Here’s a story ripped from the headlines. Yesterday at the US Open, Novak Djokovic accidentally hit a linesperson with a tennis ball. He had just dropped his serve at love, and – clearly frustrated – took a ball out of his pocket and knocked it behind him. (He might have hit it a tad bit harder than usual, but sending a leftover ball to the back of the court after completing a service game is standard practice.) A split second after thoughtlessly hitting it, Djokovic looked back to see it had struck a linesperson, and was clearly horrified to see what he had done. After rushing back to apologize, a lengthy conversation with the tournament referee ensued. The outcome was that Djokovic was defaulted from the match and tossed from the Open.
I’m of two minds about this.
A longtime Federer fan, I’ll cop to a little schadenfreude for any
misfortune that befalls The Djoker.
(What’s a good nemesis for, anyway?)
But as a human being interested in rules, fairness, and normativity, the
decision strikes me as a mistake.
Here’s a second case.
In the 2018 US Open Final, Serena Williams played Naomi Osaka. Early on, Serena’s coach, Patrick
Mouratoglou, was cited for nonverbal coaching.
This gave Williams a ‘code violation’—basically a verbal warning from
the chair umpire. Serena protested that
she had not cheated, and the chair umpire admitted her point, responding, “I
know that.” From there, however, the
match “descended
into chaos”. In the second set, Serena
broke her racquet in frustration.
Because she had already been issued a formal warning, this time the
rules required her to be docked a point.
Serena was incensed. She declared
the chair umpire, Carlos Ramos, to be a thief.
He issued a third code violation for “verbal abuse,” resulting in
Williams dropping a game at a crucial moment.
It’s easy to see things spiraled from what appeared to be a
simple ambiguity. When Serena initially
talked to Ramos after Mouratoglou’s coaching violation, she had insisted that
she had not cheated. Ramos agreed that
she had not cheated. From the player’s
point of view, they had settled their difference. From the official’s point of view, the issue
was not that a player had cheated, but that the rules demanded a code violation
for a coach’s action. So when the
racquet incident came around, it could appear either as the “first” of Williams’s violations, or as the
“second” violation assessed to Williams, depending on how you were
counting.
My present concern is not to resolve what was or was not
retracted by implicature of Ramos’s from-the-chair speech act, “I know
that.” Rather, my claim is that for the
US Open to turn on niceties of this sort is ridiculous. Serena herself was the first to make this point. When Donna Kelso, the Grand Slam Supervisor,
entered the court to explain how Ramos was following the letter of the law to
an understandably upset Williams, Serena countered: “I get the rules, but I’m
saying that it’s not right.”
Serena’s case is different from Novak’s. The most basic rights are those protecting
one’s physical person, so it matters that someone suffered harm in today’s
episode. The only physical damage done
in the 2018 final was to Serena’s Wilson Blade racquet, which I strongly
suspect she owned outright. But anyone
on the ground of a grand slam tennis match appreciates that tennis balls will
be moving through the air. Djokovic is
the responsible party, as he also understood.
However, it’s hard for me – at least – to see how altering the course of
the Open in response to a truly bizarre accident serves anybody’s interests
(except, well, Federer’s – and so by extension, my own). Like I said, I see both sides of this one.
Don’t worry about that.
Believe as you will about Novak and US Open rules. I’ve taken my (and your!) precious time
getting to it, but what I’m really after here is The Rules as a kind of
normative banner. In the wake of today’s
decision, lots of commentators have insisted that the tournament referee had to
throw Djokovic out because The Rules required it.
Two points about this.
One: whenever anybody says “The rules require it!” I strongly recommend
consulting the fine print. Two: what The
Rules require is not conceptually transparent to what’s right. Serena was too
smart to be go in for that bit of bureaucratic doublespeak, and we should be,
too.
I teach a big intro class at a university. Alas, there are rules. Lots of rules. My syllabus is full of them. Yours probably is as well. But here is the thing. I – for one – have learned by sad experience
that I’m just not clever enough to construct any set of rules such that their
strict enforcement will serve the values I care about. I don’t know quite why this is. My experience is that enforcing the rules is
bad for me, and for my most vulnerable students. Now, you might think I haven’t thought hard
enough about how to make the rules fair.
And maybe so. But no matter what
rules I put down, those rules aren’t even dry on the syllabus before Ambitious
Students will have figured out how to maximize their interests within the game
those rules constitute. And because I
have to grade on a curve, that’s not great news for not-so-ambitious
students. For whatever it’s worth, my
very consistent experience is that the students who stand to win from The Rules
are overwhelmingly upper-middle class or rich, white, and male. Nothing against those students, who are
within their rights to play by the rules.
But a system where you only get ahead by figuring out The Rules and
playing hard within them will not be neutral in upon whom in confers benefits
and burdens.
I’ll end with a jeremiad.
I have met The Rules. I hate
them. Including my own. Sometimes I feel a temptation to enforce The
Rules against a student whom I really feel has it coming. “They called me a thief!” I’ve said in my own
way. But when I’m in that state, I’m not
seeing things right. People I trust have to tell
me to suppress my vanity, to let go of the rules. I have never regretted following their
advice. I’ve also had students try to
enforce The Rules against themselves.
(Curiously, never the same students eager to use the rules to get
ahead.) That’s not good, either. I don’t work for The Rules, and nor should
they. Were we created for the syllabus,
or the syllabus for us?
What’s my thesis? When
someone tells you they are just following the
rules, it’s also true that they are
following the rules. We cannot divest
ourselves of responsibility for our
actions by saying the rules made us do it.
They didn’t. There’s a question
about what the rules say, and there’s a question about what’s right. Running those questions together is more
dangerous than a flying tennis ball.