Once, during a friendly night tennis game when I was sixteen or so, I hit the ball straight up in the air on purpose. My follow through brought the racket into my left eyebrow, splitting it open and gushing blood. Head wounds. There's always more blood than you suspect.

I can't, now, remember if I was happy or pissed (my reason for doing this). But we did have to stop playing and run over to the nearby 7-11 to use the bathroom. I got the wound closed (without stitches, even) and the blood stopped. And I kept playing tennis, recreationally, for a few more years. I had an okay serve, but not much else.

Wimbledon just finished for another year. Federer (pronounced: Federrrrrrrrr) won his fifth straight Wimbledon title, tying Bjorn Borg (who inspired the name of a Star Trek villain because of his dominance in the late 70s). Yesterday, Venus Williams (Miss Williams if you're nasty) won her fourth title, which put her in a short list of women who have won four or more Wimbledon titles.

I like watching tennis.

There are a ton of sports I don't have much patience for: Car racing. Golf. Arena football. Wrestling of any kind. And many more I don't even actively consider. I like watching baseball, and it usually doesn't even matter who is playing.

Which is, a lot of the time, my attitude about tennis. As long as it's a good game (the players are pretty much equals, or at least playing that way), then I will watch that little ball bounce back and forth, comment on who is getting tired, wonder which woman is going to get off the best squeal, that sort of thing.

In the last few years, electronic line cameras have been introduced to try to make line calling better (or, really, to cut down on the arguments with the umpires). I'm thinking these are, at times, about as popular as red light cameras in my hometown. Today one of the commentators said the reliability of the electronic cameras is about 90%.

90%. I'm not sure how much better this is than the regular line callers. But the regular people don't have the neat graphics (Accompanied by a "whoooo" at Wimbledon from the crowd as the digital ball flies through the air toward the disputed call--which I hadn't heard before. Must be a British thing.), so the cameras are given the benefit of the doubt. Even if the difference between being in and out is rather small--and 10% of the time it is wrong.

But this is not the point of tennis, this technological encroachment on the calling of matches. It's an individual versus and individual, and the differences in ability are minuscule, much less than 10% at times. The ball goes just a bit farther out on a volley or stays in on a hot serve. These things can be the difference in the game or set or match.

Federer waited until the fifth set to break Nadal (pronounced with a French accent, because he's good on clay) more than once. But he broke him a few times in the last set, and that's all that matters in the end.

The joke is that love means nothing to a tennis player. But you gotta love the game. You gotta love the hits and volleys and serves and tantrums. The impossible shots and the impossible comebacks. Roddick (pronounced: Welease Woddick!), the not always so great American hope, was up two sets to none and four games to two in the third set--and lost. Of course, the Frenchman who beat him had to play Federer less than a day later and was obliterated.

The rain delays, which were plentiful this year in England, made watching some of Wimbledon this year kind of hard. Because it was covered (at different times) by both NBC and ESPN (which are owned by different companies), and they both seemed to have the same opinion about which players we wanted to see, so you could see a match once, twice and sometimes three times in the same day. Or on consecutive days. And never see at least half of the matches. Of course, I guess I could have bought the Wimbledon Internet package, but who watches tennis on the computer?

Sometimes I think people are way too much in love with technology.

And because they began to play a lot of the matches at the same time on a bunch of different courts after so many days of rain, everything kind of got bunched up and smashed together at the end. Until, of course, the championship matches, which happened exactly when they said they would.

I guess there still is magic left in the game.

Matt Worley will occasionally say "He's worth a deuce!" while watching a match.