Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Bad luck, long women's match conspire against local ATP final
TV exposure hurt as a consequence
By Neil Schmidt, nschmidt@enquirer.com
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Carlos Moya's second-set rally Sunday, which earned him the Western & Southern Financial Group Masters title, caught ESPN by surprise.
The network pulled the plug on tennis in favor of a rebroadcast later Sunday night, but it was prepared to stick with the action had Moya been closer to winning.
“We were ready to hold the 8 o'clock (switchover to baseball) if Moya was ready to win the match,” said Len DeLuca, ESPN's senior vice president of programming strategy. “But he was down 5-2 in that set at the point we left the air, so it looked like it was going to a third set.”
Instead, Moya erased two service breaks and finished off Lleyton Hewitt in a tiebreak.
ESPN announced shortly before 8 p.m. that it would cut away to the St. Louis-New York Mets game but that the match would be shown in its entirety at 10:30 p.m. on ESPN2.
Tournament director Bruce Flory had no complaints about the way the network handled the coverage.
“It was just bad luck more than anything else,” he said. “You could end up following the match; it was just chopped up.”
The other thing hurting the telecast was that the JPMorgan Chase Open final preceding it on ESPN ran long. Chanda Rubin upset Lindsay Davenport in a match that lasted two hours, 19 minutes.
That match began at 2:30 p.m. EST, allowing only 90 minutes until the men's match here. By the time the women finished, the Moya-Hewitt match was already in a rain delay at 4-4 in the first set.
“It does raise the two-hour (time block) question,” DeLuca said. “This experience will make us look at our programming when we do tennis (back-to-back) in the future.”
ESPN ran its tape of the first eight games, then filled in the rest of the rain delay with a 75-minute edition of SportsCenter. The only portion of the match to air live was from 7:07 to 8 p.m.
The tennis audience wasn't deemed large enough to merit preempting the Mets-Cardinals game or a Little League World Series regional qualifier at 8 p.m. on ESPN2.
“Those have very strong core audiences,” DeLuca said. “But we feel good that we served the tennis viewers by giving them a full broadcast (at 10:30). And with that being 7:30 on the West Coast, it went prime-time there.”
FRIDAY STRONG: ESPN2's ratings for its Hewitt-Andre Agassi quarterfinal Friday night drew a 0.66 rating, averaging 550,000 households.
It was the network's second-most-viewed tennis event ever for a non-Grand Slam or Davis Cup match, and the 10th-most-viewed event overall in ESPN2 history.
“That's a very solid number on a Friday night,” DeLuca said.
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Bad luck, long women's match conspire against local ATP final
