Maybe a shot clock on the court isn’t such a bad idea, after all

NEW YORK—Everything seemed normal during the second day of qualifying at the U.S. Open on Wednesday.

The sun was out and the weather was warm—too warm to plant yourself on a metal bleacher for very long. The courts were filled with little-known hopefuls fighting for their livelihoods. Top players like Karolina Pliskova and Simona Halep, their places in the draw secure, batted flawless ground strokes back and forth in practice. A crowd of fans whooped and leaped and flashed their camera phones when Roger Federer suddenly barreled out of the media center and headed for his hitting session in the Grandstand.

Things were so normal that it was hard to remember that we were in the middle of an historic week: For the first time, tennis was on the clock.

After years of discussion about how to quicken the sometimes-plodding pace of play in the pro game and reduce the time that matches take at all levels, the USTA has installed digital shot clocks—or “serve clocks,” as they’re labelled—on the scoreboards behind the courts at Flushing Meadows during the qualifying rounds. On Wednesday, as the players gathered the balls to serve on one side of the net, and set up to return on the other, the clocks silently began to count down from 25.

That number—25—may be another sign of progress. The time limit between points at the four majors is 20 seconds; at other tour events, it’s 25. There has long been a need to unify them, and 25 is the more reasonable number for today’s physical brand of play. On Wednesday, the 25-second limit allowed the players to go about their usual between-point routines without appearing to be rushed by the ever-decreasing digits at the back of the court.

There are compelling arguments for and against a shot clock in tennis. The best reason to use one is that it lets a player know exactly how much time he or she is using; as of now, they have to guess when they’re getting close to the limit, or wait for a chair umpire to warn them or even penalize them. Yet I was always skeptical of the idea, mainly because I thought it could create more problems that it solved. What happens if a ballperson doesn’t get the ball to the player quickly, and the player is forced to rush, or go over the limit, on a big point? The merciless clock would, presumably, override the umpire’s power of discretion in those situations, and that could be dangerous.

So how did it go on Wednesday? Smoothly, judging from a couple of hours spent walking the grounds and dropping in on matches. When the shot-clock experiment was announced over the summer, a few wags in the British press wondered if the rude and raucous sports fans of New York would be able to restrain themselves from counting the numbers down out loud and distracting the players. No one, from what I heard, gave in to the temptation. I didn’t hear anyone mention the clocks at all.

The vast majority of the time, the players got their serves off with more than 10 seconds left on the clock. The more deliberate among them—Michael Mmoh of the U.S., for example—got down into single digits some of the time. The speedier ones—Igor Sijsling of the Netherlands, for example—often took less than five seconds to toss the ball. The longer a game lasted, the more time the players tended to take between points, but they almost never flirted with double zero on the clock.

One player, Ysaline Bonaventure of Belgium, asked a ballperson on the other side of the net to give her the ball that she had just used to win the previous point, which took a few extra seconds. Without a clock on court, she might have continued with her normal routine and taken more than 25 seconds. With the clock, she walked straight from the net to the baseline to serve. But she didn’t appear rushed, and didn’t need to hurry her delivery. In general, the players appeared cognizant of the clock, but not thrown off by it.

Late in the afternoon, I had a chance to see the scenario that I had worried about play out. As Patricia Maria Tig of Romania stepped to the line to serve, she was forced to wait for a few seconds when a ball boy dropped a ball and scrambled to pick it up. By the time Tig began her motion, the clock was at double zero.

In the past, when I imagined a clock on court, I imagined that an alarm would sound, or a red light would blink. But here, nothing happened. The clock silently went to zero, Tig continued with her motion, the chair umpire didn’t say or do anything and the point was played. That was as it should be; obviously Tig hadn’t been at fault for going over the limit. Even with the clock, the umpire had the power to ignore it. That’s important.

Disasters are still possible this week: The players might reject the system or the sport may decide that a clock isn’t necessary. Tennis, after all, has lived without one for 140 years and done just fine. We won’t know it’s fate until the top players—and in particular, the most famously dilatory of them, Rafael Nadal—test it out. But my initial, day-one reaction was positive.

The best aspect of the clock was also the most surprising: It kept me from getting annoyed by players who were deliberate in their preparations. When you don’t know whether or not a player is going over the time limit, it’s possible to find yourself sighing in irritation as he or she inspects each of the balls for fuzz, stares across the net at the opponent and bounces the ball 10 times before finally tossing it in the air. On Wednesday, when a player did all of those things, and I could see that he still had 10 seconds to spare, I found myself accepting the rituals without complaint. Because I could see that no rule was being broken, the rituals seemed more kosher.

Which makes me wonder: Maybe the best reason to have a shot clock isn’t to let the players know when they’re taking too much time; maybe the best reason is to let the fans know when they aren’t.

(Photo Credits: Anita Aguilar)

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