IS THE TENNIS LINESMAN OBSOLETE?
Humans would be replaced by machines as officials at tennis matches under a new electronic system being developed by two Californians. And don’t laugh. The system has already had two trials at major championships.
— By Ken Bentley
One weekend a couple of years ago, Geoff Grant, a 32-year-old biologist at the Jonas Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., was involved in a quarrelsome match at a local tennis tournament.
“I was playing one of my friends,” he recalls. “and we hit almost on every tenth point… on his bad calls, of course. This was a guy I had played for years in practice without incident.”
Grant stormed off the court in a rage and raced off so fast in his car that he got stopped by police radar for speeding.
“Right then,” he says, “I decided something had to be done about bad line calls. I knew I wasn’t going to quit playing tournaments—loved tennis too much to do something like that. So I did the next best thing.”
That “next best thing” was to build an electronic device designed to take the
guesswork and the disputing out of tennis line calls. Called the “Electronic Line Judge” (it once had another name), says Grant, “I’ll use E.L.J.; the press doesn’t
want a four-word work,” by Grant and a non-tennis playing friend, Ken Nicks, 29, an engineer.
“We realized that there must be a method
to cover a court to signal umpire’s response when a ball is in or out,” says Nicks. Sensors placed beneath a court would pick up foot-long steps.
So far, the device has been used with inconclusive results at major tournaments: the World Championship Tennis
playoffs in Dallas, and almost recently, the first Virginia Slims Championship finals in Los Angeles last October.
In the Esmensan’s car when the ball was out: In Los Angeles, the inventors used a more ambitious system c
apable of calling balls out in other places of play. But problems with electronic noise curtailed the device’s effectiveness.
Grant’s and Nicks’ invention represents a potential milestone for the sport: if perfected, it could bring a relative infallibility to the notoriously highly fallible—and inflammatory—task of line-calling.
In its first two trials, the reaction to the electronic line caller was somewhat mixed.
For instance, Mickey Martin, a service linesman at the WCT finals, was enthusiastic:
“Never did I question the machine,” he says. “Although there were a couple of times when the buzzer didn’t go off on call, still that’s fine.”
However, players in Martin’s match (Stan Smith and Rod Laver) said the device was not 100 percent accurate.
THE ELECTRONIC LINEJUDGE SYSTEM
The Way It Works:
To prepare a court for electronic line-calling, pieces of shock-absorbing sheets about 18 inches wide and no thicker than regular gym tile are installed beneath the surface.
Each sheet has one single (in) neon light coil (long) inside that lights when the lid of the device court senses that a ball has landed on its surface.
All around the coil, electronic devices pick up shocks on the outside of the court.
This factor will determine if a ball is out.
Some players complained about machine errors.
“Some people in the WCT,” Grant says, “felt the players were consulting us too much, like it was amazing or strange. They also said they were happy to call the lines, but I think calling even one line would be better than calling none at all.”
Out of the 16 players in the tournament approached to agree (Evonne Goolagong refused to play without knowledge about the electronic line judge) most agreed.
The ELJ was again tested at the Virginia Slims Championship in Los Angeles, but the inventors had to admit more testing and refinement were needed.
Quote from Ken Nicks:
“During the six-day tournament there were 973 close line calls, 686 times (roughly 70 percent) the ELJ agreed with the linesmen. That’s good but not perfect.”
Some felt ELJ intimidated fewer players than human linesmen:
“A player like King can intimidate a linesman, but you can’t intimidate an electronic device.”
Conclusion:
If perfected, ELJ could replace human linesmen entirely. But for now, it needs further testing and development before being used in major championships.