5 posts tagged “tennis”
I'm sure some of you—and by "some of you," I actually mean my parents—are wondering how I finished in the Tennis Channel's Racquet Bracket. Well, pretty dang good, actually. When I last updated you bragged,
I was in 21st place. I later dropped down to 23rd at one point, but the
semifinals pushed me back up to 16th. Except for failing to predict
upstart Gael Monfils's place in the semis (which almost no one else
did, anyway), my choices were pretty much spot-on from the
quarterfinalists onward.
Today, of course, the finalists were No. 1 Roger Federer and No. 2 Rafael Nadal. My pick was Nadal, who—despite Federer's obvious prowess on other surfaces—has just dominated clay-court tennis for four years. If Federer somehow managed to defeat Nadal, I was going to tumble to 639th place, passed by many of R-Fed's supporters. If Nadal won, I was going to move up to 12th, picking off the handful of Federer supporters who were ahead of me. As you surely know by now, Nadal won.
Finishing in 12th place is way beyond anything I could've imagined, really. After all, there were 3,737 entrants. In my mind, doing "very well" would've meant finishing in the top several hundred. Finishing 12th?! Zowie!
That said, I can't help but feeling the tiniest of stings for not finishing in the Top 10. Tennis Channel awards prizes to the top 10 finishers. Finishing sixth through 10th was worth a Tennis Channel t-shirt. Truthfully, I don't really care about the $500 first prize or the tennis racket that goes to second place. But I started to really want to win one of those t-shirts.... Golly gee, Tennis Channel, finishing 12th out 3,737 isn't even worth a t-shirt? Now, I guess, I know how it feels to finish on "the bubble" at a poker tournament, just out of the money.
Doing well in the Racquet Bracket affected my spectatorship habits. My tendency, probably like yours, is to root for an underdog, at least when I have no preexisting rooting interest in a player. But this particular Racquet Bracket changed that—or, at least, doing well in this Racquet Bracket did. While ordinarily I might've written off my picks and rooted for who/whatever felt good at the time, the success got to me a little bit. Instead of rooting primarily for underdogs, I started hoping more to be right, which meant, of course, that I was often rooting for the favorite that I'd picked days in advance.
This reminds me of a recent Arizona State University study, which concluded that office March Madness pools can actually decrease enjoyment of the basketball itself. "Once a person has committed to a predicted outcome, he's set himself up for the possibility of looking like a fool. In other words, the fear of losing (known as 'anticipated regret') may actually feel worse than losing itself," the researchers said. "Peoples' worry about losing the bet tends to spoil the event for them."
I felt a little bit of that these two weeks, particularly today. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have rooted for Rafael Nadal during this tournament. He seems like a nice kid, and I'd absolutely like to meet him. But he's had a lot of clay-court success already. In a normal year, I'm sure I would've been rooting—match after match, probably—for an upset of Nadal. Even today, when he was facing the No. 1 player, Nadal was actually the favorite. It's beginning to look, after all, like Federer will never win the French Open. And if I hadn't had that Racquet Bracket pick tugging at me, I'm sure I would've been rooting for "underdog" Federer today.
But the rational part of me had picked Nadal in the Racquet Bracket, and that's where my rooting interests landed. It felt weird, I have to say. I was rooting for Nadal, but self-consciously so.
I'm not much of a gambler, but all this has me thinking a little bit about sports betting. I know some sports bettors say that putting a few bucks on a game causes them to get into the event a little more. Those Arizona State University researchers would probably hypothesize that the bets actually decrease the bettors' enjoyment of the event because of the stress of possibly losing money. I suppose, perhaps, that there might be a "sweet spot," where a bettor has risked just enough to make things interesting without causing him to worry too much about the result. I bet that sweet spot's hard to find....
Anyway, and I've written about this elsewhere before, I think fans tend to gravitate to underdogs because it's a relatively no-risk adventure. If the underdog loses, well, that was to be expected. But if the underdog wins, there's a lot of excitement to be had for what was a low-risk spectating preference. The opposite, of course, is true for rooting for favorites. If you root for the favorite, you lose face when an upset occurs. And there's often little emotional excitement to be gained from a favorite. After all, if the favorite wins, well, it should have.
I'm probably not going to give up on my fantasy tennis games. At this point, the contests are still, I think, just helping me focus attention on something I love. In other words, maybe I'm near the sweet spot for adding stress/excitement to my tennis spectating. But this is something I want to be watch. If I get so wrapped up in the fantasy games that I start losing interest in the actual games, it's absolutely time to stop.
