USO Day 4 Crisis Center

New York - Mornin', folks. We have a strong schedule today, and plenty of people from the TWibe have assembled out here in Queens. Remember, there will be an informal gathering for drinks at the Dublin House on W. 79th St. in Manhattan on Sunday night. It's an old and definitely not trendy Irish bar, but it has good beer, a nice big back room, and is rarely crowded. You can actually hear each other talk!

Many of you consider reporters a very small step above potato slugs in the food chain. They're professional pot stirrers, right? Purveryors of sensationalistic, unfair drivel.  They're incredibly unfair to Roger Federer (if you're not a Federer fanatic, substitute the name of your idol). They're also tough on the poor men and women who aren't entirely wired for success. Hail, they're probably out there as you read this, torturing puppies or dropping cinder blocks off overpasses.

Well, we ink-stained wretches are paid (with greater or lesser return on the investment) to identify the main issues out there at any given time, and to steer readers toward them. Perhaps you have to spend a fortnight of 16-hour days at a few Grand Slam events to really understand why reporters choose the stories they do, in a constant attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff.

But even I have issues with the way many of my colleagues in the media operate, and it's almost the opposite of a complaint you may have. I think tennis reporters are pretty soft, and the players and adminstrators more or less conspire with them to keep a lot of the interesting information from becoming public.

Tennis journalists rarely press for clear, concrete answers to their questions. I'm thinking about this now because on Day 1 of the Open, when Venus Williams explained about the illness that sidelined her for the summer, nobody bothered to ask just what that illness was. I finally asked if there was a specific name for the mysterious affliction and she answered that there was, but  added: "It's outside of the pressroom, that name. But it's good to be here."

Fair enough, I guess. We now know that she was talking about Sjogrens Disease. I don't blame Venus for wanting to keep the condition more-or-less secret, just like you couldn't blame Pete Sampras for denying that he suffered from Thalessemia (he actually felt guilty about denying it, but felt that it would give his opponents too much of an advantage if he revealed the disease, because they would designg their strategies to exploit the symptoms). But I do blame the press for not even bothering to find out precisely what had laid Venus low.

There was another good example of this - what, deference? Over-willingness to accept a vague or platitudinous reply? - after Wozniacki won her first match. She referred to her effort to change her game a little and try different things as the reason she had a rough summer leading up to New Haven ("I tried a few things that didn't work out," she said). But nobody asked the natural follow-up - "What were those things?" Again, I don't blame Wozniacki (although it's hard to see how revealing those mistakes could hurt her in future matches when she wouldn't be repeating them), but I was surprised that there was no interest in getting clear answers.

All this underscores the way the players and media have drifted into a kind of tacit agreement to give the public sound bites without really pulling back the curtain on the game or mind of the player. More and more, we reporters traffic in platitudes, and waste a lot of ink bandying about broad and useless generalities. Reporters may be too harsh, but it's in the wrong way - and the lack of real, clear, useful and specific information only muddies the waters and probably helps drive the animosity toward the press - if for no other reason than because so much of what is written ends up being vague and thus more likely to be second-guessed, or taken for opinion.

Enjoy the tennis today, folks. I'll be writing about Serena Williams and Michaela Krajicek later.

-- Pete