Yesterday I posted about an interesting but never-happen proposal to institute “time-ins” in football. So far the main response has been that baseball is even slower and less action-packed than football. Well, of course it is. So what?
Coincidentally, this morning’s Washington Post carried this story about what’s being seen as the increasing misuse of time-outs in tennis, a trend that, because I don’t follow tennis closely, had escaped my notice.
I do recall that tennis was once considered a continuous-action sport. No dilly-dallying between points or games. Then television happened, and as it does to every other sport (at least the ones I watch), it slowed things way down to enable commercials to be run. That changes a sport. Makes it harder to gain and maintain momentum. Deprives better-conditioned athletes of some of their advantage. And so on. The strategic use of “injury” time-outs has the same effect, and insults the sport. I’m comforted that this is viewed as a problem in tennis, even if the football folks haven’t yet caught on to how much excitement all that standing around drains out of what’s supposed to be an action-packed, thrill-a-second, sixty-minute contest when it drags on for hours and hours.