Big-point players in tennis: NOT a myth

There really are big-point players in tennis. Just found a couple of statistical references to support this claim.

Watching this year’s Wimbledon, Rafael Nadal always looked in charge of his semi final against Andy Murray. Yet, there was a time late in the third set, with Murray down 0-2 on his way to a 0-3 whipping, when Murray had actually won more points than Nadal. Rafa was winning the points that mattered.

Similar claims in other sports have turned out to be false. For instance, baseball long believed in “clutch hitters”, batters who perform especially well in important situations. However, Bill James, the spiritual father of sports statistics, showed that this was simply not supported by the data. Similarly, fans long believed that basketball players have “hot hands”, when they are “in the zone” and sink every attempt. Statistical analysis showed that “hot hands” were fully explained by chance. Is tennis really different?

One reason for believeing tennis is different is comes from this (superb) New Yorker article on the state of the doubles game. The relevant sections say:

The doubles tour might no longer exist, if not for Etienne de Villiers, the chairman of the men’s tour at the time. De Villiers had previously worked at Walt Disney International, so he understood the need for better marketing. The doubles tour could survive, he said, but only if the players agreed to some compromises. The game would be streamlined. Most matches would be kept to two sets, with a “match tie break” in place of the third set. If a game went to 40-40 the next point would decide it, there would be no more endless ads and dueces. (Grand slams would stick with the traditional scoring).

The new format has few fans among the players. Martina Navratilova says it is a “bullshit excuse”. Leander Paes calls it as “Russian roulette”, and Luke Jensen dismisses it as “tennis in a microwave”. Jensen believes that the shorter format favours weaker teams, “Anyone can win one set”.

Oddly enough, though, the statistics don’t bear this out. Not long after the changes were made, Wayne asked Carl Morris, a mathematician at Harvard, to calculate their effect on a team’s chances. In shorter matches, Morris concluded, the likelihood of an upset could increase by as much as five percentage points. And yet, when the ATP later reviewed the tour’s statistics, it found that the best players had improved their records. The new format offered “no second chances”, as Bob Bryan put it, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “The one thing we didn’t figure in is that the better teams are clutch” Wayne says. “On those big points, they come through”.

That said, this is a roundabout way of making a simple point. My friend Sriram Subramaniam suggested a comparison of % break points won with % other points won. One would expect Rafa to win more break points than Murray. Unfortunately, Google didn’t turn up this specific analysis. The closest thing to this analysis that a few mintues of Googling turned up is this paper by a Franc Klaassen of the University of Amsterdam.

He shows that there really are big points, and that seeded players play better on big points than unseeded players. He observes that seeded players facing a break point on their serve have the same win % as on other points, and that unseeded players have a lower win %, suggesting that it is more about weaker players choking than better players raising their game. He also shows that serving first in a set, or serving with new balls, has no impact. He doesn’t make any conclusions about champions like Rafa or Federer as opposed to the general pool of seeded players; his dataset is small, coming only from Wimbledon 92-95.

Calling for tennis’ Bill James to mine the vast amount of data generated by the ATP tour...

Etah, ASBOs and Skybet

"I started my management career in a backward village in Etah, Uttar Pradesh. I lived in the village, as one of the local people, trying to improve their lives.

Women in my village walked five miles each way, every day, to get water for their families. This was obviously a big effort; it left them physically drained. Couldn’t we improve these women’s lives by putting in a water pump, right here, in our village? Of course, easily done. My company bought and installed a new water pump in the village. But that didn’t work out. The women still had to do their daily hike for water because the water pump never worked. It got vandalized at night, either for components or by local boys with nothing better to do. My company repaired the pump, again and again. But it never worked.

The breakthrough came when the company stopped buying the pump, and said the villagers would have to buy a new pump themselves. Sure the company could top the pot up with cash if needed, but each family in the village would have to contribute towards buying the pump. There were no exemptions for poor families. The could make really small contributions of one or two rupees. But everyone had to contribute. It took months of conversation, cajoling and threats of being socially ostracized to get every family to contribute. But once they got there, once the villagers had their pump with their own hard earned money, the pump stayed in repair. People would protect their pump from thieves, vandals knew they would be ostracized. Nobody cares about a company’s pump."

