One of the most infuriating things about newspapers is that when they screw up and have to run a correction (trust me, it isn’t easy to get an editor to agree to run one), it appears at least a full day later, and usually in a small box in some section of the paper unrelated to the place where the inaccuracy ran.
It’s a little better these days, with the internet, because newspapers (as well as TennisWorld) can append corrections in the electronic versions of the original story.
Still, in the interest of enough people seeing this correction of sorts, I'm writing a separate item as a follow-up to my "Will Play for Food" post. It will be way too "Inside Tennis" for some of you, so feel free to talk amongst yourselves until I get done.
I got a call yesterday from my long-time friends Eliot Teltscher, formerly a Top 10 pro and now a USTA honcho, and Jean Nachand, the USTA’s Director of Women’s Tennis, regarding my recent Kimberly Couts post (“Will Play for Food”).
Eliot and Jean got a lot of flack because my post highlighted the fact that Couts was entirely on her own in Australia, with nobody to even watch her matches. This turns out not to be entirely true. Nachand was present at Couts matches, although not necessarily for their entire duration, and the USTA had two other coaches on hand (Ray Ruffels and Wade McGuire) to help shepherd all the U.S. kids through the draw and otherwise act as friends in need.
This wouldn’t seem like a big deal,unless you know the backstory. The USTA did take an “official” team of kids to Oz, and the USTA is often accused of ignoring everyone but their anointed prodigies. It seems that some people, having read my original post, thought it unconscionable that the USTA would ignore a kid like Couts just because she wasn’t part of the official team and had the moxie to travel to Oz on her own – and on her own dime.
The aggrieved need to know that USTA personnel were not just present at Couts matches (including the tune-up event), they engaged with her and tried to make her life easier in every way during the trip.
“Kim is a very mature girl,” Nachand told me, “she handles herself beautifully. But she’s still just 16 and we definitely kept an eye on her. We helped find her practice partners and helped her when she need to switch hotels and organize other aspects of her trip.”
I don’t think these revelations undermine my original post; it was still a tremendously gutsy – and costly – trip for Couts to undertake, on her own. But the USTA can’t be blamed for any kind of negligence or callousness here either.