I'm sorry folks, but somehow a key early paragraph in the Tongue of Fire post got misplaced to the bottom of the post, which might have caused you all some confusion. It's fixed now, and while I have no idea of how or when that happened, my apologies to all ~ Pete
In my recent entry, "Courier Finds His Inner Geek", I omitted a key word in describing qualifiication for the Champions Cup Series.
A competitor on this new 30-and-over circuit needs to have been in a Grand Slam final, not just a Grand Slam. Jim gently pointed this out to me in an e-mail, playing on my choice of words to note in typical deadpan fashion that qualifying via having merely played a major would have represented "casting a wide net" indeed!
Also, I ought to have made clear that a competitor must have played singles on a triumphant Davis Cup team. And that, regarding the third way to qualify, a player who has been in the Top Five in singles can get it (there are doubles rankings as well).
There are no further criteria.
Nothing more for me to have screwed up.
Now go out and buy tickets for the event to help get the egg off my face.
My apologies for incorrectly listing Croatia as the host of its first-round 2006 Davis Cup tie vs. Austria. I copied the draw from a secondary website (here's the official ITF Davis Cup World Group drawsheet for 2006) because it was easier to cut and paste, and didn't think to double-check the accuracy against the ITF site.
Austria's home ground advantage certainly lessens the degree to which Croatia is apt to be favored (see my post below, "Fast Court Nation"), but I think the Croatians will still be heavy favorites. Austria will almost certainly opt to stage the tie on clay, but the Croatians all grew up playing on the stuff, even though Croatian top dog Ivan Ljubicic has posted such great hard court results.
Hat tip to Darcy for catching the original error, and to Luke for confirming that Austria is host. Incidentally, I tried to address this last Friday night, from home, but my tired old Compaq isn't up to the task of powering TennisWorld's various editorial and administrative functions.
I'm begging my boss to spring for a zippy PC-based laptop, with an up-to-date browser.
Many apologies for the unbelievably confusing repetition of text in my recent post, "An Exercise in Futility." Reading it reminded me of watching certain clay-court matches—more on that subject later . . . Anyway, I think I've got the post back in its original shape and I still have no idea what happened. Thanks for your patience—and alert comments.
Mary Pierce was born in Quebec, Canada, not in the U.S., as I wrote in my earlier post, "Amber Fields of Gray, Mon Cher." Conspiracy theorists will note that this is the second correction I've posted re: Pierce. Sometimes God does not work in such mysterious ways, some will say! Anyway, sorry 'bout that. And a hat-tip to astute reader Lucy, who had a funny comment on this (see below).
I owe Mary Pierce an apology; in my last post, I wrote that she hadn't been in a major final since 1997. As I surely knew but blanked on, Mary won the French Open in 2000, but had nothing better than a quarterfinal appearance in a Grand Slam since then until this year.
Well, some kind soul decided not to leave me hanging in the wind and posted a comment on my last entry, pointing out that Jesse McCartney is not the son of the former Beatle Paul, as I had been told with some conviction by someone who ought to have known better. And I ought to have known better than to take his word for it. To all, an apology. If you care, you can check out Jesse's history here.
The winner of the Boys’ 16s at the Zoo was not, as I reported, Scott Schnugg—it was his brother, Nate. Also, in my hat-tip to Colette Lewis, the hardest-working woman in the junior-tennis business (Seena Hamilton will now kill me), I fancifully wrote that Colette had been in Kalamazoo all week. While technically true, it creates the impression that she’s from somewhere else, which is not the case. She’s a Zooian, through and through.
In yesterday’s post on Rafael Nadal’s drive to the clay-court winning streak record, I erroneously reported that the record belongs to Thomas Muster, who won 40 tournament matches in a row on clay. (The mistakes slipped through here because the Yahoo! link I used contained erroneously reported information.) The record actually belongs to Guillermo Vilas, who won 53 straight on clay. Also, Borg’s 31-match streak, previously just the sixth-best streak but one about which some people made a big deal (hence my post), was not even the former Swedish star’s own best. Borg is right behind Vilas in second place on the all-time list with a 46-match streak, one rung above Muster and his 40 in the record book. Hat tip to my colleague Tony Lance for this catch!
In a recent post, I noted that only one player (Ivan Ljubicic) besides Roger Federer has been in three finals this year; while that’s technically accurate, Ljubicic actually has been in four—and no, Ljubicic’s agent didn’t hold a gun to my head and make me post this semi-correction. Guess it’s the remnants of the conscience instilled in Catholic school.
