2019 is upon us, and we are raring up to serve you with a spicy dose of viral tennis news and updates with the same fervor as we did last year. Interestingly, this time around we have two interesting updates from the world of tennis.
To start things of, we will shed some light on the circulating videos of trained dogs picking up balls in a recent tennis tournament. Gone are the days of ball boys/girls, as dogs seem to have replaced them on the tennis court. The canine counterparts are fast, raring to go and excited with the opportunity to pick up as many balls as they possibly can.
The experiment was tried at the WTHR in London during the opening of the Champions Tennis Tournament. The excited crowd was shocked to see dogs inside the court and couldn’t contain their bewilderment at how the canines scurried across the court to retrieve all the stray balls.
There has been a lot of talk about the use of dogs in the tennis court, and this experiment was first conductedduring the doubles match between Juan Carlos Ferrero, Mansour Bahrami, Mikael Pernfors and Henri Leconte.
The dogs that participated in the match were specifically trained for the job by Canine Partners. Canine Partners, which is a dog training agency working with dogs to help people with their disabilities.
Ball dogs might just become common in the world of tennis if the trend continues. Let’s just all hope that they don’t start running when the ball is in play. Thatfellas, would be a disaster of sorts.
In other interesting news from the world of tennis, we got to see a first when a match was playedover two different years. One can recall the match between Nicolas Mahut and John Isner that continued for three consecutive days, but even that famous battle doesn’t top the recent occasion of a match spanning two different years.
Both Samantha Stosur and Marie Bouzkova made history of sorts, when their tennis match slotted for the 31st December 2018, extended into the year 2019.
While Bouzkova, the Czech, prevailed in the battle, it was ultimately the fight that Stosur showed which helped stretch the match into 2019. Bouzkova handed her Australian opponent a 4-6, 6-2, 6-2 defeat. It was only when the sets got levelthat the crowd reallystarted hoping for a miracle. And, that is exactly what happened.