Calling Out for Humanity in Tennis

The hasty rush toward automation in tennis was exposed in a dire moment of failure on Wimbledon's Centre Court.

WIMBLEDON, England — The fourth round match Sunday on Centre Court between Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and Sonay Kartal was—as could have been expected from their respective rankings of 50th and 51st—tight as could be.

With Pavlyuchenkova serving in a long service game at 4-4, Ad-40, there was a moment that wasn’t quite so close: Kartal hit a leaping backhand that appeared to land several inches beyond Pavlyuchenkova’s baseline.

Many in the partisan crowd inside Centre Court loudly sighed as their local favorite’s shot landed long; Pavlyuchenkova also clearly thought the point had ended, and looked toward the chair. But there had been no out call made to halt the point, as was expected to come from the robotic voice of the Hawkeye Live technology.

“Stop, stop, stop,” chair umpire Nico Helwerth said as Kartal hit the ball back over the net, soon echoed by a robotic voice shouting “Stop! Stop!”

But Helwerth didn’t immediately award the point to Pavlyuchenkova as might’ve been expected; instead, he called for a higher power to weigh in.

“I see it out as well, but I will check if it was the correct call,” Helwerth told Kartal.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re gonna just quickly check if the system was up and running, because there was no audio call for this ball on the baseline,” Helwerth announced to the crowd.

As Helwerth got on the phone with off-court review officials, televised replays confirmed that the ball had clearly landed well long.

But even though Kartal had clearly hit the ball out, which should have instantly lost her the point and the game, Helwerth announced after a delay of several minutes that the point would be replayed.¹

“The electronic line calling was unable to track the last point, so we will replay the point,” he announced.

If Pavlyuchenkova had won the replay, the strange lapse might’ve been no-harm, no-foul. But when the point was replayed, Pavlyuchenkova badly missed a forehand swing volley, and Kartal broke soon after to take a 5-4 advantage and give herself a chance to serve for the first set.

Pavlyuchenkova, understandably, began thinking conspiratorially during the changeover.

“You cannot prove it,” she said of the line calling system as she spoke to Helwerth, suggesting it was favoring the British player. “Because she is local, they can say whatever. You took the game away from me. They just stole a game from me. They stole it. I hope they’re happy.”

While I don’t believe Kartal received any favoritism from the electronic system or the human officials because of her nationality, there’s no doubt that Pavlyuchenkova got hosed, and had a game that she should have rightfully won taken away from her.

Thankfully, for the sake of competitive integrity, the moment did not change the course of the tournament: Pavlyuchenkova steadied herself and broke Kartal back to level the first set, which she eventually won in a tiebreak on her way to an eventual 7-6(3), 6-4 victory.

Pavlyuchenkova in the Press Room

Pavlyuchenkova is a reliably open, direct, and engaging talker, so I was sure she would tackle the incident head-on in press. Sure enough, she did.

Correctly calling the point “a very crucial moment in the match,” Pavlyuchenkova said she thought the chair umpire “could take initiative on the call and call the clearly out ball out. “That's why he's there sitting on the chair,” Pavlyuchenkova said of the umpire’s role. “He also saw it out, he told me after the match. I thought he would do that, but he didn't.”

I followed up on Pavlyuchenkova’s revelation that she had spoken to Helwerth after the match, curious to hear more about how that conversation went.

“I actually don't remember exactly; I think he felt bad a little bit,” Pavlyuchenkova said of Helwerth. “Then he probably felt like he should have taken initiative and called it out because he saw it out, he told me. Yeah, so probably maybe he felt something about it.”

Pavlyuchenkova wasn’t as angry as she could’ve been, of course, because she had been victorious in the match in the end, despite the sizeable hiccup.

“But then, again, as I won the match, I didn't want to go into this or, like, create bad vibes,” she said. “Because, yeah, I just wanted to have a nice moment. I won. I'm in the quarterfinal here. So all good now.”

I couldn’t resist asking: how would she feel if she’d lost the match after that call?

