plucky tree

the perils of watching time-shifted tennis

I record a lot of tennis on TiVo partly because it’s usually inconvenient to watch it live (time zone differences) and if I time-shift it, I can zap the commercials or skip through matches I don’t care about.

However (and this is where I begin to whine), it’s gotten increasingly difficult to not have the outcomes of matches I’ve queued up be spoiled before I’ve gotten a chance to see them. I almost need to cut myself off from the outside world during a tournament I’m watching. Here are the various ways matches can be easily spoiled:

• I’m on a bunch of tennis email lists and even if the list has nothing to do with a tournament, everyone seems to love to be the first to announce something, especially if it’s an upset or the result of a big tournament.
• I play tennis often and players are often fans and love to chatter about who just won a given match, even if I tell them not to spoil it, they’ll do it in some subtle way (e.g. you say a match was “shocking”, then it’s probably the underdog that won).
• Some places I go, like a tennis retailer or the club where I play, have a big TV blaring, showing a live broadcast of something I’m recording, so I have to avert my gaze and plug my ears.
• I have a bunch of friends that are tennis buffs, and if I’m on my computer, there’s always a risk of getting a spoiler instant message.
• Even though I’ve removed sports from my Google News feed, sometimes a tennis-related story will show up in the headlines either because it was super-dramatic or is the final match of one of the big 4 tournaments.
• Going on Facebook or Twitter during a tournament is always a bad idea, not only because of tennis friends but because I’m fans of various pro tennis players and they will likely spoil something.
• If I want to check the schedule of matches for a day, the schedules on-line are always updated to show live scores as well. Bah, don’t do that!
• Visiting a website that shows live tennis streaming is also a minefield. Typically, live scores will be somewhere on every page and when you open a live stream, it’ll start playing something live (obviously) even if you really want to watch the match from the beginning.
• Watching archived matches can be easily spoiled by the mere fact that it always shows how much time is remaining. If it’s a best of 5 set match and one players is up 2 sets to none and there’s 45 minutes left, you already know the outcome of the match.
• For the big 4 tournaments, coverage typically spans multiple channels and sometimes simultaneously. Watching one channel will typically spoil what you’re taping on the other channel, even if it’s just the score ticker at the bottom of the screen.
• Some of the tournaments have iPhone apps that send push alerts that you need to remember to turn off. Otherwise, they love to send messages with match results, especially for upsets.
• TiVo has this retarded “feature” (to avoid screen burn-in) where it will start playing live TV if you leave it alone for 30 minutes or so. When you turn the TV back on, suddenly it’s showing the live feed of something you haven’t yet watched from the beginning!
• If I’m days behind on a tournament, just seeing the schedule of matches or a draw can spoil a match I haven’t yet seen (i.e. if I see someone is still in the tournament, I know they won the match I’ve yet to watch).
• The silliest one that’s burned me is that, while watching a time-shifted match, I’ll look up one of the players on Google or in Wikipedia. If you search for a player in Google, it’ll show the scores of recent matches at the top! And if you poke around in Wikipedia, they’ll get updated right after a match finishes, so you can be reading a bio and get the result of the match spoiled.

And that’s just what came to mind just now, without thinking about it. Along with all these possible ways to spoil something, I think people have changed in general. I think people care more about the result rather than the drama of a match, so I think it’s kind of hard to get people to understand that you don’t want it to be spoiled. Also, I think everyone likes to be a publisher nowadays–Facebook, Twitter, blogs–so it can be irrestible to “break the news” to the world.

Ok, I’m done whining now.