Who's afraid of Virginia Wade?

So much wrongness in one tiny tweet

Con 2 súper cracks antes de la gran final!! Qué grandes que son!! @RafaelNadal @DavidFerrer87 #RG13 pic.twitter.com/09SoZkCWBq

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Tell me your favorite parts in the comments!

Oh yeah, and go Rafa (or should I say Rafita)!

Markets in Everything: Tennis Pass Edition

Sharp-eyed reader DC sends this link.

Excerpt:

A steep price increase for most permits required to play tennis on New York City's public courts has changed the game, pricing out thousands of players while creating shorter wait times for those who can afford to pay.

The Parks Department first served up higher fees for public tennis in 2011, doubling the prices paid by players between the ages of 18 and 61. Single-pay passes for an hour of court time jumped to $15 from $7, while season passes rose to $200 from $100.

Far fewer tennis permits have been sold under the new prices, according to data from the Parks Department. Sales of season passes for most players slipped by 40%, with 7,400 sold in 2011 as compared to 12,400 in 2010. (Only about 6,800 passes had been sold by the end of June 2012 to players purchasing unlimited court time for the year.)

Sales of single-play passes for this group of adults took a big hit as well, dropping by nearly a third from more than 40,000 for the 2010 season to about 27,000 last year.

Preliminary numbers through June show about 9,700 passes sold, though the Parks Department cautions that third-party vendors are still reporting sales and the number will rise.

Some longtime players say they made the decision that the cost is just not worth it. Christopher Farber, a freelance photographer living on the Upper East Side, no longer splurges on the season pass and has instead cut back his matches to about two a month, opting for single-use permits instead.

"I feel like $100 is a threshold," said Mr. Farber, who in the past played about 50 times a year at the courts in Riverside Park with partners he found through the website Craigslist. "I'm freelance and kind of get by every month, but even at $100 I can see myself buying a pass for the summer.'"

Interesting.   Tennis courts are most emphatically NOT a public good.  They are a club good, and can easily be provided as a club good (non-rival up to congestion point, but cheap to exclude).  Should the government even be in this business?  And if so, what is the "correct" price?

Homeless

After his second round match against the previously invincible Peter Polansky, James Blake thumped his chest and proclaimed that the US Open was "his house".

I guess he forgot the facts that (a) he has never actually won the US Open (or even gotten past the quarters in this, or any other Slam), (b) he only got into his house in the first place by virtue of the USTA giving him a wild card, and (c) his next opponent would be Novak Djokovic.

After the slinky Serb routinely dispatched Blake in straight sets last night, I told Mrs. Angus that poor James was now homeless and probably would be sleeping in the bus station.

A Lose / Lose Situation

At the US Open, Novak Djokovic compared having shade on the tennis court to sleeping with his girlfriend!

Really. See your yourself:

People, I live in Oklahoma where it's been at or around 100 for a month and a half now. Believe me, us Okies appreciate shade as much as anybody. But I've never heard anyone make a comparison remotely like that.

Of course, this leads to several intriguing possibilities. Perhaps Novak's lady friend is just not very sexy? Or maybe Novak is DOING IT WRONG?

Either way, I bet he had some 'splaining to do when he got home.

Good on ya, Rog!

Roger Federer organized a pre Aussie open exhibition to benefit Haiti. It was a big hit. Here is one video:

and there is much more here. It is very entertaining, perhaps more so than actual tournament tennis these days.

 

Sadly for Paul Kedrosky, newspapers are not dead

Because if they were, no one would be mocking him on the interwebs for his extremely weak and bogus op ed on tennis challenges.

First, PK doesn't seem to know much about tennis:

The rules allow three incorrect challenges per player per set. In a best-of-five-sets match (which is normal for men), that means at least 18 available challenges per match, none of which carry over from set to set.In other words, use ’em or lose ’em. A player can get an additional challenge if the match goes into a tiebreaker, or if a fifth set goes overtime.

Best of 5 matches are played at the 4 major championships and in Davis Cup ties, meaning that they are an aberration, not the norm.

Second, he does not seem to know what the word substantial means:

And the rewards for challengers can be substantial. For example, the No. 10 seed at the Open, Fernando Verdasco of Spain, averaged 0.4 challenges per set and had a sparkling 43 percent success rate. If he challenged once per set, like Federer, and his challenge success rate fell to a similar 30 percent, it could mean one more point to him in a three-set match. If his success rate didn’t fall as much, however, and he challenged twice per set it might mean as many as three more points in a five-set match. Either way, it could be the difference between winning and losing.

Third, he seems to think that winning a challenge gives you the point (see the above quote). It does sometimes, but often winning a challenge just causes the point to be replayed.

Fourth and most importantly, he seems to forget that the status quo is neither player challenging much. If they both increased their challenges and were equally good at it, then there would be exactly zero net advantage to either player. In other words, in *equilibrium* challenging more cannot be a competitive advantage (not even a tiny one like what he cites in the quote above).

Aside from that, the piece was terrific!