Wimbledon: Watch it like a HawkEye

The All England Club (a.k.a. the people who run Wimbledon) announced, among other things, that it will be using the HawkEye instant replay system for future tournaments.

On the surface (tennis pun intended), this is great; it reduces the role of human subjectivity in the outcome of the match. Just as the NFL introduced the instant replay in 1999 and baseball began implementing QuesTec to ensure accurate strike zones, All England Club officials are doing their best to ensure the fairest game possible.

This ruffles my feathers, and here's why.

As long as sports have been played professionally, human subjectivity has been part of the game. Someone, an unbiased yet imperfect person, is responsible for determining what's a foul, a touchdown, a ball or a strike.

Should we remove that element of professional sports just because we can? I think not. Aside from the fact that thousands of referees, line judges, and umpires could eventually be put out of work, automating the officiating process of sports removes a key part of the game itself.

Bad calls happen and I'm glad they do. That means that sometimes a team gets a lucky break. That means that sometimes a team is forced to dig deeper to see if they can score that extra run or convert a fourth down when they shouldn't have had to. Luck -- good and bad -- is a part of competition anyway, so who's to say that eliminating one element of subjectivity will change that?

And who's to say that HawkEye or QuesTec would never break down or have glitches?

So for the sake of the purity of sport, I cast my vote for the abolition of machine-aided officiating.

Besides, it's always nice to have someone to blame when your team loses.