Sunday evening I settled down to watch the Australian Open on ESPN, the first grand slam since the U.S. Open in September. The first match featured Coco Gauff, the next, Rafael Nadal. Because men’s matches at grand slams are best-of-five, I went to bed long before the end of the second match, but waking up the next morning I saw that Nadal had won.
I also saw the Gauff match again, as it was being replayed on the Tennis Channel. Instead of giving us matches that were played while most of us were asleep, someone had the brilliant idea to show us matches we had seen before we hit the sack. It was followed by the Nadal match.
In the afternoon, I turned on ESPN (2 I think) and found that they had retaken coverage of the tournament, in the form of replays of course, since it was the middle of the night in Australia. And there on the court was a familiar face: Coco Gauff. She was followed by Señor Nadal.
Last night, hoping to watch a new day of matches, a new set of players, I couldn’t find any. ESPN was showing the Buccaneers-Cowboys game, even though it was also available on ABC. And, apparently because of the unique rights ESPN has to the Open, the Tennis Channel was not only not showing live matches, it was not televising replays, at least not of the Open. (It showed instead a match from Indian Wells, featuring – perhaps you guessed it – Rafael Nadal.) It seems to me that if one station buys rights to a tournament they should show it – every day of it – and if they decide that something is more important, like an NFL playoff game, they should let another station televise it while their attention is elsewhere. It shows the low priority tennis has in this country.
