Quote of the Millennium

Might he coach? "No, no. Playing is one thing and teaching is completely different. It looks simple but it's really not. It's a really tough job." TV commentating? "I'm different to other people who want to lay back and do nothing for the rest of their lives and talk nonsense on ESPN, talking about my match against Sampras. I will not do that."

This quote from Marat Safin encapsulates the main problem with tennis broadcasts in the United States. John McEnroe, Patrick McEnroe, Brad Gilbert, Mary Jo Fernandez, Mary Carillo et al. basically have a lock on most of the tennis broadcasts. If you want to watch a match on television in the States with the sound on, you are going to be treated to these fools.

They could careless about what is going on the court and the current crop of players and love to talk about themselves and their useless opinions. I have heard children give better “analysis” of matches than these people. Normally, I turn off the sound and watch the matches with music on. The last two days, I attempted watch matches with the sound on to try and see if I could learn something interesting but was only treated to a headache from the verbal diarrhea spewed by these people.

I literally watched two minutes of the Davydenko-Soderling match this afternoon before John McEnroe worked on my nerves with his nonsense. We should be telling him, “You can’t be serious with your bullshit analysis!” Yesterday, he took a narrow reading of the trainer rule to act like Rafael Nadal was cheating and attempted to feign false outrage. In the same Nadal-Almagro match, Mary Carillo said that the reason Nadal pulled out of Wimbledon was to focus on the US Open. Really?

We then have Brad Gilbert who basically trashes all of the non-Anglo players. The man is an overall tennis creep that acts as if he were commentating a WWE match. The audience has hear about how he coached Andre Agassi and Andy Murray every two seconds, and we do not hear boo about when he was a player stinking up the court.

And don’t get me start about Martina Navratilova, who can only talk about what she would do if she were playing and trash the current players. She reserves special ire for the Williams sisters. Say what you want but those girls have 18 grand slam titles between the two of them. They have to be doing something right.

I am going to miss Safin for his play and personality. Who else can sum up what everyone else is thinking in one sentence in his third language? The sad part is that I think Safin would actually be a good commentator, but these trolls have scared him off from doing that.