‘I will miss it’ – Hawk-Eye puts Wimbledon’s well-dressed line judges to pasture

Spectators make their feelings about AI replacing human line judges clear at Wimbledon on Monday

Some time in the mid-Noughties, the experienced chair umpire John Parry made a trip to the annual Champions’ Tour event at the Royal Albert Hall. The idea was to check out a newfangled device called Hawk-Eye, which promised to track the progress of a tennis ball more accurately than the human eye.

“It didn’t actually work terribly well,” Parry told Telegraph Sport. “The Albert Hall court was built on a wooden floor, literally floorboards which weren’t perfectly level, and that seemed to throw the cameras off. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed then that, one day, this machine was going to wipe us all out.”

Some 20 years on, the robots have conquered the vast majority of tennis’s big events. Walking through the gates at the All England Club, their presence is unmistakable. Each of the outside courts is surrounded by six or eight green lamp-posts, all around 10ft tall, and mounted with a hi-tech camera tilted down towards the lines.

The effect is curiously intimidating: part Checkpoint Charlie, part science-fiction drama. You half-expect the robots to spark into life, like the tripods in HG Wells’s War of the Worlds, and fire laser beams into the crowd.

New technologies have made line judges a thing of the past at Wimbledon - Getty Images/Sebastien Bozo

Meanwhile, the usual crews of elegantly dressed officials – bedecked in their Ralph Lauren finery – are absent from the grounds. Driven into early retirement by the wave of automation, they will be watching from home this year, even if each court is to retain two so-called “match assistants” for minor duties such as escorting players to and from the bathroom.

“The line judges were my unofficial family,” says David Bayliss, who first worked the lines at Wimbledon in 1997. “When I went to Melbourne for the 2002 Australian Open, I became so close to one woman on my crew that we wound up attending each other’s weddings, and I became the godfather to her son. He’s 11 now, and such an important part of my life.”

The line judges’ Ralph Lauren clothing became one of the hallmarks of Wimbledon - PA/Steven Paston

The ATP Tour began experimenting with automated line-calling in 2017, but the Covid pandemic hugely accelerated the shift. When the All England Club joined the stampede, announcing the news last October, they were only bowing to the inevitable.

There are few dissenting voices, even amidst the hundreds of officials who have been made redundant. Despite those early teething problems at the Albert Hall, no one denies that the ball-tracking systems run by Hawk-Eye and their chief rivals FoxTenn have consistently outperformed line judges on every measure.

But there is still widespread sadness at the extinction of a great tradition, which stretched all the way back to the 1870s. As bits and bytes replace flesh and blood, the game has lost something intangible: a sense of human interaction.

“There is an exclusive club of tennis officials around the world,” says Andrew Jarrett, who was the Wimbledon referee for 14 years. “It’s a family of people who have worked together at numerous tournaments and built up a wealth of stories, whether they be the great experiences or the war wounds that everyone carries along the way. So you lose that incredible sense of camaraderie.

“What’s happened to tennis reflects the challenges we all face as we come to terms with AI,” Jarrett added, “and perhaps the loss of employment that’s going to affect so many industries. Nobody can argue about the enormous benefits. But at the same time, we can’t help glancing back to times past, when the world was a little gentler.”

Ralph Lauren kit was a perk

Until recently, a grand-slam officiating crew would have numbered around 300 people who worked up to 12-hour days, doing 80 minutes on and then 40 minutes off. In between Wimbledon shifts, they would gather and gossip in the Buttery – a lovely airy space attached to the side of Centre Court. But the most recent remodelling of the facilities should have given them a hint of what was coming, as they were moved to a Stygian room underneath No 1 Court. “The food stayed the same,” said Parry, “but the ambiance definitely took a turn for the worse.”

One of the perks was the bespoke Ralph Lauren kit, which would be updated every couple of years to keep it looking fresh. After more than two decades of duty, Bayliss has a wardrobe full of the distinctive green and purple striped shirts, which he sometimes presents to family members as gifts. “They cherish them very much,” he said.

Many line judges idolised the leading players, and were at least partly motivated by the prospect of spending a fortnight in their vicinity. Bayliss speaks warmly of Serena Williams, even though she could be a tricky challenge on the court. “We had a young official who was dying of cancer,” he recalled. “Serena was contacted and made a wonderful video for him. It was very moving.”

Judges were assessed by their chair umpires after each performance, and graded on a sliding scale from L1 to L5. Higher scoring officials tended to be put on the baseline or the service line, as opposed to the sideline, because it’s trickier to track a ball travelling across your plane of vision than it is to follow one coming towards you.