For now, though, I finished 12th! Woo hoo!
As I mentioned a few days ago, I'm doing well in the Tennis Channel's Racquet Bracket for the French Open. And, incredibly enough, I'm still doing well. I'm 21st out of 3,737 entries. Woo hoo!
Today, though, I find myself in the position of having to root for a pretty big upset to remain near the top of the standings. In one of today's quarterfinals, Frenchman Gael Monfils is taking on the fifth seed David Ferrer. Now I had Ferrer making it to the quarterfinals, and I gave serious, serious thought to putting him in the semifinals. But I ultimately went with fourth seed Nikolay Davydenko. Davydenko, however, was upset in the third round by Ivan Ljubicic, and Monfils ended up in Davydenko's spot in the quarters.
Lots of my Racquet Bracket competitors went with Ferrer in the semis, and that makes a lot of sense. His clay-court game has really been firing lately. (For that matter, he's currently on my ATP Fantasy Game team.) Not that many, of course, put upstart Monfils into the semis. In fact, if Monfils somehow upsets Ferrer, it looks like I'm apt to finish at about 12th place in the standings. If Ferrer wins, as expected, I'm going to get passed by a lot of Ferrer aficionados—and will drop to somewhere near 75th place. No!
So please join me in sending out good vibes to Monfils. Maybe he can work the home-court advantage....
Update: Wow! Monfils won, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-1.
As I've mentioned before, a bit sheepishly, I play fantasy tennis games. Yes, I'm that big of a tennis fan. I'm that big of a tennis nerd. I'm that big of a nerd.
I play these games even though I never win anything. And I never will. There are so many other tennis geeks out there that I get excited if I finish in the top 300. In this year's ATP Fantasy Game, for instance, I'm truly excited to be in 2,675th place (out of 9,477 entries). That's the top-third, man.
Truthfully, though, I'm pretty good at picking tennis matches, particularly the first couple of rounds at the Grand Slams. I follow the sport closely enough that I really do know that Steve Darcis and Ivan Ljubicic have an interesting history. I'm watching enough tennis to know when a seeded player (hi, Carlos Moya!) is going to fall to the first competent clay-courter he faces. During the ongoing French Open, I knew going in that wildcard Jeremy Chardy was going places. I'm that deep in the tennis arcana.
So yesterday, when I got the first emailed reminder to check the standings in the Tennis Channel's Racquet Bracket for the French Open, I was pretty ho-hum about it. I knew my first- and second-round picks for the French Open had been ok, but I also knew that a bazillion other tennis fans were playing, too.
When I logged in, I nearly fell over. I was in 7th place. Out of
3,737 entries. Wow! I did, in fact, gasp. Today, I dropped to 9th
place, but I was no less excited to see my name nom de tennis on the very first page of the standings. Woo hoo!
Now I know I'm not going to win. A couple of players I had going deep have already bowed out. Juan Carlos Ferrero, for instance, retired in the first round with a leg injury while he was leading (egad). And Juan Mónaco (I like Juans, you know), the 13th seed, lost in the first round, dang it. I imagine I'll drop more and more every day until the Top 10 seems like a distant galaxy.
But the past couple of days, I've felt like I'd somehow developed a wicked kick serve. Suddenly I had a serve-and-volley game.
Stand back: I'm taking the net.
Gosh, it's been awhile since I posted. I need to do better. But I've been busy with the usual things—work [insert eye roll here], Phillies games, beer, rooting my Fly-boys into the next round of the NHL playoffs, and spending way, way, way too many hours working on [dang, this is kind of embarrassing] my fantasy tennis games.
On Tuesday, I caught my second game of the baseball season from my perch in Citizens Bank Park's Section 211, accompanied this time by a different co-worker. Yes, the plan to use my season tickets as a man trap is still a work-in-progress. Instead, I keep inviting colleagues—men, mostly straight, who are sports fans but not a single one who's likely to evolve into the beer-drinking, baseball-addicted boy toy of my dreams. It is good to spend time at the ballpark with a friend, though. And since it's not a date, I don't have to worry too much about how my hair looks.... [That was a joke. Really.]
