Devotees of BBC Television’s coverage of the All England Tennis and Croquet Club’s annual tournament at Wimbledon will be well aware of how blessedly logo-free the courts are – only Rolex, Slazenger, Coca Cola and Robinsons get their names discreetly into the picture, but now, the Financial Times reports, IBM Corp is trying to get in alongside the select band with a fiendish gizmo that claims to measure the speed of each serve: we’re with Jim Courier, who thinks it’s silly and says It creates a situation where you say ‘gee, I hit that one at 200kph – let’s see if I can hit this one at 202’ and points out that a much slower slice serve into the corner may be much more effective, but it’s been used for a couple of years at the US Open and is said to be going down gangbusters at the Australian Open in Melbourne, so it sounds as if IBM has come up with an ace – but given the make-up of the UK audience for televised tennis, it had better recalibrate it in miles per hour.