This is not a parable. I heard this story as a historical account, from a friend who now teaches at Stanford. He started his career with Unilever India as a management trainee. This prestigious Unilever program places trainees in villages in Etah, a backward part of Uttar Pradesh, for six weeks.

This placement provides Unilever trainees - who mostly are privileged, ambitious, well-educated, upper-middle-class youngsters from India’s metros - with a lifetime supply of interesting stories. There have been insinuations that the sole purpose of the Etah placement is to equip management trainees with good stories. These insinuations are not true. Unilever has a dairy factory in Etah. The company is engaged in an Integrated Rural Development Program (IRDP) in the surrounding villages to improve the supply of milk to its factory. Management trainee placement in Etah is a part of this larger serious-minded program.

This story keeps coming back to my mind because its insight, call it the Etah Insight - that public enterprises work only if the populace are emotionally invested in the enterprise - feels bleeding obvious, but is so often ignored.

For instance, just last month, the Con - Lib government in the UK announced an emergency budget. They are raising the personal allowance by $1000; so 880,000 families will be taken out of the income tax net. This sounds both pro-poor and fiscally responsible, and has attracted almost no comment from the mainstream media. However, looked at through the lens of the Etah Insight, it could actually mean 880,000 more families have less of an emotional stake in their society’s success.

Taxes need not be about revenues. They could have a role to play even in households who receive more in benefits than they would ever pay in taxes. People who realize that benefits and government services are not free are more likely to use these services responsibly and respect the society which provides these benefits.

Taxes could be re-framed, like voting, as a part of a broader social contract. Benefits become a part of a contract rather than a pure entitlement. Taxes, despite being involuntary, could help foster a sense of ownership in the “broken society” that David Cameron’s Conservatives once cared so much about.

Stimulus spending, which is a bit like buying water pumps for villages, is in the news across the pond. The commentary is predictably sterile and partisan, with the left talking up spending and the right claiming that the $787 billion stimulus did not work. The Etah Insight suggests that the more creative conversation is in the middle and a few levels deeper; about precisely where stimulus spending would work, which depends mostly on whether the social norms to make stimulus work are in place. Will the stimulus pumps remain intact, or will they just get vandalized by the local yobs?

The Etah Insight also suggests that the pain of paying taxes matters. It is clearly easier to collect taxes like VAT and TDS, which are perceived as higher prices or lower incomes rather than as a price paid for governance. However, making it necessary to pay hard cash for government services could produce a more engaged, and ultimately more successful, citizenry.

The Etah insight is not on the public agenda, but the bookies are one constituency who seem to get the idea. Betting remained robustly recession proof through this World Cup. Why? Skybet’s advertising slogan hit the bunny on the nose: it matters more if there’s money on it.

Ubuntu, not furniture

Consider yourself at home
Consider yourself one of the family
We've taken to you so strong,
It's clear we're going to get along
Consider yourself well in
Consider yourself part of the furniture

These words were chiming forth from the back seat of my car. My children were practicing for a show while I was dropping them off at school. As they picked up the tempo and emphasis for the crescendo...Consider yourself, one of us!...I did a double take on “consider yourself part of the furniture”.

Is that nice? To be considered a part of the furniture? Sure, being a part of the furniture is better than being bullied. But sitting around being invisible, like the bofa on the sofa, can’t be a ton of fun.

The opposite of being a part of the furniture may be umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. This zulu saying translates, roughly, to a person is a person only through other people. This saying is a part of a South African philosophy called ubuntu, about the inter-connectedness of humanity. This reminds me a little of the traditional Hindu namaste, which means I recognize the divinity in you. Ubuntu seems to have an added element of reflexivity, or self-reference, to it. Like, maybe, re-framing Descartes, I am because I recognize the divinity in you.

I first came across umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu in a management handbook called The Fifth Discipline. Peter Senge welcomes readers to his book with umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, to say that the meaning and value of the book is derived entirely from what we readers get out of it. Since then, Bill Clinton has advised the Labour Party to embrance ubuntu. There is a Linux operating system called Ubuntu.

And, praise the lord, there is even an Ubuntu fair trade cola. They really should quit treating Oliver like a part of the furniture, and should buy him an Ubuntu fair trade cola instead, to recognize the divinity within him.

I’d like to buy the world an Ubuntu... its the real thing.

