Ball Boys

Aren’t ball boys funny?

We live in a society that has invented technology for everything from clearing rain from our car windshields to launching beer from a fridge to our couch.

But at the end of every point in tennis there’s a ball rolling around on the court, and so we have volunteers lined up to run around and play fetch. What a bizarre idea.

The funny thing is that it really is the best idea. There’s no way of knowing where the ball will end up at the end of a point, so you have to have something that can actually find the ball, so robots are out, at least for now.

You can’t slant the court because that would crew up the bounces during play. You can’t have a giant wiper because then the players would all have to remember to jump over it or you’d end up with tennis players that shrink by a few inches each year.

But still, it seems weird.