Wimbledon Must Change

I’m normally not one to embrace change over tradition, but Wimbledon must change. During the first week of the Championships, those of us lucky enough to have Direct TV, have been able to watch matches going on simultaneously across several channels. So when the networks were showing Serena and Venus playing doubles, I could flip to another match. Starting today, with NBC’s coverage, that liberty is gone. Wimbledon tradition is for all 16 remaining players in both the men’s and women’s draws to play on Monday, with no play on the middle Sunday. Serena hits the courts at Noon GMT on Monday, Venus at 1pm GMT, with Federer and Soderling taking the court at the same time. Those of us that want to watch Fed or any number of other matches are going to lose out, because we know that the Williams sisters trump everyone else when it comes to NBC’s coverage priorities.

If you have any interest in the 17 year old American qualifier, Melanie Oudin, she’ll be playing out on Court 18 on Monday- good luck catching anything other than (perhaps) the match point. We are also unlikely to be able to see the Verdasco/Karlovic, Hewitt/Stepanek, Djokovic/Sela, or Haas/Andreev matches either. NBC’s coverage is designed for soccer moms, whom they assume have the tennis attention span of your average house fly. So tennis addicts like me that want to watch all the men’s 4th round matches are up shits creek. You can try espn360.com but do you really like watching tennis on a computer? I sure don’t. Memo to the All England Club: spread the big matches out so we can actually watch the damn things!