The liveblog is a classic writing format with an obvious purpose: recap an event for somebody unable to tune in. The reader gets to approximate the watching experience, or at least stay informed of the major plot points. Ideally, the writer mixes in some analysis along the way. A bunch of sites do liveblogs, so a good one will differentiate itself through jokes, an unusual perspective, or a real-time mental breakdown if the event goes off the rails.
At rare times the liveblog is more compelling than the event itself. Reading this blurb from Stuart Heritage’s Game of Thrones finale liveblog on The Guardian was likely a richer experience for many than watching the last season:
“Ohh, Tyrion’s telling Jon that he also loves Daenerys. ‘Love is the death of duty’ says Jon. ‘Duty is the death of love’ replies Tyrion. ‘Death is the love of duty’, I add, trying to join in. I’M JUST TRYING TO JOIN IN.”
With tennis, a sport whose matches last anywhere between one and six hours with plenty of variation, the most important thing is simply summarizing the crucial moments with a bit of color. If you’re on-site, add some extra sensory details. You don’t need to cover every point. The Guardian is consistently excellent at capturing the flow of a match (Katy Murrells on Jack Draper-Aleksandar Vukic is a good example), and even their tennis livebloggers who usually cover other sports tend to put enough juice into their updates to make them worth reading.
Unfortunately, The Athletic is not up to snuff. The New York Times-owned sports site can be exasperating to read at the best of times—identifying areas prominently neglected by an editor’s helping hands is always way too easy, especially for the prestigious, moneyed publication in question. But most of the writers are very good, even if The Athletic’s subscriptions-above-all business strategy and questionable editing doesn’t exactly set them up to do their best work. The site does have access to the biggest events and athletes in spades, so you would think their tennis liveblogs would feature plenty of scene details as well as shrewd analysis.
What we too often get instead is The Athletic/Times doing an approximation of a Twitter aggregator’s favorite format: one-sentence paragraphs devoid of analysis. The greatest sin a liveblog can commit is failing to add insight beyond a score update, because this gives the reader no reason to follow said liveblog instead of the Google scorebug, yet many of The Athletic’s updates do just that. Lukas Weese, who covered last year’s U.S. Open from on-site, paid excruciating homage to The Tennis Letter with his updates of the Jannik Sinner-Tommy Paul fourth-rounder.
Some notes and questions: The bolded heading and first “paragraph” here say the same thing. The other three “paragraphs” are not complete sentences. In the lone line that could generously be classified as an observation, “tension rising in Arthur Ashe Stadium,” Weese writes with the color of a century-old movie. Did tension rise because the set was neck-and-neck? Did tension rise because Paul was down a set at the time of the update and needed to win the second to retain any chances of beating Sinner, the world No. 1? Did tension rise because the American crowd sensed this and rallied themselves behind Paul, also an American? What did the crowd even look and sound like? Did the fans get louder, more nervous, more restless? Was Darren Cahill doing star jumps in the player’s box? Weese didn’t have to answer all these questions, but I’d have preferred him to answer any of them than to write what he wrote. Maybe worst (or best) of all: Weese didn’t provide another update on the match until the end of the set, 38 minutes later.
Weese’s role at The Athletic might indicate the reason for these watery updates: you’ll note that at the time of this liveblog, he was a news editor, not a writer (he’s since shifted into a role as a live reporter). Still, as far as I’m aware, good newsers still use descriptive, complete sentences to inform the reader. And by covering a major in person, for at least that fortnight, you are definitionally a professional tennis writer. Pick your favorite former tennis writer who has been bounced into a different career, and compare one of their pieces to Weese’s liveblog under the nytimes.com banner. Any illusions that tennis writing is a meritocracy should end there.
Weese’s weak offerings getting past an editor suggests that The Athletic lacks sufficient respect for their reader to not overfeed them with baby-food paragraphs. Alas, this is a pattern extending through the recently concluded Australian Open.
In the middle of this excerpt, Michael Bailey rejects Weese’s comparatively lengthy “paragraphs” in favor of a single word. Again the specificity is lacking—is Bailey breathless? Is Keys feeling the nerves ahead of her service game? Is the crowd?—but I can’t deny the art form of the one-word paragraph, even if Bailey bungles the timing. We’re also blessed with the phrase “creates her way to a love hold,” which makes tennis sound like Minecraft. Like Weese, Bailey does not describe a single point or hot shot. He does provide an update on new balls, though given the lack of tennis in his tennis analysis, I’m not sure who for. If the person reading this liveblog isn’t worthy of any details about the service game or digesting any paragraph longer than 23 words, surely they can’t be trusted to understand that new balls have a springier bounce off the racket than old ones and usually lend themselves to a comfortable service game.
You might be thinking that The Athletic is avoiding specifics in their live tennis coverage to be mindful of a general audience. It seems that livebloggers like Weese and Bailey are simply there to fill space, given that full-time tennis writers Charlie Eccleshare and Matt Futterman, and tennis editor James Hansen, also pop into the live recaps to offer more detailed analysis (even if it does often still come in those maddeningly diced portions). But The Athletic is also not afraid to leave their reader in the dark for a bit, like with the lede of a story co-written by Hansen and Eccleshare (whose work I like a lot) after Carlos Alcaraz beat Jannik Sinner in a sensational Beijing final late last year:
At the time the story came out, I stared at this opening line for a good while trying to figure out what Hansen and Eccleshare were referring to with “6-4.” I had Alcaraz’s second-set comeback on the brain, and wondered if they were thinking back to the rapid turnaround in the middle of that stanza, which ended 6-4. But kicking off a story with a reference to a second set sandwiched by dramatic tiebreak sets made no sense. Finally I realized “6-4” was the updated head-to-head between Alcaraz and Sinner. You’d think the head-to-head simply lying on the page for the reader to identify without any accompanying context, until the story circles back in the third paragraph, is something an editor would catch. On top of that, “6-4” is such a common tennis score that anybody could easily mistake the head-to-head for a set score in the meantime.
Even if The Athletic’s catering to casuals were consistent, the “tennis writing as second grader’s class assignment” liveblog style still would not be fun to read. The editorial staff’s willingness and desire to pump out flavorless liveblog updates on such a large platform does not service the curious tennis fan, but it’s a slap in the face to writers capable of doing better.
Popcorn Tennis 