Everything factual on this site is true and sourced. Everything funny comes from these four, who don’t exist and who each have an opinion about your backhand.
The Newsroom
They comment on tennis. Tennis never asked them to.
The Pundit
Jean-Pol Vandenbroeck
58. Introduces himself as a former Belgian top 50; no archive confirms it, and he has an explanation for that too. Self-appointed pundit, thirty years waiting for a call from the TV studios that never comes. Rewrites his predictions after the fact with total aplomb, sometimes within the same paragraph, and loves made-up percentages (“80% of the time, and I’m being kind”). Will never say “I was wrong”. Considers the one-handed backhand “the only real backhand”.
“I said it back in January.” · “Me, in Kitzbühel, in ’92…” · “Careful, I’m not saying the opposite of what I said. I’m clarifying.”
The Intern
Maxime
22. Journalism intern, total sincerity, zero hang-ups. He’s still looking for where the 45 went in 15-30-40, why silence is compulsory when football fans sing, why the towel after every point, who decides a ball is new, and what exactly a let is. He takes expressions literally. He is the site’s smartest character disguised as its most lost. He often signs off with “Anyway, I still have a lot to learn”.
“Silly question, but…” · “I’m told it’s tradition, fine, but what does that mean?” · “I checked, and actually nobody knows.”
The club player
Céline, dite « la C30.4 »
34. Plays club league (interclubs, Belgium’s weekend team competition) on Sunday, comments on the world’s top on Monday. Happy to mention her brief spell at C15.5 “before the injury” (a three-week tendinitis). Her strings explain every defeat, the lighting on court 4 at her club explains the rest. Coaching vocabulary (“zone”, “intentions”, “patterns”) applied to laughably small stakes. Refuses to accept that the world number 900 remains, technically, out of reach. You recognise yourself in her, or you recognise your doubles partner.
“That shot, I make it. Not every time, but I make it.” · “Two practice sessions away, mind you.” · “My season really starts in May.”
The Nostalgic
Monique
68. Watched Evert–Navratilova 1978 “live, on television, with the family, respectfully” and Borg–McEnroe 1980 “the next day, in the paper, which was enough”. Too well brought up to criticise, she compares, and every comparison is an execution she believes to be kind. She worries about the players the way a grandmother would: are they eating, was the corridor clean, has anyone told them it doesn’t matter. The manners of Couvin applied to Flushing Meadows, in short sentences and without a single exclamation mark. Names modern things with one article too many (“the YouTube”). Considers Henin–Clijsters “already the modern era” and padel “a misunderstanding with glass walls”.
“I’m not criticising. I’m comparing.” · “Someone should tell him.” · “My granddaughter showed me.”
Transparency. Jean-Pol, Maxime, Céline and Monique are fictional characters. Their reactions, like the rest of every dispatch, are written by an artificial intelligence, with no human review before publication; the editor sets the rules and can pull a dispatch. The facts, scores and quotes of real players are checked and sourced in every dispatch.
How a dispatch gets here
A day in a newsroom that doesn’t exist
Everything that follows is true, and nobody here is real: every desk is staffed by a program, the columnists are characters, and no human reads anything before publication. Every half hour, day and night, the same scene plays out. Of a hundred piles, five or six become a dispatch.
The clippings reader
Every half hour, the clippings reader opens the papers
Day and night, he reads what the newspapers and sports sites, Belgian and foreign, have published since his last coffee: headlines, summaries, links. He knocks under his real name and never goes in where he has been told not to.
The clippings reader
The sorting, on the corner of the desk
A Grand Slam final has arrived from twelve directions at once. He makes piles, one event per pile: a few hundred a week, and most of them will never move again.
The copy editor
The laugh test
He takes each pile and looks for what can be made of it, with a score from 0 to 10 and a house mechanism: the absurdity of the rituals, Belgian self-mockery, the C30.4’s point of view, padel as the foil. Below 6, the pile goes to recycling. Doping, health, bereavement, private life: red light, he closes the pile. And he keeps count: no more than two piles on the same person per day, and four to ten dispatches a day depending on the quality of what comes in.
The researcher
The facts, on an index card
For what remains, he opens the articles where the outlet allows it, sticks to the summary elsewhere, and writes the card: who, what, which score, which exact quotes, which source. The source named at the foot of the dispatch is an article he has read in full. Without a readable article, the subject waits for another outlet to pick it up. Nothing in the dispatch may say more than that card. When two sources contradict each other, the card waits.
Jean-Pol, Maxime, Céline, Monique
One draft per columnist
The card goes to every columnist. Each hands in a draft, in his voice, with his tics: a headline in a single movement, 60 to 90 characters, and his reaction, the only invented thing in the whole affair.
The editor-in-chief
The editor-in-chief decides
He reads all the drafts and scores them on five criteria: funniness, faithfulness to the card, accuracy of the voice, good nature, and the retweet test. Could the player quoted share it with a laugh? A score below 3 and the draft falls. Among those left, the draft from a columnist who has not signed the latest dispatches goes first, and the by-lines take their turn there. He keeps the best, or none: the least bad is never published. His scores and his comment go with every discarded angle that comes out.
The checker
The checker takes out the red pencil
He compares each draft with the card, sentence by sentence, the chosen one and the discarded ones in the same batch. An orphan figure, an approximate quote, a headline tic already seen in the last ten dispatches: back to the author, two rewrites at most. A false headline, a jab at someone’s looks or private life: the draft goes in the bin, no appeal. If the chosen draft falls, one of the others takes its place, by the editor-in-chief’s rule: first the one from a columnist who has not signed the latest dispatches, and among those, the best scored. If they have all fallen, the dispatch does not come out. The discarded angles that pass come out next to the dispatch, in French, with the editor-in-chief’s scores, for anyone who wants to compare.
The art director and the illustrator
The illustration, one per dispatch
The art director writes the scene that tells the punchline: a scoreboard reading 3:33, a player slumped under his towel. The illustrator draws it flat, navy and lime, characters included. The players are drawn figures, never portraits, and nothing is about anyone’s body. On a delicate subject, the scene stays on the tennis and the objects. Until the image is there, the dispatch waits.
The transcreators
The dispatch goes out, in three languages
The dispatch is published with its source at the bottom: “It’s true, we checked”. Within the same half hour it is rewritten in Dutch and English, not translated: the joke is remade in the language. Each version goes back past the checker, and the three are linked together. Nobody presses a button, and most passes publish nothing.
Basile, the ball boy
The next morning at 7, the mail
The youngest in the newsroom walks yesterday’s court and picks up the dispatches that landed on it. He hands over three (the best rated by the editor-in-chief, a different columnist each), writes a few lines on why those three, and posts the mail at 7am to whoever left an address. He writes no dispatch himself.
The stringer, the copy editor, the researcher, the editor-in-chief, the proofreader, the art director, the illustrator and the transcreators are programs; the columnists are characters, and so is Basile. No human reviews before publication: the editor sets the newsroom up (the bible, the thresholds, the rules) and keeps the power to pull a dispatch. None of this has a desk.