An Electronic Brain for Tennis Matches

N E W  Y O R K, Sept. 7, 2001 -- Just as there are tennis wizards on the courts here, there are electronic wizards working behind the scenes at the U.S. Open: The world's largest tennis tournament, it seems, has its own electronic brain.

Every morning, dozens of uniformed umpires crowd into a space beneath Louis Armstrong Stadium. There, from a teller's window near the chief umpire's office, they receive small black hand-held computers. Within minutes, they are carrying the devices, no bigger than a book, onto their assigned courts and climbing into their chairs overlooking the action.

The umpires then use their computers to keep score of each match, their signals going deep into the basement of the giant Arthur Ashe Stadium. The information flows into a room called the Bat Cave. It's crammed with computers and monitors, and a dozen workers in shorts and tennis shirts.

Inside the cave, James Broder, a tennis player who developed the software, monitors the action. "We can track every point of every match," says Broder. "The umpires, they're providing content."

More Than Tennis Scores

It was Broder who created a way to use that content to feed an astonishing number of appetites. The signals flash across 68 scoreboards at once and onto two gigantic Jumbotrons, which carry video from dozens of cameras around the grounds, which was once the site of the 1939 World's Fair.

Working with statisticians who attend the big matches and record statistics, Broder and his associates create an electronic barrage of real-time scores and statistics, which can be flashed directly onto television screens around the world.

It's a prodigious feat, so specialized and sophisticated that it has propelled Broder into an entrepreneurship that now spans an international sports world far beyond Grand Slam tennis.

Broder's scoring and timing universe now covers the Winter Goodwill Games (ski racing, bobsled, luge), the bicycling Tour de France, the World Equestrian Championships, World Cup velo (track cycling), World Junior Velo Championships, Tag Heuer World Cup ski racing, and the NASCAR race car circuit. Until a few years ago, Broder's world even included the gritty task of keeping score for Pro Beach Volleyball (no longer a client).

Struggling Over Statistics

That Broder should contribute to this triumph of computer technology over the statistical blizzard generated by international sport is especially astonishing, considering that in the early 1980s, he was a failing economics student facing dismissal from the Vanderbilt University School of Business.

But then Broder, who had ranked 33d in the nation among 16-year-olds tennis players in 1976, wangled a $1,500-a-month summer internship with the women's pro tour ("I was a grunt").

And while as an undergraduate at Yale, he'd never even used a computer, he quickly developed the skills he needed. His struggle with the technology produced an epiphany. "It was the statistics. I had to get a handle on statistics and I realized that computers were the way for me to tackle them."

He explained: "They needed a new computer ranking system. It was a big problem. They had a black box and a process so complicated nobody understood it."

The year was 1983 and the unfathomable women's tour rankings were sowing distrust among the players.

"It was still the Cold War," says Broder, "and this was an American tour. The Czech and Polish players and coaches were suspicious."

One weird element of the WTA rankings raised the hackles of everyone, not just the East Europeans: Tracy Austin was still ranked among the top five players in the world 11 months after leaving the tour with injuries.

"The answer," notes Broder, "was a 52-week weighted, moving average." That meant finding a way to rank players not only on recent matches but also continue counting older results.

Charting Evert vs. Navratilova

It was a juggling performance only a geek could love. But Broder swooned. And he produced a system still in use today, creating software to take the measure of the players' wins and losses at regular intervals.

One of its earliest successes: Charting the ups and downs created by the rivalry of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. After an experimental tryout, the system was approved by a vote of the WTA in 1984. Broder was on his way.

And the Bat Cave? How did it get its name?

"There used to be a tiny room in Armstrong Stadium where we housed all the equipment," says Broder. "The ceiling leaked and when it rained, it felt like we were in a cave."

Today, it is a nerve center more fitting for flying a small spaceship than as a rocky shelter for a bunch of flying rodents.