the pig and the enema or how I lost my voice

conversation with Billy:

my strength is my voice and my ideas. My posts sound just like you’re talking to me. If I’m writing about fantasy league, I can write about it as my experience – a diary if you will – fo my experience as a team owner.

I can also use the fantasy team picking process as follows: first, I don’t need to do much data analysis, I can return to doing it how I inititially did it. I still got 50% on the first round.

The process of picking and looking at the draw can lead me to studies. In other words, it’s not interesting to read about who will beat who. What’s interesting is that, for instance, I only get 50% picks right in the first round. Why? Well, there are a lot of unknowns because qualifiers and wild cards are in the draw. When I did do statistical analysis and looked at the head to head records, I found that many a lot of players had never faced each other.

Why is that? Well, tennis is a very high income sport, there is tremendous pressure from junior players and post junior players for places on the tour. For example, in the article about Ivan Lendl, it stated that Michelle Wie is already number 15 in income of all, male and female tennis players.

The point is not to write about who is going to beat who but write about interesting matchups and why and why players don’t meet each other very much. These are the interesting subjects.

Also, the reason that the Roland Garros poster story didn’t work for Slate and the reason I had trouble with the story is because I lost my voice and thought that, since it is a magazine article, it somehow had to sound different.

E.B. White, [the pig and the enema-why I should stick to what I know] title of a piece about why I am not making picks any more.

Here’s a quote from Death of a Pig that isn’t in the excerpt:
“I discovered … that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back.”

Poor piggy. Wasn’t there a better way. Herbs or something?

Also, writing as Billy tells it. What the person speaks is what will make good writing. Just ask them to blurt it out and copy it down.

“I’m embarrassed to show my face on the Talk Tennis forum it was so dumb.

E.B. While quote, “I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotyped roles.”

Since I hadn’t created it using HTML, it meant that google. couldn’t search it … oh never mind. The problem with an image is that google can’t search for the text in it and … Stop. Now you see what the problem was. I had gotten caught up in geek talk instead of writing the damn tennis column.

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Somewhere on my journey I got lost. I write a column for an online website and I decided that I could attract readers and post more frequently if I provided intense coverage of the [link]ATP Tennis Fantasy Season, a fantasy tennis league on the [link]ATP website.

First I had to figure out how to make a 32 player tournament draw that I could display online. After spending days reading about html tables – not pretty enough – and [link]CSS styles tables – way too complicated, I created the draw using the software program Photoshop.

I printed out my Photoshop file of the draw for the upcoming tournament then set about predicting the eight players who would get to the quarterfinals. Every week fantasy league members pick an eight player team. If I could correctly pick the eight quarterfinalists for the current tournament, I had my team. If I could do it well, thousands of fantasy players would flock to my website.

Next I had to develop a system for picking the winners in each match. After a few weeks I had ten statistical categories for each player including the record against their current opponent. For 32 players that is 320 pieces of information I had to look up in the statistics in the ATP database. And that was only for the first round. For the second round and later, I would have to look up the head-to-head record of my projected players.

By the time the ATP tournament in Hamburg rolled around, I was ready. But Rome is a Masters Series event so there are 64 players in the draw and I was sunk. After five straight hours spent lying on the couch with my laptop propped up on my belly, I called my friend Willam the technical wizard. There was one last glimmer of hope. Page scraping. Evidently you can write a program that will gather information from website pages automatically. That means that I could write a program to get the data I needed.

I have been using computers since 1971 and did a fair amount of programming in the past but even for me, that was over the top. If you get the same fuzzy headed feeling reading this page as I do, you understand.

I managed to get through the day and fill out my draw but the next morning, it really was all over.

The top two tennis players in the world, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, had entered the Hamburg event. I picked them both for my team because I had accidentally failed to pick Nadal for Monte Carlo and Federer had already won Hamburg three times. I had to pick them. I was already down to number 7131 out of 11000 fantasy teams so I desparately needed a win.

The problem is that Federer and Nadal had just played a glorious final in Rome that went over five hours and it never occurred to me that they would, of course, drop out of the next tournament – Hamburg – to rest for the French Open.

Anyone who couldn’t figure that out is not qualified to write a column about fantasy tennis.

William is not only a tech wizard, he is a very wise man. Whenever I fail miserably, I call him up for advice..

E.B. White, [the pig and the enema-why I should stick to what I know] title of a piece about why I am not making picks any more.

Here is a well-known quote from the piece: “I discovered … that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back.”

Poor piggy. Wasn’t there a better way. Herbs or something?