One summer, a few years after we moved onto St. Peter’s Church Road, I turned on the television to watch the Wimbledon final.
The championship match was broadcast on NBC, which was lucky, because that was the only channel we got. And by “got,” I mean that NBC was the only channel where ghostly forms swirled in the static, as opposed to the blank snow of all the other channels.
Newfangled televisions use a digital signal, which is an all-or-nothing proposition. If the signal’s strong, the picture looks great; if it isn’t, you’ve got bupkis. But back them, television stations broadcast analog signals, which meant that achieving a poor picture was still gratifyingly possible. The morning was spent adjusting and readjusting the old TV, followed by constant skirmishes with the rabbit-ears.
The fruit of my labor was a fuzzy, but recognizable scene: that emerald temple of world tennis, Centre Court at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
And there were the great gladiators themselves, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, whose rivalry was already the stuff of legend!
The two finalists came onto the court and started their warm-up. Here was the first opportunity to observe their game-readiness, to admire Federer’s brilliant one-handed backhand, to marvel at Nadal’s bulging biceps.
Slight problem: I couldn’t see the ball.
There was Federer’s elegant swing, accompanied by a loud “crack.” And there was Nadal’s wicked, wrist-whipping forehand, accompanied by an equally booming crack and a primal grunt. And then, back to Federer, whose leonine footwork made him seem to float above the grass.
Crack.
Crack.
But where was the ball? It was like watching a pantomime.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d run up against one of the principles of Communication Theory, which stipulates that a piece of information (in this case, the location and movement of the tennis ball) has to be able to overcome the ambient noise (in this case the awful static on the screen) in order for the receiver to get it.
In other words, the resolution on the screen wasn’t fine enough to distinguish a tennis ball from the snow.
I’ll admit that I watched for a while, even under those conditions, hoping that the atmospherics of the match – the court positioning, the color commentary, the cheering, and the close-ups on the players – would add up to the feeling that I was watching a tennis match.
It didn’t. I turned off the television in disgust and crossed my fingers, hoping that the match would be one of those disappointingly quick finals in which a player is blown out in straight sets.
Alas.
The men’s final in 2008 is considered one of the greatest finals in Wimbledon’s history – if not the greatest tennis match ever played.
That’s right. Some consider it the greatest tennis match ever played.
That was the year we finally bit the bullet and signed up for cable TV – not up at the Creek, where cable isn’t even a remote possibility, but down in Baltimore. Cable offered the promise, through the magic of digital video recording, of never missing another world-historic match. Who needed television on St. Peter’s Church Road if you knew you could watch the Wimbledon final later on – with the added benefit of being able to fast-forward through the commercials!
So The Championships, Wimbledon, as they’re pretentiously titled, drove the adoption of a new technology in our lives: televised programming that we have to pay for.
And now, a few years later, we’ve taken another leap, this time into the brave new world of High Definition (HD) television. Even with the better resolution of cable, my aging eyes were starting to have trouble following the ball on our old analog TV. So last week, we drove out to Costco and did what millions of Americans do before a major sporting event: we bought a nice big Korean-made flat screen.
We got it home, set it up, and all I can say is “Wow!”
The only fuzz on the screen is the fur on the tennis ball as it rockets across the net. Beads of sweat pour like diamonds from the players’ hair. All of a sudden, the game seems brutally fast and spectacularly violent.
But there is a new kind of noise that threatens to distract from the game: too much information. Or, as our daughter likes to say, “Ew, TMI!”
Like, do we really need to be able to see the players’ nose hair?
Some things are better left to the imagination.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 30 June 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