“I would just say that I hate Wimbledon and never come back here,” she replied with a laugh. “I would just say ‘I hate grass and Wimbledon’—like usually we always do when we lose. No, of course, I would be very disappointed. But again, I try to look at it as, yeah, I'm working on my mental toughness lately. OK, it was a crucial moment, but it's just one game in the first set. The match is long: it's like a marathon; you’ve got to play every point. Yeah, so maybe if I lost: so be it, just not my day. I mean, she's also been playing really good. But I won, so.”

Pavlyuchenkova said that this sort of incident might’ve derailed her when she was less mature on court years ago.

“For sure today—as well, having the crowd like that, having this call—yeah, I would probably be still talking about this call to my box for the next ten games probably, maybe ‘til the end of the match,” she said.

Pavlyuchenkova acknowledged that it might have been difficult for Helwerth to intervene and overrule an allegedly omniscient electronic eye. “He probably was scared to take such a big decision,” she said.

She again said, though, that the chair umpire’s job is to make calls; after all, if they can’t call an obviously out ball out, what are they doing?

“They're very good at giving fines, though, and code violations,” Pavlyuchenkova said. “This they don't miss, because every time, any little thing, they are just right there on it. Yeah, I would prefer they looked at the lines and call [out] mistakes better.”

Taylor Fritz, who had come into the press room before Pavlyuchenkova, was told about the incident and thought it was clear the umpire should’ve intervened.

“I mean, if it was clearly out, then why is the chair umpire there?” Fritz said. “The chair umpire has to make the call. Why is he there if he's not going to call the ball?…There should be situations where the umpires can obviously step in and make a call. If it's obvious, it's ridiculous.”

A Statement Win…Then a Statement

The win over Kartal put Pavlyuchenkova into a remarkable tenth career major quarterfinal—further enhancing her résumé as the best player to have never reached the Top 10.

Last Eight for a Ninth Time

But the story of the day was not Pavlyuchenkova’s remarkable run at age 34, or her recent recovery from Lyme disease, or any of the other things she and fellow thirty-something quarterfinalist Laura Siegemund achieved on Sunday: instead, it was on how tennis tournaments continue to embrace and rely upon technology that is repeatedly proving it’s not ready for the moment.

Nor was Wimbledon ready to explain what happened. The Pavlyuchenkova-Kartal march ended at 3:39 p.m.; after crisis management meetings between tournament officiating and communications departments, Wimbledon finally sent out its statement explaining the incident nearly five hours later, at 8:22 p.m., barely in time for local print deadlines.

Here’s what it said in full:

“Following the Pavlyuchenkova vs Kartal match, we have had the opportunity to undertake further investigation, including speaking to the players, Chair Umpire, Hawk-Eye operators and Review Official.

“It is now clear that the live ELC [Electronic Line Calling] system, which was working optimally, was deactivated in error on part of the server’s side of the court for one game by those operating the system.

“In that time there were three calls not picked up by live ELC on the affected part of the court. Two of these were called by the Chair Umpire, who was not made aware that the system had been deactivated. Following the third, the Chair Umpire stopped the match and consulted with the Review Official. It was determined that the point should be replayed. The Chair Umpire followed the established process.

“We have apologised to the players involved.

“We continue to have full confidence in the accuracy of the ball tracking technology. The live ELC system relies on the Hawk-Eye operators, the Review Official and the technology to work in harmony. This did not happen. In this instance there was a human error and as a consequence we have fully reviewed our processes and made the appropriate changes.”

The ball tracking technology itself may well be good enough at locating where the ball is landing and knowing if it were in or out, but if some sort of operator error can lead to the system being inactive on one half of the court for an entire game—without anyone being the wiser until something flagrantly bad happens on a big point, during a Grand Slam match on hallowed Centre Court, no less—then the system is simply not yet good enough to be relied upon at this high stakes level of competition.

There would have never been a time where something similarly cataclysmic happened on court with human officials: it’s hard to imagine four or five human officials suddenly going unconscious simultaneously to similarly incapacitate line calling like happened on Centre Court on Sunday.

Sure, the human line judges didn’t get every single close call right—or at least sometimes their calls didn’t align with the electronic eyes—but they were doing a pretty great job and didn’t deserve to be chased out in favor of technology that could fail so badly on Centre Court. To err is human; if a machine is erring, it’s a bad machine unworthy of our sympathy. Also, what sort of camera technology that is trusted good enough to be exact on where a ball lands within a millimeter isn’t also smart enough to urgently alert officials immediately if it’s suddenly become wholly inoperative mid-match?

