How we think and keep score in tennis

I've been told my many people that I have an interesting and certainly unique way of thinking. I have no doubt this is true, but find the way we determine how other people think to be interesting. After all, how do people know that I think differently? They've never been inside my head. So certainly it's all derived from how I express my thoughts. That's odd. I see a significant difference between what someone thinks, and how they express those thoughts. Some people just start talking, and eventually, after a lot of unrelated, somewhat pointless words have been said, they have made their point. Does that mean that they are scatter brained and incapable of nailing down a thought or idea? No. Some people won't say a word until they have ever loose corner of their thought tied down, so when it comes out, it's polished, perfected, and to the point. Are these people all more intelligent? No, different people have different ways of expressing their thoughts.

So how do we really know when people are thinking differently? How do we know they aren't just verbalizing differently, and that's not even mentioning how we interpret things differently. Yet we all think that by the time someone's initial thoughts have gone through at least two sets of unpredictable filters, we can tell how they think. Interesting. But I suppose that's all we can really do. After all, we can't get into other people's heads, so all we can judge is what comes out of their mouth (or out of their fingers in the form of words).

It's kind of like colors. For all we know, I could see the color named "green" as blue, you could see the color "green" as green, and someone else could see the color "green" as purple, but we've all learned to call it green, so nobody knows the difference. Hey, if I was God, I'd do all kinds of stuff like that because no one would ever be able to figure it out. Hmm, perhaps this explains why there are such varied opinions and tastes when it comes to color schemes.

The irony of this is that you're probably reading this thinking, "This Ben kid really thinks about things really differently."

Well, that was interesting. I was trying to figure out how to start a piece on the scoring method for tennis, and that evolved. I'm not even sure how anymore. I guess that just shows how many different directions my mind can go. From "how can we tell how other people think" to "who in the name of Uncle Sam came up with tennis scoring?" Whoever it was went to all ends to make sure that none of it made sense.

First of all, the first score is worth 15 points. There are two logical reasons for making a score worth more than 1 point:
1) There is a way to score less. A score in basketball is worth 2 (or 3) because there are also free throws worth 1 point.
2) To proportionalize the valuable of different scores. A touchdown is (usually) 7 points, and a field goal is 3. Somehow or another, the inventors came up with that proportion given the difficulty of each feet.

So why go by 15's? 1-2-3 seems just as feasible as 15-30-45. There in lies the next oddity. The scoring isn't 15-30-45, it's 15-30-40. Beyond the blatant illogicality of this lies a deeper problem. Well not problem, more of a personal gripe. I'm pretty big on proportionality. When you look at the score, say, 40-15, it would generally imply that the party in the lead has scored roughly 2.6 times as many points than the losing player. However, since it's actually 3-1, they've scored 3 times as many points. So the score, which should be a simple, easy "count your way to 5" system is so abnormal that it doesn't even reflect the proper proportion of the score.

And it gets even better! Once a player with 40 "points" makes another "score," they are given the win...unless the other player has 40 "points" as well, because you have to win by two "points, no scores." (See, it's so much harder to explain the rules with this scoring system.) In that case, the score goes to "40-advantage." That makes some sense, but why can't it be 50-40 (or 40-50)? After a "40-adv" play, if the "40" player scored, it goes back to "40-40." Is that because 50-50 is too difficult to remember? Wouldn't it just be easier to keep adding on to the score than to start cancelling them out after a few volleys? Beyond that, however, just going back to 40-40 over and over doesn't at all reflect the progress of the game. If the score is 80-80 (although, knowing the guy who came up with all this, it would be 67-67), you know that they've been going back and forth a couple times; neither player able to win enough volleys in a row to get the win. If the score is 40-40, who know how long they've been going at it? Did they just get tied up at 40 for the first time? Have they been at the 40-40 or 40-adv stage for several go arounds? Who knows.

It's all backward and senseless. Oh, I know, someone had a unique idea, and I shouldn't be scolding them for being creative just because I don't like their idea. Well, yeah, creativity is great. I love being creative. But creative engineers should be building cool looking skyscrapers, not designing the traffic grid. It's creative engineers who design the cities that are the most difficult to navigate through by car (I've heard this about Hong Kong, and though I never drove there, I can certainly see that this is the case), and it's the straight forward, detail oriented engineers that give you boring skylines. So if you're that set on being creative and different, don't design the ground work, design what comes off of the ground. In other words, make innovations to how tennis is played, don't change the way we've been counting since preschool.