Thank you to everyone who read and subscribed during my third major tournament for Bounces! It’s been a ton of fun being at tournaments and writing stories that seem to be resonating. I’m hopeful that with more people supporting Bounces as subscribers, this place can steadily build into a sustainable outlet for covering tennis for years to come.
Bounces is not quite there yet, but I think and hope that it’s getting there. If you’re enjoying my work here and want to see it continue, please do consider becoming a paying subscriber.
As is tradition here after a major, it’s time to empty my notebook of all the dangling thoughts and tidbits from my weeks at Wimbledon.
The notebook, in action while I was on BBC Radio during Wimbledon. (Can you guess the match?)
Here is a rundown the topics this time around to close the book on Wimbledon:
McEnroe Fatigue on the American Airwaves
Talking to the Oracle of Wimbledon, VenusGauff
What’s Changed at Wimbledon in Recent Years
Digesting the Double Bagel Discourse
The Wimbledon fines lists
Jannik Sinner, Superstar
It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Rigidity
Junior Sweets
Brunch at Wimbledon is Even Tastier
Hall of Infamy: The Bill Ackman Wildcard Debacle
Meet (Cute) Me Over at Learned League
Spoiler Alerts for Bounces?
The Latest Zverev v Rothenberg Update From Berlin
Here we go!
Sally Jenkins wasn’t at Wimbledon this year, but her column for The Washington Post—“Tennis fans deserve better than John McEnroe”—still created a lot of chatter in the Wimbledon media center.
Jenkins roped Patrick McEnroe into her complaints, saying that the pair “have given the viewer about as much information as a couple of air compressors, complete with the irritating hissing.” Here’s more of the gist:
Responsibility for this lies with cowed producers and frictionless network chiefs who have enabled the McEnroe monopoly despite their shallow blandness — and who have allowed John in particular way too much diva license. He calls virtually all of the top matches, from ESPN to NBC to TNT, and cuts out to do cameos for BBC and Tennis Channel, without doing a lick of ostensible homework.
Here are my two cents on the McEnroe monopoly on US tennis broadcasting: