The Miserable Art

Alright, have you ever smacked your head in frustration, wondering why, oh, Kim Clijsters, Vera Zvonareva, or Nadia Petrova chose to play so danged conservatively at a key juncture in a match? Actually, you can substitute any name that you like in there, because we all know that playing "conservatively" is merely a prelude to choking, sometimes it's a code word for choking. And most anyone can choke; in tennis, the prerogative rises almost to the level of, well, a human right. At same time, the temptation to choke - and I call it a temptation because choking is, well, almost irresistible -  rises almost to the level of a human mandate.

Choking. Is there a sport in which the miserable art is so routinely and gloriously on display, with so little to distract anyone who might be even remotely interested in seeing how such an appalling meltdown can play out? Let's face it, there's no place to hide and nothing to hide behind on a tennis court. No constant motion, no cheerleaders flinging their legs and pom poms in the air, no teammates, no obstruction to block your view of that the field of play - that broad, flat, monochrome expanse of featureless clay,  cement or grass that's different from a parking lot only in that there is a net - something barely larger than a stretched out fishnet stocking - separating it into two halves.

It's enough to make you think that tennis is merely a vehicle through which a broad and robust representation of players - men, women, Russians, serve-and-volleyers, New Zealanders, stars, baseliners, Czechs, journeymen, Italians - are accorded the honor of demonstrating to all the world their ability to, well, gag. To choke. To lose matches that they could, should, or would win - if only they weren't being sucked into that ultimate black hole of the sporting universe, or being lured into it by a siren song of the evil self-defeating dwarf that resides in all of us. We march toward that alluring, haunting melody, like so many zombies. We've all been there, with Martina and Reeshard and Evonne and Johnny Mac and Jelena and Roger and Ivan. . . ah, the brotherhood of man!

So here is an interesting study of choking, distinguished by the fact that the person who produced is not some blowhard like yours truly, building a mountain out of an anecdotal molehill. Here we have a serious social scientist, weighing in on a question that is going to trouble some of you by its very nature.  It  is an intriguing thesis by one Daniele Paserman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I assume that Daniele is a woman (Ed. Note: he is, in fact, a man), which may be important to some of you, for reasons that will be clear when you read the abstract from her exhaustive (68-page) work, Gender Differences in Performance in Competitive Environments: Evidence from Professional Tennis Players.

The abstract:

Alright, I confess that I'm not sure that I'm smart enough to know what this abstract really means. I mean, This result is robust to controls for the length of the match and to the inclusion of match and player-specific fixed effects. . .

Pardonnez-moi?????

However, that last paragraph is pretty explicit, to the point, and something all of us can understand - and to which anyone who plays this sometimes infuriating game can relate, with a rueful nod of the heasd. So have at it folks. I am most curious to hear what our resident social scholars and stat masters have to say about this (Rosangel, Andrew, AmyLu?). Here is a pretty lively rebuttal to the thesis, or at least a warning to those who would read broad generalizations into Professor Paserman's study. I suppose the one thing we can't argue with is Paserman's numbers - presumably they are accurate.

As this study was brought to my attention by regular Comment poster and sometime Guest Contributor Codepoke (I'll be publishing a new Battlefield Report from him within few days), I asked him to weigh-in on the Paserman study. He replied: "Personally, I don't think women choke more than men, I think more women have a game that cannot be adjusted under pressure so that they are a whole WTA of Blakes. That will make them look like they choke more, but really they just miss more. But that's just me."

Take it away, and we all know this can be a touchy subject, so let's keep it civil, okay?