I already shared Marin Cilic’s thoughtful pro-line judge remarks—originally published by Carole Bouchard—earlier in the week, but in case you missed them, I think it’s worth sharing them again here:

“Honestly, I don't like it (that the lines judges have been removed),” Cilic said. “Because when the Hawkeye came, it was, of course, great for tennis. There are not going to be so many deciding points that maybe the line referee didn't call, and it decides the match. But then why don't I like it? Because the lines judges are a part of the tennis family. Maybe they were at some stage in their life trying to be a tennis player. Or they love sports, and it's so difficult to become a chair umpire as you have to go through so many tournaments, juniors, national level tournaments, futures, challengers, first line referee, then the chair umpire, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to get this experience to be at Wimbledon. And then now it's gone. It's like only Hawkeye. Why? You just get rid of this huge family of people who love tennis, who enjoy tennis, who have this incredible experience, who were doing their job incredibly well. You erase this, which is for me very, very, very, very bad. Not just here, but of all the tournaments that we have. I don't like it.”

A Society at Break Point

I also want to re-share an answer from Danielle Collins on the topic earlier in the year, since I appreciated how she zoomed out to broader societal trends.

“I do appreciate, too, having lines judges and the opportunity that gives people to have jobs,” Collins continued. “Because I think right now there's a lot of jobs being taken away because of electronics. So that's a scary thing. That's a scary concept that we're dealing with in our lifetime. So I kind of like having the lines judges for that purpose, and the tradition of having them. But I also understand how the electronic line calls can kind of speed up play.”

A couple months ago in Madrid when discussing the use of Hawkeye on clay, Belinda Bencic told reporters² that she rued the trend, which shows up in various ways, of people assuming that machines are more useful than human brains.

“We’re trusting electronics [instead of] to our human eye and our human brain and our human instincts,” Bencic said. “You see the ball is literally out; there’s no way the umpire would have come down and called that ball in, but then electronic line calling says it touched by one millimeter...I feel like we’re all, [as] humans, we are turning off our brains, we’re turning off our senses, and we’re doing everything electronic, everything AI, everything ChatGPT. And we stop thinking.”

Bencic spelled out the initials in “ChatGPT” in her answer with an audible disdain that I have to say I enjoyed. I have loudly been against generative AI, but I will admit that, after hearing another Substack journalist on a podcast talk about how ChatGPT was useful for things like proofreading and formatting, I thought I’d give it another shot. So as an experiment last month, I pasted an interview transcript I had typed up into ChatGPT, asking it just to make the formatting of the Q&A uniform and to remove all the pesky bracketed timestamps from the document.

When it spat a transcript back out, ChatGPT had removed the timestamps, but had also, unsolicited, slightly rephrased the text of several of the questions and answers for unclear reasons, even though I had definitely not asked it to do anything like that. I was horrified: what if I hadn’t noticed those subtle edits and had published a transcript that now wasn’t close to what the interviewee had actually said? I swore off ChatGPT once more in that moment, and I think I’ll stick to that for good.

I don’t think it’s overstating things to say that, as various forms of automation and AI take over, our society is increasingly encountering existential forks in the road where we are forced to choose between trusting humans or machines. Personally, I will always try to side with humanity every time I can. I am a human, after all; if I don’t stick up for my fellow humans against the machines, how can I ever expect them to stick up for me?

So with that in mind, I do hope to see the line judges coming back to courts around the tour sooner rather than later, both here at Wimbledon as well as everywhere else. Let the Hawkeye technology stay on as a backup, but as an old school review/challenge tool.

If you’re reading this and are also on the side of humanity over automation and AI, I am glad to have you on our side. And if you want to subscribe to read more human-written words here—and help defray the expenses that go along with traveling the tour as a human journalist—I’d be super grateful for your subscriptions here to help keep Bounces going strong on tour.

Beyond the paywall below, a look ahead for Bounces subscribers at four matches to watch on Monday at Wimbledon. Thanks for reading and subscribing! -Ben