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July 7, 2022

Watching Wimbledon

I hadn’t watched a Wimbledon match in years. But one was airing on television in the morning, and Perry Mason wasn’t, so why not?

It was a men’s fourth round match and pretty thrilling, although almost entirely from the baseline. No one plays serve and volley anymore and that is a great loss for tennis of both genders. It gets kind of boring watching all the booming ground strokes. It’s so much more exciting to see players at the net and opponents trying to execute passing shots.

Oh well, I miss the Green Bay Packers’ “run to daylight” too.

Nevertheless, I was entertained and then something struck me as odd: the fact that Wimbledon still uses people to officiate shots and serves and some serves in the men’s game often reach 130 mph!

But there they were, some men and women clearly in their 50s, 60s and perhaps even 70s, many wearing glasses (!) calling the lines while standing behind or to the side of players. It all seemed so quaint and absurd, especially since they have a super fancy computerized system to overcome erroneous calls! Why not just use the system the whole time and have a noise sound in or out?

I made this comment to my dad, who was watching with me, and he was adamant that human beings remain on a tennis court calling lines. No more computers! Retain the human element even though it is routinely overruled by computers.

I wasn’t really sure what I thought on the issue. I know there is considerable talk about removing home plate umpires with robots in Major League baseball because of their wildly inconsistent and totally arbitrary strike zones. (In fact, there is a pilot project to test robot umpires in one of the minor leagues.)

A robot home plate umpire! No more arguments with the batters or hitters or managers! Who throws out the pitcher when he purposely throws at a hitter in one of those retaliatory stupidities in baseball?

And speaking of robots…what about having one replace the ball boys and ball girls at Wimbledon, the ones that frequently get smashed in the face by balls or trip and tear a tendon?

Of course, if ball boys and ball girls are replaced, who tosses the balls to the servers? Maybe a robot could do that, too. Of course they could!

What a strange thing it would be to watch robot judges and lackeys interact with human beings in sporting events.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.