There aren’t sports fans in the US more frustrated than tennis fans. Insane corporate decisions, for example, entirely blacked out the semifinal of this year’s French Open. The matches (Soderling v Gonzalez and Federer v del Potro) each became epics that lasted hours, and not a moment was shown in the US. The rest of the world had a field day cracking jokes about how much of a backwater the US really is. The Canadians were especially mean. Ha ha.
Thank heavens for the internet. Tennis fans like myself can now watch live tennis on any number of streams. Except that most of the time, these streams are real TV broadcasts from other countries, and would therefore be in a language that I don’t speak. Yep, that’s right: I have watched tennis matches in Russian–I only knew, because the advertisements pointed to .ru websites–and German–which I know what sounds like, having met a number of German people. Funnily enough, I now find the clip and the harder vowels of the German language rather cute. I used to think the German language sounded harsh: you should hear the way Germans say “Blumentritt,” as in Ferdinand Blumentritt, Jose Rizal’s BFF. But “Robredo”–as in Tommy Robredo, a Spaniard in the world top 20–sounds weirdly sweet if a German is speaking it.
No matter. Most of the time, I can’t stand sports commentators anyway. It’s just as well that sometimes I don’t understand what they’re saying.
