Andy Roddick Boils Over Down Under, ESPN Airs It Live

↵↵Andy Roddick will never be mistaken for the perfect gentleman of tennis stereotypes. More than most players on tour, he’s liable to let some vitriol fly if calls aren’t going his way. ↵

↵↵I can’t fault him for being upset, or even for the salty language: He did lose two straight match points on challenges, postponing a straight-sets victory for a couple of exasperating minutes. And the call that Roddick was most upset by was not a computer-aided challenge, but a judgment call by the official, who ruled that Roddick would not have been in the vicinity of the ball to return it on the first match point.↵

↵↵Roddick later took to Twitter to apologize, showing both good humor and the flaw in ESPN’s broadcast strategy:↵

↵↵⇥apologies for the language today folks hopefully most kids were asleep by the time i went off ...... my bad↵↵↵What, exactly, does ESPN expect to catch when showing sports completely live with microphones near the athletes, even in the wee hours of the American morning? And what are the tennis powers that be, still smarting from one potty-mouthed star’s outburst, thinking by letting that happen? It’s a neat thing to watch for insomniacs, but it’s also a recipe for trouble, and bits of blue like Roddick’s rant are the non-Janet Jackson reasons the five-second delay exists. Maybe ESPN should make use of it?↵

↵↵(HT: SB Nation.)↵

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