Humans might soon be replaces as judges
Testing under way of electronic device to make line calls.
In tennis, f ew things arouse the crowd more than confrontations, especially those involving players, umpires and line judges.
Who can forget Ilie Nastase pulling down his pants and mooning the chair umpire Charles Hare in Palm Springs in 1976? Or John McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1981 screaming, “You cannot be serious, man!” after what he perceived as a bad call, and referring to the umpire Edward James as the “absolute pits of the world”?
Or that night at the 2009 U.S. Open when Serena Williams cursed at and threatened to stuff a tennis ball down the throat of line judge Shino Tsurubuchi for calling a foot fault, an incident that cost Williams her semifinal match against Kim Clijsters?
But tennis tantrums could soon go by the wayside. The ATP World Tour, the governing body of men’s professional tennis, is testing Hawk-Eye Live, an electronic line-calling device that would eliminate the need for line judges. The system will be discussed by ATP leadership and then debated by players and officials during ATP Council meetings at Wimbledon this summer.
“In our sport, things change really slowly,” said McEnroe, 59, who played under Hawk-Eye Live during the ATP Champions event at the Delray Beach Open in Florida last month. “But if the technology is there, all you really need is an umpire to call the score. It’s not like it would be the players calling their own lines.”
He added that he might have been a better player with no line judges to argue with, “but I would have been more boring.”
The Hawk-Eye system, which made its debut in 2004, acts as a check on human line-calling. Through computer-generated software and courtside integration, line calls are made and recorded but put into play only when a player challenges the validity of a call made by a line judge or the chair umpire. The replay of the ball’s bounce is projected on giant screens around the stadium, generating suspense until it is determined whether the call was accurate. Each player is allowed three incorrect challenges per set and is awarded another should the set go to a tiebreaker.
More than 100 ATP and WTA tournaments use HawkEye, as do all four Grand Slam tournaments, though the system is not available on all courts. (At the French Open, as at other clay events, Hawk-Eye is used only for television broadcasts and statistical analysis as ball marks are more definitive on clay courts than on hard or grass surfaces.)
Hawk-Eye Live, which has been in the works for the past two years and was tested at the NextGen ATP Finals in Milan in November and again in Delray Beach, goes beyond the challenge system and makes every on-court call. The system sends visual and audio cues to the chair umpire and off-court monitors within a tenth of a second of a ball bouncing.
There is, however, a manned boo th behind and above the court, and there will always be a chair umpire on court. In Milan, line judges wearing plain clothes sat in the stands as seat fillers, ready to intervene if the system malfunctioned. One of the biggest issues was determining what sound Hawk-Eye Live should emit in making an “out” call.
“We tried horns, buzzers and beeps,” said Gayle David Bradshaw, the ATP’s executive vice president for rules and competition. “We didn’t want it sounding like the buzzer on the ‘Family Feud.’ Finally, we decided to record different human voices yelling ‘out,’ so it doesn’t sound monotonous. We’ll add a different voice for the foot fault call.”
According to Japhet, the extra cost to tournaments for upgrading to Hawk-Eye Live will be offset by eliminating the cost of paying, housing, feeding and clothing line judges.
Japhet and Bradshaw acknowledged that replacing line judges with technology will not only put people out of jobs, but it will also dehumanize the game a little bit.