Barajas and Atocha

Airports and railway stations are boring, functional, de-humanizing places that one passes through, perforce, on one’s way to happier parts of a holiday. Unless, you’re in Madrid. I fell in love with both the Barajas airport and the Atocha railway station during my familiy’s visit to Spain.

Barajas, apparently, is well known in architectural circles. It won the Royal Institute of British Architect’s top design award in 2006 (the architects were British, I hope it is equally well loved at home in Spain).

The head architect, Lord Richard Rogers says “We've tried to make it a palace of fun as well as an airport...it's about colour and light and space and transparency...and it's all about making people look as though they are important in that space; they're not squashed by low ceilings or dominated by retail and shops, you've got great views out to planes and landscape and we have a fantastic landscape all the way around the site”.

Truth be told, the skylights in the gorgeouly crazy curvy roof do look a bit like bugs eyes, but not in a spooky way.

We took a taxi from Barajas to the main train station in the city center for our onward journey. Forty minutes and twenty euros later, we hauled our bags off the taxi, past a snarling and seemingly permanent traffic jam outside the station, and into the concourse. Here is what we saw:



I’m giving a bit of the game away here, because sheer unexpectedness of the jungle in a railway terminus was a part of what made it special. But nonetheless, it is amazing.



Apparently the space inside the old train station became available in 1992, when new high speed train tracks were laid around Spain in preparation for the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville Expo.



They could have tried to maximize revenue per square meter and stuck yet another shopping mall into this space. I'm glad they turned it into a little tropical jungle instead, with chirping birds, turtles riding piggyback,



orchids,





and palm fronds.

Wimbledon, the World Cup, and the price of petrol

Having spent much of the last week vegging out watching Wimbledon and the World Cup, I am struck by the contrast between the slick appeals system at Wimbledon, and the complete absence of a similar system, or even calls for a similar system, at the World Cup. This is despite the fact that bad refereeing decisions have a bigger impact in football, where one goal often is decisive, than in tennis, where hundreds of points are played every match.

For instance, when Italy was down 1-2 against Slovenia, Fabio Quagliarella appeared to have equalized. The goal was disallowed because of an offside call. Replays showed that Quagliarella was onside. If Italy had referred that decision to a third umpire, the goal would have been allowed, with potentially huge consequences. I thought the USA were also robbed of a glorious win against Slovenia, when their goal to go up 3-2 was disallowed. Yet, none of the players, managers or talking heads on TV were outraged at this injustice, or were calling for third umpires. The technology clearly exists. There just doesn’t seem to be any underlying or latent demand for referrals in football. How come?

Dan Ariely, an always entertaining economist, might have a clue. Here, he talks about why we are much more sensitive to the price of petrol than, say, to the price of milk. He thinks it is because:

“For the several minutes that I stand at the pump, all I do is stare at the growing total on the meter — there is nothing else to do. And I have time to remember how much it cost a year ago, two years ago and even six years ago.

I suspect that if I stood next to the yogurt case in the supermarket for five minutes every week with nothing to do but stare at the price, I would also know how much it has gone up — and I might become outraged when yogurt passed the $2 mark.”

The point is, there is a natural break in the rhythm of our activity when we buy petrol, which is not there when we walk down super market aisles sticking stuff into a trolley. That break changes the way we absorb and respond to information.

With tennis, there is a natural break in the activity after every point. That break makes it easier to work up a rage at bad umpiring calls (remember McEnroe?). That break also makes it easy to insert a referral into the game. Ditto for cricket.

With football or basketball, the ball is back in play immediately. The clock is ticking down. There is less opportunity to work up a rage about a bad decision. Players and fans can't dwell on the past because the future is already playing. Inserting a referral into the game breaks up the tempo of the game in an unnatural, annoying way.

While it is disappointing that Italy crashed out (in the interests of full disclosure, I had a bet on Italy winning the World Cup at 18/1), maybe this is good for the game. A sport with no referrals teaches us to suck up the referee’s calls, shut up, and get on with the game. Maybe, in that way, football builds character.

Caesar, the cat?

The assassination of Julius Caesar, when Casca’s hands spoke for him on the Ides of March, when et tu Brute felled Caesar, is surely one of the most pivotal, dramatic and best remembered episodes in world history. The place where this happened, the Area Sacra, with the brick ruins of four Roman era temples and its chipped fluted columns, is still evocative and atmospheric. However, it is not a tourist attraction. It is a sanctuary for stray cats.



