Worst
Two sets to love
February 25, 2010 1 comment
World’s best tennis player Robert Dee is suing the Daily Telegraph for calling him the “world’s worst tennis pro”. Dee might indeed have lost “54 successive matches in international tournaments”, totalling “108 sets in a row”, but:
Dee argues that as he did not have a world ranking in 2008, he cannot have been deemed the world’s worst.
This is ingenious! According to Dee’s scheme, then, the player with the lowest world ranking is the worst player, and all the players who haven’t even managed to secure a world ranking must be better than him?
Last time I saw a printed rating list for English chessplayers I went through it trying to find the lowest-rated player listed, with the intention of writing a piece about them. I was dissuaded by my colleagues on the grounds that it would be unkind, and I might have been dissuaded even faster had I feared the prospect of being sued. Presumably, though, whoever has the lowest rating can’t actually be the worst player, since there must be all sorts of unrated players much worse than they – but those would be the opposite grounds to Dee’s.