So I ran into Mary Carillo in the media dining room. We shared a sublime Foie Gras washed down with an engaging but slightly pretentious Chardonnay (just kidding; we were both grabbing bad coffee, on the trot). But I remembered that a poster had mentioned, a few posts back, that Carillo was a critic of the Hawkeye line-calling system, so I figured I’d find out what gives.
In her typically animated manner, Mary started waving her arms and raving:
Well, I take Mary’s point. My first reaction - and I'm a New Yorker - is to say, shut your pieholes, you sharp-elbowed, deluded and self-infatuated morons.
But Mary, like some posters (Mark?) makes a valid point: If you’re going to have Hawkeye, why not use it to double-check any call, on an ongoing basis? This is especially true when you know that if the new system at the NASDAQ 100 has shown anything, it’s that Hawkeye features an extremely efficient, fast process for determining call accuracy.
But I like the idea of the challenge system, and it isn’t because I’m a slave to the tennis-is-entertainment crowd. It’s quite the opposite; I’ve always fought Billie Jean King and others on this, saying that just because tennis is entertaining, it doesn’t mean it’s exclusively entertainment- and therefore subject to the same standards that govern show business.
I find watching a coyote hunt a rabbit entertaining, too. But I wouldn’t exactly call it entertainment.
Anyway, I figured it might be a good idea to check all these issues out with the guy responsible for creating them, Paul Hawkins. He's the father of Hawkeye, and I found him, surrounded by gnomic geeks, in an airless green broadcast room (cubby-hole might be a better description) near to the ESPN booth, overlooking the south baseline.
The room, as you might expect, was stuffed with computer equipment of all kinds – equipment being any number of plain black or graphite gray boxes sprouting a gazillion wires, one or more of them ultimately attached to video monitors.
As we walked out to get some air and chat, I said I had a question. He replied, without missing a beat, “As long as it isn’t, ‘Are you really as young as you look?’”
Hawkins, it turns out, is 31. He describes himself as part geek and looks the part, with his lean frame, prematurely graying hair, and funky, slacker-bordering-on-hipster wardrobe. The other part of Hawkins is sports freak – he’s passionate about games and has been a county-grade cricket player, which is England’s rough equivalent to being an all-state player in the U.S.
Hawkins took a doctorate in Artificial Intelligence at Durham University. His main talent, though, might be his ability to meld the geek with the practical, can-do pitchman for an idea that he felt couldn’t miss: a digital umpiring system.
Hawkins was working for a big research firm when he began to peddle his idea, trying to raise seed money for an experiment in digitally tracking tennis (or cricket) balls. The people who rose to the bait were television executives. Partly because of that, Hawkeye has been application drive rather than technology driven. That is, people went to Hawkins and said, “We need to fix officiating” rather than Hawkins going to them and saying, “I have the technology to eliminate bad calls.”
Staked by TV money, Hawkins spent over four years ironing out the kinks in the Hawkeye system, under real-time conditions in the television booth. But the whole project almost went down the tubes because of one lousy match, the 2004 Australian Open final between Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne.
In that match, Clijsters got a bad call that came as close to costing her a Grand Slam title as any call in tennis history. In fact, the only people in Rod Laver Arena, or millions of homes, worldwide, who didn’t see how badly Clijsters got jobbed (thanks to Hawkeye, which was being used by television but notby the tournament) were the three people who should have: Henin-Hardenne, Clijsters, and the umpire.
I've written extensively on how this was the watershed moment that demanded the transition to digital officiating. Yet, in reality, almost the opposite came to pass. The technology terrified Tennis Australia, rather than inspiring the organization. As Hawkins said, “Tennis Australia was in a panic over what happened and their reaction was to say, ‘We don’t want this system.’”
At that point, Hawkins figures, fully 80 per cent of the tennis establishment was against incorporating Hawkeye into the official game. Hawkeye was evil incarnate. It made the game look bad!
Then, another match turned the tables. Serena Williams got so badly hosed in her U.S. Open quarterfinal with Jennifer Capriati that the USTA decided it absolutely had to do something. And yes, we note how different this reaction was from that of the Aussies.
“We were gaining,” Hawkins remembers. “Before the Capriati – Williams match, I’d say we were running about 65 per cent against Hawkeye. But by the end of that U.S. Open, we had 90 per cent support for electronic officiating. The USTA said, ‘We want this.’”
In light of Carillo’s criticism, I was curious to know how Hawkins felt about the challenge system. Wouldn’t the purist – the geeky, AI, algorithm, math guy - take umbrage at the compromised nature of the arbitrary two-challenges-per-set system adopted here at the NASDAQ?
Not at all, it turns out. Hawkins thinks Carillo’s criticism is “narrow-minded”, and based on her basic antipathy to any kind of electronic officiating. He points out that the players themselves voted for the challenge system (as opposed to unlimited review), that very few players have run out of challenges here at the first tournament to embrace Hawkeye, and that the probability of Carillo’s U.S. Open doomsday scenario actually coming to pass is mathematically so remote as to be negligible (personally, I wouldn’t argue with this guy’s grasp of probability theory).
And then Hawkins added his most devastating argument: “When a player walks onto the court, he knows his destiny is in his own hands. If you don’t waste your challenge opportunities, you can’t lose a match on a bad call.”
So there you have it, from the horse’s mouth.
For the record, what I’ve noticed so far is that the players kind of like this system. If you’ve been watching on television, you probably saw that they, as much as anyone else, get a kick out of seeing how the call turns out – so much so that they’ll smile across the net at each other, or shrug at the resolution - even when it goes against them. I think the certitude provided by Hawkeye is invaluable; it makes players either feel good about having been right or shrug and say,"So I was wrong. Big deal. Can we move on?"
You know what Hawkeye has demonstrated, so far? That the players don’t know what they’re talking about, oh, two-thirds of the time(remind you of anyone you know?).
That’s right. The up to the moment count is 116 challenges, of which only 34 were upheld (meaning the call was overturned). The stats among the women are particularly bad: 56 challenges, only 12 upheld (no further comment on that; you all know I live in mortal fear of empowered female Harvard professors!).
Doug Robson, a frequent Tennismagazine contributor and USA Today tennis correspondent, did some number crunching earlier today and basically figured out that there have been something like .85 bad calls – that is, calls that would have gone uncorrected before Hawkeye - per match.
Now, if you assume that the average three-set match goes 6-4, 7-5, and that the average game consists of a total of six points, you have 132 points, of which slightly less than one is wrongly called.
Hawkeye’s greatest contribution may prove to be the elimination of the argument that the thing tennis really needs is digital officiating.
But I still like it. I like it in its present form, and I don’t see why everybody is hell-bent on rushing to judgment here. If the system is flawed, it is also infinitely adjustable.
One other observation: I've done the heavy lifting on this issue now, and I have to admit that I am just as bored by intense discussions of digital officating as I am of human officiating.
Some things, I guess, never do change.