Tennis: "World's Worst Tennis Pro"

Poor Robert Dee. Quien es? Who's that, you ask? He's a GB tennis player I only heard about in a Eurosport report today. Turns out, Mr Dee was roundly labelled 'World's Worst Tennis Pro' in pretty much all of the UK national papers sometime in 2008. Since then, his tennis might not be winning him money, but his litigation success suing every offending rags ass has!

What interested me about the story was the fact that only one of the 30 media groups, The Daily Telegraph, haven't apologised despite being taken to the High Courts. In doing so, they teased out the core argument Dee has about why it's 'technically' unfair to label him this way: in 2008, he had no ranking, so how can he be judged by comparison to the ranked fraternity?

Hmn. Fair enough, I can understand the grounds of slander. Some of the articles even went as far as to suggest his career was "doomed to failure". But if the technicalities of The Telegraph's story are true (54 consecutive losses, allegedly), I think they have every right to write their story.

In real terms, the piece is only interpretation of statistics- sometimes you can put a positive spin on it, sometimes you have cause to call a duck a duck. So is this a battle of the assertion or semantics?

This is purely my opinion, but professional sports is competitive and tough. Taking the lows with the highs is part of the journey. The persistence to force an apology from a resolute newspaper suggests there isn't much belief in the likelihood of achieving success in the sport as a player, so the concern is already onto prospective other roles in tennis and trying to limit damage to Dee's reputation. Well, if you couldn't 'bring it' as a player in a notable way, what reputation is there to protect? Isn't that a bigger concern for you as a future coach?

And if we're talking about summer camp or David Lloyd gym coaching, and not LTA and ITF-affiliation to develop top 100 juniors and seniors, is negative press from 2008 really even a factor?
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