Please PISS Off!

Rafa has pulled out of Wimbledon citing tendinitis and there won't be any epic final. This is a huge disappointment to everybody. I was reading some articles on The Championship and it was pointed out that since Federer got married he has not lost a single game and is 12-0 at this point. A perfect example of idiotic sports statistic. Nothing really wrong with the observation. It's fact. The annoying aspect is the sneakiness of the implied inference. To imply that Federer has become sort of super-human after his marriage, is what I call a pathetic inference from sports stat(PISS). The writer went on to suggest that Nadal should get married to his long-time girlfriend to improve his record.

It's almost impossible to watch any kind of sport w/o some appearance of these aberrant phenomena. With all kinds of data available and human tendency to find some sort of pattern in any collection of junk, our screen gets filled with these PISS facts over the course of the match. It's great to get a breakdown of the spots where the service lands, or errors on the forehand over the course of the game. These are concrete things that matter in the context of the current game, more so because they are temporally quite close to the matter at hand.

Most sports, and tennis in particular, is decided when one ball lands wide, or when one party makes a crucial error, or takes a single risky shot. He gets broken and the set is finished. At such moments, players aren't really getting any better or worse cause their former girlfriend is now his wife.

In reality, the players play and the counters count. As watchers, let us watch and spare us the PISS.