This cat is napping on the ruins of the Theatro Pompei, the building where Caesar was killed.



The cats in this sanctuary seem to be healthy, clean and well looked after.



My family and I discovered this place by accident. The tram line we were on happened to terminate at the Largo Argentina, a busy transport hub adjacent to the Area Sacra. Otherwise, this place is simply not promoted as a sight for tourists to see. Other potentially interesting sites in Rome which are off the main tourist map include Ostia Antica, the Circus Maximus and Augustus Caesar's mausoleum.

I often complain that we Indians are so bad at showcasing our fantastic heritage. It is interesting that Italy, which is ten times richer than India but still feels spiritually akin to India, is also not that great at showcasing its heritage. The world champions of showcasing heritage might well be the British. It feels like more work has gone into presenting the Roman Baths at Bath, a spa in a remote outpost of the Roman Empire, than the seat of the Roman Empire itself at the Foro Romano.



Still, I'm glad someone is looking out for the cats :)

Hutton, the toff?

CMJ’s son Robin retired from first class cricket a couple of weeks ago. I looked looked him up on Cricinfo, and came across a delicious little nugget: Robin Martin Jenkins played in the same Radley College XI as Andrew Strauss and Ben Hutton.

The reigning England captain, a county all rounder who was once considered England material, and the captain of the county that calls Lord’s home – these guys all played together in a school team. Wow! What sort of school boasts such a fine cricketing tradition?



A very posh school, it turns out. Radley College is one of three remaining all-boys all-boarding public schools in England, along with Eton and Harrow. Its campus is five miles south of Oxford, sprawls across eight hundred acres, includes a cricket pavilion, a golf course and, since 2008, a real tennis court. It is only about 150 years old - Eton and Harrow are both more than 400 years old - but, regardless, an interactive web-tour of the Radley College campus confirms that it is as comfortably upper class as PG Wodehouse’s Wrykyn ever was.

Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the sonorous voice of the MCC establishment, sent his son to Radley College. That fits. Andrew Strauss’ nickname in the England dressing room is Lord Brock, after an old Etonian TV presenter famous for living the high life. That fits. But Ben Hutton? Does he fit?

The name Hutton is sacred in cricketing lore because of Ben’s grandfather Len Hutton, who, as recently as 1951, became the first professional to captain England. He was the son of a builder from a Yorkshire village called Pudsey. He went to a local council school, trained as a carpenter (perhaps, coincidentally, like Jesus Christ), set the world record for the highest test match score with 364 against Australia, and he captained England to successive Ashes victories.

Len Hutton was more than just a great player. Like Frank Worrell, the West Indies’ first black captain, Hutton’s achievements are drenched in special meaning because of who he is. Yet, this working class hero’s grandson went to one of England’s most exclusive public schools. Interesting.

Arnold Toynbee has a theory on why this is not just OK, but is profoundly good. Toynbee takes it as a given that every civilization is shaped by a ruling elite. This has been empirically true through history, including in supposedly communist or socialist societies. The vast majority in every civilization, the “internal proletariat” in Toynbee-speak, are outside the ruling elite. Toynbee believes that the relationship between this ruling elite and the internal proletariat is the most critical difference between a vital civilization and one that is breaking down.

In a vital civilization, the ruling elite have a natural legitimacy. The elite have a hold on the imagination and aspirations of the internal proletariat, who voluntarily seek to become more like the the ruling elite, a process Toynbee calls mimesis. Conversely, in a civilization which is breaking down “the internal proletariat, that majority in society which had formerly given its voluntary allegiance to a creative leadership, but which is now increasingly alienated from its own society by the coercive despotism of its corrupted masters... registers its secession from society by adopting a spiritual ethos which is alien in inspiration”. In this calculus, the Huttons are a part of a healthy civilization, one in which the best of the working class seek to become like the ruling elite.

Ben Hutton is not the first public-school-man in his family. His father Richard attended Repton, a school as exclusive as Radley College. Richard Hutton would have been eligible to enroll at Repton in 1955, when Len was the reigning England captain. It seems like Len, at the pinnacle of his career, respected the prevailing power structure even though he was not born into it, and chose to give his son a more privileged upbringing than he himself enjoyed.

England’s cricket captain sent his son to the best school that he possibly could. That fits well enough, regardless of whether the captain was a gentleman or a professional.