One thing to keep in mind in tennis is that you are expected to win every game that you serve. The advantage of serving is such that you should get at least two more points per game than your opponent. The scoring is set up so that if everyone wins every game they serve, it will go to 6-6 then to tie-break in every set.
This is why they make such a big deal out of breaking serve. If you break their first serve, and then there are no other breaks for the rest of the set, you still win the set.
Agreed entirely - and going back to, say, Seles before she got stabbed, she dominated by hitting everything, fore or backhand, two-handed with a huge racket in both senses of the word. Impressive in terms of achievement but ugly as sin to watch. I caught only the tail-end of the N-F match, but even four games was enough to see wizardry in progress.
Why does this bother you? We don’t pay athletes on the basis of the show they manage to drum up for us in any sport. Would your pet peeve have extended the other way, had the Williams sisters gone three sets and the men’s final went, oh, say exactly like the final at the French Open (yawn!) went?
Or, to give another example, do you think that the salaries of, say, the winners of the World Series should be cut if they win their division by 15 games and take all three series 4 - 0? :smack:
I did not see your post, obviously. I believe I started to make my response before you posted, got distracted by something else, and didn’t preview (often the case with short answers). :o
Huh? What does it mean to break a serve?
When Player A serves and player B wins the game, Player B is said to have broken A’s serve. It’s a crucial advantage, and tiebreaks aside, you need to break serve at least once to win a set.
Exactly. Players are normally expected to win any game in which they serve. Obviously this doesn’t happen every time, or a tennis set would be interminable (even to win a tiebreak you have to win more points off your opponent’s serve than he does off yours) but in top-flight tennis it’s nothing out of the ordinary for a single game taken against the serve to be enough to decide the set.
I don’t know about “extended the other way”, but it might have offered more of a case for equal payment had the women, just for once, been the ones who had to work harder for their prize. What actually happens is that they play lower-quality tennis for a shorter time and attract less gate money, and demand the same pay in the name of fairness. When any of those parameters changes, we’ll discuss how I feel about it.
As to the World Series, I have no opinion on that sport whatever.