Anyway, Tuesday night's game was a chilly affair, but the hometown fans who stuck it out were rewarded with an almost unbelievable, come-from-behind victory in the bottom of the ninth. Trailing 3-0 to the Astros, the Phils strung together a comeback with an improbable home run from a just-added player; a hit batsman; a homer from hunky [see, it's always gay when I'm at the ballpark] Pat Burrell; a stolen first base after a strikeout by Geoff Jenkins; and a probably unwise trip home by Jenkins, who missed the third base coach's stop sign after Pedro Feliz's game-winning double. Wow. After all that, the teeth-chattering I'd suffered for the last half of the game suddenly didn't matter so much.
Yesterday afternoon, I was back at the ballpark, catching my first Phillies-Mets game of the season. I met yet another colleague [this one gay, if not at all a likely candidate for the man trap]. It was a gorgeous day for a game, springlike and sunny, and I even broken open the sunscreen for the first time this year. The Phillies' offense was pretty lackluster, though. Half the team, it seems, is injured. And Chase Utley, who went two-for-four and homered, just can't carry the whole team. The Evil Mets won, 4-2. Bummer, huh?
What else did I do this week? Well, there was some beer—not all of it at the ballpark. [<Digression>The beer selection at the ballpark is better than you'd think, but it's not superb. I usually stick to Victory's HopDevil. I normally rail against hops-heavy American craft beers, but HopDevil is good—and it's one of the best things I'm going to find at Citizens Bank Park.</Digression>] On Monday night, I was at another beer-tasting at Tria's Fermentation School. The session was devoted to La Trappe Brewery, one of the seven remaining Trappist breweries in the world and the only one in the Netherlands. [The rest are in Belgium, of course.] In the States, La Trappe beers are sold as Koningshoeven beers for reasons attributable to church politics.... I was smitten with the Koningshoeven Bock, the Koningshoeven Tripel, and the Koningshoeven Quadrupel—which was my favorite of the night, all caramel and goodness. I was also smitten with one of the brewers [not a monk, Mom!], Gijs Swinkels, but even the slightly buzzed me recognized the futility of making a pass at a straight man from another continent.
So that's pretty much what I've been spending my time on. Baseball and beer. And, well, perfecting my entries in Tennis Channel and ATP fantasy games. [Hmmm, this could explain why I'm still single.] My picks for this week's U.S. Men's Clay Court Championship were, I thought, stunningly good. I even correctly put the way unheralded Marcel Granollers Pujol into the final on my bracket. [I did not have him upsetting James Blake to take the title, however.] And despite this prescience, I still only barely finished in the Top 200 [190th out of 1733 entries]. How good do I have to be, anyway?
And do I have to be that good to get a date, too?
I love tennis. I spend a lot of my evenings and weekends in front of the Tennis Channel. I mark the seasons by reference to the French Open and Wimbledon. I know the ad court from the deuce court, and I have strong feelings about whether Andy Roddick or Novak Djokovic is hotter.
But for some reason, I don't blog much about tennis. I guess I'm afraid that I'd do nothing but tennis blogging if I started. Blogging about one tournament would lead to blogging about the next tournament, and soon I'd be blogging about James Blake's blisters or Venus Williams's nail polish. It's a slippery slope, I tell you.
It's probably safe to say this much, though. If you're a tennis fan, you absolutely must be reading Jon Wertheim's weekly Mailbag column for SI.com. Each week, Wertheim answers readers' questions, which are themselves a hoot. For his part, Wertheim is knowledgeable and witty. The Mailbag column never fails to make me smile. Usually more than once.
Take, for instance, this Q&A from a recent Mailbag:
I can't be the only one who was put off by Rafael Nadal's constant pulling of his shorts out of his butt crack during the game? Is it forbidden to mention these things?
-- Claudia Fletcher, Baltimore, MD• Forbidden? My spellcheck now recognizes the word "wedgie" thanks to the heavy coverage we've given this issue. Also, is this the single worst endorsement for Nike of all-time? "Gee, I'm racing out to buy a pair of those pantaloons now that I see that the guy getting PAID to wear them can't stop tugging at them in discomfort." It's like Suzie Chapstick constantly walking around with an oozing cold sore.
That's classic Wertheim. It's like Suzie Chapstick constantly walking around with an oozing cold sore. Brilliant! I hope Nike heard that.
P.S. I just remembered that I've mentioned Wertheim once before—in one of my 10-Not-So-Famous-People Meme entries. Hmm, it's probably time to do another of those....
