INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—“Oop,” the author Nicholson Baker says, is what men blurt out when they accidentally bump into you in the hallway. Women, according to Baker, say “Oops.” I don’t know about that. In tennis these days, all of us, men and women alike, say “Oop.” We say it around 7:00 in the evening—“The Oop is out.” In tennis-speak, this brief and funny little sound stands for Order of Play, the daily sheet that tells us who is going to play whom, where, and when, the following day.
For fans and writers, the sound of those three letters is a little like hearing someone say that your favorite TV show has just started—the hassles of the day just past can be temporarily put aside. Passing your eyes expectantly over the names on the Oop, you can relax for a minute and look forward to a fresh start tomorrow. Then you can turn to the person next to you and say, “What were they thinking putting Kerber on at night?” Then you can Tweet it. Then you can get outraged responses on Twitter. A brand new day has already begun.
What's the appeal of the Oop? We know that anticipation is usually better than the real thing, and the Order of Play offers a purely anticipatory world, organized in a simple, inarguable black and white grid. Everything is made clear. The players and matchups you had forgotten about are in front of you. Now, looking at their names—first one in lowercase letters, last in blazing all caps—you can go ahead and imagine how those matchups may play out. They usually end up being better in your mind than they are in reality the next day, which is why seeing an Order of Play for the first time is the purest fan experience of the tournament. Everything is possibility.
Other distinctive and likeable traits of the Oop:
—The air of absolute authority conveyed in the words, “Not Before 1:30 P.M.” At a time when athletes rule the world, they still have to abide by the Oop. If it tells them that they're playing at 11:00 A.M. the next morning, they’re going to bed early. The BNP Paribas version ends with this tremendously unanswerable caveat: ANY MATCH ON ANY COURT MAY BE MOVED
—The thought, as you look at the simple list of names, of all the considerations that went into making it. Requests from players and networks; time to rest between singles and doubles; a balance between day and night sessions, so that each group of ticket-buyers gets something decent for their money.
—The very official way that the tournament director, referee, and tour supervisors must put their names to the Oop each day, certifying that they’ve signed off on it. It has the gravitas of a government document.
Once you’ve got an Oop, you don’t let it go. That night, it travels with me to whatever bar or restaurant I go to. There it can be brandished to answer any questions about what’s coming up the following day, and colleagues and friends can mull over the possibilities. The next afternoon, it travels with me around the grounds, folded in fours and stuck in my shirt pocket. I can never remember any match that’s coming up without an Oop to guide me. Many times I’ve walked out of the pressroom, taken a seat on a distant court, and had to go all the way back to retrieve an Order of Play—I'm lost without it.
As the days go by, the Oop shrinks, just like the tournament it represents. It begins as three pages bristling with so many names in tiny print that you can’t tell singles players from doubles teams—over the first few days, dozens of results come in from matches that I never even noticed on the schedule. By now, the quarterfinals, it has shrunk to half of a single page. The names that are left loom larger every day. It's easier at this stage to be disappointed by what you see. An Oop without any good matches can leave you in that terrible state, with nothing to mull over or look forward to.
On Saturday and Sunday, it will be smaller still. You might think it would be unnecessary even to put one out when the only singles match left is the final. But no, it will be there, in its usual rectangular white stack at the front of the press room the evening before. Only when I pick it up and see those all-cap last names faced off against each other will the final seem official. One more time, I’ll be able to put aside the hassles of the day, escape into the clean and orderly world of the Oop, and start to imagine what might happen.