The Best Day of Tennis You Won’t Get to See

The second Monday of Wimbledon is traditionally hyped as one of the best single days of tennis each year. That reputation is warranted as the day usually features all of the final 16 men and 16 women slugging it out for spots in the quarterfinals. For tennis fans, it's a great day to plop down in front of the TV and wallow in all the grasscourt greatness.

Unfortunately, many of us won't get to see much of what transpired on the lawns of Wimbledon today. The networks, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that tennis fans really don't need to see live tennis on this, the best single day of tennis. Go figure.

To be fair, ESPN2 has done a good job with their Wimbledon coverage throughout the first week. I wasn't too enthusiastic about their French Open coverage a few weeks ago, but they have been handling the Big W quite nicely. They have been beginning their live coverage at the crack of dawn--actually before dawn for those of us on the West Coast--and have continued right up through the end of play each day. What more could you want?

Well now, NBC has gone and mucked everything up. ESPN had to end their live coverage at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time so NBC could take over. That may not have been a big deal for East Coasters, but for West Coasters it was a disaster. You see, NBC was still showing the Today Show when ESPN2 stopped broadcasting. And they would continue to show Matt Lauer, Al Roker and company for the next three hours. When NBC started broadcasting the tennis at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time, it was a crappy old tape of the earlier East Coast broadcast. Nice way to muff it, NBC.

The funniest part is that ESPN seems perfectly aware of how inane this set-up is. On both Saturday and Monday, Chris Fowler has alluded to the fact that an embargo had been placed on the network not to show specific matches that NBC would be showing on tape later in the day (the Roddick-Melzer and Venus-Ivanovic matches). Both days, EPSN2 has then gone on to show lengthy excerpts from the post-match press conferences featuring Roddick and Venus. Pretty cheeky there!

What's more, the news crawl on ESPN2 has also given the scores of both of the embargoed matches on Saturday and Monday. In fact, the crawl on Saturday featured no other match results besides the Roddick victory. At least the Monday crawl threw in one additional result to make it look not so obvious that ESPN was giving NBC the finger.

It is so infuriating that the networks can't somehow work this all out. In this age of instant updates, it makes no sense for NBC to be broadcasting an old tape. And the fact that they preempt ESPN2's live coverage to do so is simply unconscionable. Get it together, NBC.