Line judges were, inadvertently, in the firing line when some of the world’s fastest servers were on court - Getty Images/Andrej Isakovic

“We are talking about an enormously disparate group of people,” said Parry. “There were a few who made a living from line-judging around the world, but the vast majority were amateurs taking a break from their day jobs. We had visitors from overseas too, some coming from as far afield as India and China. Most were British, though, and I always felt that British officials had a good reputation in every sport, whether it was football, cricket or tennis. It’s something about our psyche: on a tight call, we’re probably more likely to rule against one of our own, out of an excess of politeness.”

Parry stepped down from the umpire’s chair in 2009, after a uniquely distinguished career in which he officiated eight Wimbledon finals and developed a reputation as the one man who could reliably handle John McEnroe. But he wasn’t ready to leave the game behind. “I said, ‘I’m gonna go back on lines.’ Everyone thought I was crazy, but I really enjoyed it and it kept me fit.”

The umpire John Parry bowed out at Wimbledon with a match between the Williams sisters on Centre - PA

A former parachute instructor from the RAF, Parry was 80 when he officiated his final match, and it proved to be no sinecure. “Given my age, I thought I‘d be doing a junior match on court 18 or something,” he recalled. “I went to get my slip on the second Thursday to find that I was on the baseline on Centre for the two Williams sisters, who were meeting in the semi-finals. They knocked hell out of the baseline that day, and in the chair was Eva Asderaki, who had been one of my pupils. She kept looking at me, so I felt a bit of pressure.

“When I came off, I felt it had gone OK, but I also thought ‘What if I’d made a mistake?’ The first thing people would have said is ‘What the hell is a bloke of that age doing on court?’”

Bayliss also recalls one particularly demanding outing, as the service-line judge for the men’s final in 2003. “Roger Federer was going for his first Wimbledon title and he was facing Mark Phillippoussis, who was the fastest server in the world at that time. In the era before Hawk-Eye, we had this machine called Cyclops, which projected three beams of light just behind the service line and beeped if the ball was out. But it wasn’t working. A photographer had got out of the pit and kicked the machine, which went out of alignment, so they switched it off. We managed to do without it, but it was a stressful day.”

David Bayliss first worked the lines at Wimbledon in 1997 and has seen numerous changes - Sport_scan

The march of technology has been a slow but sure process. Many fans enjoyed the hybrid model which has prevailed for the last 15 years or so, with players being able to challenge at least three line calls per set. A rhythmic hand-clap often greeted the projection of the image on to the big screen, allowing spectators a brief moment of respite from the overall tension.

Some players, too, were holdouts. “Roger Federer wasn’t a supporter of full automation,” said Parry.” He thought line judges were part of the tapestry of the whole event, and that some of the incidents and queries added to the fun.” Andy Murray agreed with Federer. Or, at least, he did until he failed to challenge a crucial call on break point in 2023, hastening his own exit from his final singles match at Wimbledon.

Now that human involvement is limited to the chair umpire and the two aforementioned “match assistants”, we can anticipate recruitment issues at smaller events. Not every tournament is wealthy enough to set up a bank of cameras, then pay Hawk-Eye or FoxTenn for ball-tracking software. And without the incentive of a possible role at Wimbledon, tennis enthusiasts might be less keen to volunteer for their local Futures or junior knockabout.

The expensive Hawk-eye cameras in place at the All England Club are not available at all levels of tennis - Getty Images/Glyn Kirk

“The one thing that the officials all shared was a love of the sport,” said Jarrett. “Everyone was very conscientious about doing the job to the best of their ability. There wasn’t much praise, nor much money. So there’s got to be some reward in there.

“In my own role as referee, I often remember thinking, ‘Jarrett, you are one lucky boy to be standing here waiting for the superstars of tennis to walk on.’ I know that a lot of others felt the same way, and that’s why they came back year after year.”

For Bayliss, his fellow officials grew even closer to his heart when they rallied around him after a recent bereavement. “The community supports each other in times of need,” he said. “I know if I go to Australia or America, I can meet these people and stay in their houses. We’ve all worked together, experienced the pressure and stress of being on court.

“It was a lifestyle as much as a job,” he concluded. “The build-up to Wimbledon was always exciting. Getting your uniform measured up, organising your accommodation, and then going through the gates on the first day. You’d meet friends from all over the world, and spend the first couple of days catching up with their lives, while also chatting about what had changed around the grounds since last year. It was a definite buzz.”

He sighed. “I’m going to miss it.”

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