every match. Catholic or Santeria, whoever I can find.