Your lyin eyes

ORWELL'S JUDGE AND JURY OF PRO TENNIS

It begins with a subtle flick of the finger pointed upward, like a Sotheby's veteran signaling a bid to the auctioneer. Fans follow with rhythmic clapping, getting louder as they wait for justice from the sky. All eyes turn to the video board, and an animated tennis ball swoops down from above, down onto an animated court. The outline of a ball is pressed against a sideline, and then magnified. The crowd invariably oohs and ahs, the chair umpire updates the score, announces how many challenges remain, and play resumes. It is both timely and tidy, it is unquestioned, but it can be wrong. Ot at least I think so. But we may never know if what is known as the Spot-Shot Challenge system (commonly referred to as its predecessor 'Hawkeye,') is ever wrong, it is never questioned or held accountable by the broadcasters, who have incredibly sophisticated technology to do just that.

The following match might have been a watershed moment for the GPS Challenge system in tennis: Australian Open women's semifinals, Sharapova and Kvitova battling in an epic struggle, a rematch of the Wimbledon final. The match is excruciatingly close, 4-4 in the final set. Kvitova's edge in power and fitness led to her surge late in the match, but Sharapova's superior concentration and focus kept her in the hunt for Grand Slam glory. There was literally nothing to separate them going into the 9th game. Sharapova's serve, long considered the Achilles heel in her otherwise magnificent tennis armor, falters in that fateful 9th game. Down love 30, she sends a groundstroke apparently long, the linesperson calls it out, and it is now at 0-40. Her shaky service game is facing 3 break points. Kvitova is rolling, a point away from serving out the match; she exudes confidence and is ready for the kill. Shoulders slumping, Sharapova throws up a finger for the appeal. The players, live audience and fans at home had no reason to think that the shot was in was in; the request was simply a stall and a prayer, part of this match's end-game.

All eyes fixed on the scoreboard, Hawkeye's animated yellow ball swooped down accompanied by the (religious?) ritual clapping and chanting, and BOOM, the cartoon showed the ball on the line. Love-40 was now a manageable 15-30. Sharapova righted herself, served out the game and now led 5-4. Kvitova, shaken if not stunned, never recovered. Five points later she was in the showers, vanquished from the tournament.

The broadcast rolled in no video evidence to support Hawkeye; it's ruling is always final in today's tennis. ESPN and the Australian Open's world feed has video replay devices with 500 frame per second technology called X-mo. Let's put that into perspective for those outside the live broadcast genre. The video you see on live TV has 30 frames per second, the "Super Slo-Mo" introduced on Monday Football in the 1990's had 90 frames per second which was a real breakthrough in terms of resolution and clarity. In 2004 CBS tried a Mac Cam at the U.S. Open, with thousands of frames per second, but its resolution suffered due to inadequate lighting. X-mo has solved all that, replaying images from 500 to literally thousands of frames per second with stunning focus and clarity. The resulting images from 2012 Aus Open have been mind-blowing: fuzz coming off balls, eyes blinking, leg muscles flexing, ankles rolling. Never before seen in such clarity. The location of a ball on the court would be routine based on the available technology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvkoWII-ukg&feature=fvst

But there was not a single voice questioning the call. I knocked on several doors of social media, tweeting like mad to all the top tennis writers, sending out alerts to ESPN's Interactive Facebook site. The few who did respond were generally negative, they didn't need the distraction because Hawkeye had spoken. So faced with the choice of what to believe, Hawkeye or your lyin' eyes, the overwhelming majority chose the former. The tennis community preferred to trust the animated cartoon of the truth, rather than call out for an X-mo replay. Can you imagine an NFL fan accepting digital animation rather than a Hi-Def replay of a disputed touchdown?

One of the most frequent contributors to the Aus Open Facebook page is Eduardo DeBritto, a former college player and a pro tennis fanatic. He had the best working knowledge of Hawkeye. "It has 8% margin for error and it takes a picture of a shadow of the ball and not actually where the ball touched, since the shadow is bigger than the contact point between the ball and the court it can make errors." Yet no outcry. This might be because of a moment in the 2004 U.S. Open when the CBS cameras showed several missed calls in a Capriati-Serena Williams quarterfinal match that made a mockery of the existing system in which all overrules were the domain of the chair umpire. Having today's system that works 92% of the time, that ends the human drama, was embraced by the tennis world.

So Kvitova goes home, Sharapova moves to the finals, and the establishment chooses not to replay the controversial point because Big Brother had spoken, and not a soul protested (well, one did, and you're reading his work). The corporate cartoon trumps visual evidence, and not a soul speaketh, not even the vanquished.

The beneficiary of the call, Maria Sharapova, revealed on a quiet news day earlier this week that she is reading George Orwell's 1984. It is serving her well.