I’m sure some of you—and by “some of you,” I actually mean my parents—are wondering how I finished in the Tennis Channel’s Racquet Bracket. Well, pretty dang good, actually. When I last updated you bragged, I was in 21st place. I later dropped down to 23rd at one point, but the semifinals pushed me back up to 16th. Except for failing to predict upstart Gael Monfils’s place in the semis (which almost no one else did, anyway), my choices were pretty much spot-on from the quarterfinalists onward.
Today, of course, the finalists were No. 1 Roger Federer and No. 2 Rafael Nadal. My pick was Nadal, who—despite Federer’s obvious prowess on other surfaces—has just dominated clay-court tennis for four years. If Federer somehow managed to defeat Nadal, I was going to tumble to 639th place, passed by many of R-Fed’s supporters. If Nadal won, I was going to move up to 12th, picking off the handful of Federer supporters who were ahead of me. As you surely know by now, Nadal won.
Finishing in 12th place is way beyond anything I could’ve imagined, really. After all, there were 3,737 entrants. In my mind, doing “very well” would’ve meant finishing in the top several hundred. Finishing 12th?! Zowie!
That said, I can’t help but feeling the tiniest of stings for not finishing in the Top 10. Tennis Channel awards prizes to the top 10 finishers. Finishing sixth through 10th was worth a Tennis Channel t-shirt. Truthfully, I don’t really care about the $500 first prize or the tennis racket that goes to second place. But I started to really want to win one of those t-shirts…. Golly gee, Tennis Channel, finishing 12th out 3,737 isn’t even worth a t-shirt? Now, I guess, I know how it feels to finish on “the bubble” at a poker tournament, just out of the money.
Doing well in the Racquet Bracket affected my spectatorship habits. My tendency, probably like yours, is to root for an underdog, at least when I have no preexisting rooting interest in a player. But this particular Racquet Bracket changed that—or, at least, doing well in this Racquet Bracket did. While ordinarily I might’ve written off my picks and rooted for who/whatever felt good at the time, the success got to me a little bit. Instead of rooting primarily for underdogs, I started hoping more to be right, which meant, of course, that I was often rooting for the favorite that I’d picked days in advance.
This reminds me of a recent Arizona State University study, which concluded that office March Madness pools can actually decrease enjoyment of the basketball itself. “Once a person has committed to a predicted outcome, he’s set himself up for the possibility of looking like a fool. In other words, the fear of losing (known as ‘anticipated regret’) may actually feel worse than losing itself,” the researchers said. “Peoples’ worry about losing the bet tends to spoil the event for them.”
I felt a little bit of that these two weeks, particularly today. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have rooted for Rafael Nadal during this tournament. He seems like a nice kid, and I’d absolutely like to meet him. But he’s had a lot of clay-court success already. In a normal year, I’m sure I would’ve been rooting—match after match, probably—for an upset of Nadal. Even today, when he was facing the No. 1 player, Nadal was actually the favorite. It’s beginning to look, after all, like Federer will never win the French Open. And if I hadn’t had that Racquet Bracket pick tugging at me, I’m sure I would’ve been rooting for “underdog” Federer today.
But the rational part of me had picked Nadal in the Racquet Bracket, and that’s where my rooting interests landed. It felt weird, I have to say. I was rooting for Nadal, but self-consciously so.
I’m not much of a gambler, but all this has me thinking a little bit about sports betting. I know some sports bettors say that putting a few bucks on a game causes them to get into the event a little more. Those Arizona State University researchers would probably hypothesize that the bets actually decrease the bettors’ enjoyment of the event because of the stress of possibly losing money. I suppose, perhaps, that there might be a “sweet spot,” where a bettor has risked just enough to make things interesting without causing him to worry too much about the result. I bet that sweet spot’s hard to find….
Anyway, and I’ve written about this elsewhere before, I think fans tend to gravitate to underdogs because it’s a relatively no-risk adventure. If the underdog loses, well, that was to be expected. But if the underdog wins, there’s a lot of excitement to be had for what was a low-risk spectating preference. The opposite, of course, is true for rooting for favorites. If you root for the favorite, you lose face when an upset occurs. And there’s often little emotional excitement to be gained from a favorite. After all, if the favorite wins, well, it should have.
I’m probably not going to give up on my fantasy tennis games. At this point, the contests are still, I think, just helping me focus attention on something I love. In other words, maybe I’m near the sweet spot for adding stress/excitement to my tennis spectating. But this is something I want to be watch. If I get so wrapped up in the fantasy games that I start losing interest in the actual games, it’s absolutely time to stop.
For now, though, I finished 12th! Woo hoo!