I'd like to wish all of our Jewish friends and readers a happy Yom Kippur, I know some of you will be sneaking away from whatever your celebration involves to sneak a peek at TennisWorld, and share the guilt felt so robustly on other occasions by your Catholic friends - not that you don't know all about guilt already, thanks to my Manhattan neighbor, Woody Allen. Personally, I always found his sensibility one-dimensional, but he's undeniably funny.
I'll be posting a little later, but today Luke has a day off so I'm going to run him over for a playdate with some little buddies of his who live near Lincoln Center, then roll into the office. BTW, I'm glad to announce that Tennis.com is a sponsor of next week's WTA event in Zurich, Switzerland, and even happier to say that the event has a good draw with a lot riding on the outcome. I'll be paying close attention to that one, because of our relationship with the event. Some color-by-number critics will undoubtedly see this as a conflict of interest, but I'm comfortable with it and suggest that if anything, it's a synthesis of interests (or, to use the fashionable buzzword, an exercise in the kind "branding" that's beneficial to the game and, frankly, necessary for the survival of a franchise as large as ours here at Tennis.
We practice what I think is best described as "advocacy journalism"; we're part of the tennis community, not an organization dedicated to objectively monitoring it for some vague public good, although some notion of the "public good" does occasionally enter the picture, or demand that we ask hard questions or take positions that seem to be in conflict with our general mandate (like criticizing the tours or players). I think that the more any of us can do to grow the game, the better. It's possible to have that agenda and mandate and still cover tennis in a fair and proper way.
All right, everyone, take it away. And check back this evening for what promises to be a very interesting Deuce Club discussion with Jackie-oh!
-- Pete