If you don’t have Direct TV and you wanted to see James Blake’s dramatic fifth set loss against Rainer Schuettler, or for that matter, Andy Roddick’s tight first set against Janko Tipsarevic, you were out of luck Thursday. ESPN2 carried instead Maria Sharapova (whom Marat Safin once dubbed the All-American girl), and ignored all but the final few moments of the Blake match. As I write this, Roddick is in a tiebreaker in the first set but only Americans with Direct TV can watch it live (ESPN2 switched to the Roddick match only after Sharapova lost).

The Direct TV package, which both for Wimbledon and the French Open, offers six courts of coverage of the first week of these Grand Slams. What’s better, several of the Direct TV channels are the British television feeds, where the announcers speak only when necessary and actually talk about the match, instead of the blowhard Americans, especially Mary Carillo, who can’t let a quiet moment pass. Dick Enberg sounds like he should be conducting a city council meeting and reading proclamations honoring award-winning vegetables at a Midwestern county fair.

The network tennis coverage, terribly handled by NBC during the French Open when they showed the men’s semifinals on tape delay, continues to be bad with ESPN2. Unfortunately, the announcers are obsessed with clothing, modeling jobs, and occasionally the actual tennis played by the women. The men, with the exception of Federer and Nadal, and sometimes Djokovic, get very short shrift, as both Roddick and Blake did Thursday. No wonder tennis is withing in America. At this rate, the only network other than the Tennis Channel to carry Grand Slams will be the Bravo network or a shopping channel.

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