Post by Brinyi on Dec 17, 2004 10:07:10 GMT -5
From the ITF site
There’s a cliché in sport which runs: “A good umpire is seldom seen and never noticed”. But following the weekend’s conclusion of the 2004 tennis year, a distinctive figure stepped down from the umpire’s chair for the last time, and will be missed when the tennis year resumes next month.
Mike Morrissey has been one of the best-known and most widely respected tennis umpires of the past decade. This weekend’s action in Seville was his fifth Davis Cup final in a chair umpiring career that started 21 years ago and has involved 11 years at the highest level. In that time he defaulted one of the most colourful characters of 1990s tennis, almost defaulted Andre Agassi, and confronted a male streaker on the Centre Court at Wimbledon.
Morrissey, who hails from the town of Chingford east of London but now lives in Wimbledon, began umpiring at 14 when his best friend became a good tournament player and he himself never graduated from a level he describes as “rubbish”.
“It was a good way of sticking together,” he says, “and it became a good holiday job”.
That was in the 1980s, when tennis umpiring was abandoning its years of volunteer officials and paying professional umpires. Morrissey always wanted to work in sport but in his teens he never considered taking up the job professionally as the first paid umpires were a good 20 years older than he was.
He trained as a teacher in mathematics and medieval British history, but after college decided that travelling as an expenses-paid umpire with the occasional job in the post office was preferable to schoolteaching. Then in 1993, at the age of just 24, he was offered a job as an umpire with the International Tennis Federation.
Barely a year later, Andre Agassi effectively dared Morrissey to default him at the Grand Slam Cup in Munich. He earned two warnings for an audible obscenity, and when he repeated it a third time, it seemed a challenge to the young umpire.
“We’re fortunate in tennis that the code of conduct is a tool to control a match, not a series of technical requirements,” he says. “Nothing is automatic, a lot is still left to our own judgement, and I judged that it would have been unfair to the sport to have defaulted Andre for a couple of incidents in a very short space of time. I could have done, and it could have been justified, though it would have been too harsh.”
A couple of years later at the tournament in New Haven, his judgement was needed when Murphy Jensen, the younger brother in the dynamic doubles pair Luke and Murphy Jensen, used the F-word in Morrissey’s face.
“I took that as an instant default,” he says. “At the time, a default in singles meant disqualification from doubles too, so it was hard, but it was right.”
Morrissey has been very much the umpire for the big Davis Cup occasion. He was in the chair for Arnaud Boetsch’s five-set win over Nicklas Kulti in the fifth rubber of the 1996 final, he was in the chair for the four-hour four-setter in which Juan Carlos Ferrero beat Lleyton Hewitt to seal Spain’s first Davis Cup title in 2000, and he officiated Mikhail Youzhny’s come-from-behind win over Paul-Henri Mathieu which won Russia it’s first title in 2002.
He also umpired Rafael Nadal's match with Andy Roddick last Friday at the 2004 Final, and with a record crowd of 27,200 fans watching, he described it afterwards as one of the hardest matches he had ever had to officiate.
“In Davis Cup you can’t be an average umpire,” he says. “There are two extra dimensions: you have to deal with the crowd and the captains, so in Davis Cup people notice the umpire more than at a Grand Slam event. There is some recognition when you do a good job, which can be nice as long as you don’t get complacent.”
Recognition did indeed come from several quarters after his last on-court engagement on Sunday, the dead fifth rubber between Tommy Robredo and Mardy Fish. ITF President Francesco Ricci Bitti paid tribute to Morrissey at the Davis Cup Official Dinner, experssing regret at his retirement and calling him 'one of the best, if not the best' officials at the highest level over the last decade'. Then on Monday night Morrissey collected his award for Official of the Year from the Great Britain Lawn Tennis Association at the LTA/Lawn Tennis Writers' Association Annual Award Ceremony.
But none of Morrissey's experience could prepare him for the day in July 2002 when, officiating the Wimbledon men’s singles final, he had to contend with a male streaker.
“It was just after a rain break, and I wasn’t yet in my chair,” he recalls. “I looked around and saw Alan Mills [the referee] holding a red blanket to try and cover up the streaker, but he looked more like a bullfighter than an enforcement officer. The police didn’t seem to be reacting either. I looked at the players – they didn’t seem very amused, and when the man started running towards Hewitt, I decided I had to do something and grabbed him. I was teased a lot about it afterwards, especially when some of the photos came out, but it’s impossible to know how to react to a situation like that.”
Morrissey wanted to retire two years ago to concentrate on his new job as the ITF’s Administrator of Officiating. But there was a new generation of umpires who weren’t quite ready for the biggest occasions, so he agreed to stay on until 35, the age by which most players have quit.
“I always wanted to stop while I thought I was still doing a good job,” he said in Seville, “and it’s great to go out at an event like this.”
Mike Morrissey brought various qualities to the job of chair umpiring, notably a sense of communication that included playing up his London accent so as not to sound like a pillar of the English establishment. His portly figure sometimes provoked teasing, and on one occasion he broke the bottom step of the umpire’s chair at a Davis Cup tie in India after inspecting a mark on a claycourt. But on many occasions he used his weight to his own benefit, laughing at his own unsportsmanlike shape to take the sting out of a moment.
Any umpire in any sport needs gravitas, or as Morrissey puts it: “You have to fill the chair.”
He says this with a self-deprecating smile, knowing that he did so in both senses of the word.
There’s a cliché in sport which runs: “A good umpire is seldom seen and never noticed”. But following the weekend’s conclusion of the 2004 tennis year, a distinctive figure stepped down from the umpire’s chair for the last time, and will be missed when the tennis year resumes next month.
Mike Morrissey has been one of the best-known and most widely respected tennis umpires of the past decade. This weekend’s action in Seville was his fifth Davis Cup final in a chair umpiring career that started 21 years ago and has involved 11 years at the highest level. In that time he defaulted one of the most colourful characters of 1990s tennis, almost defaulted Andre Agassi, and confronted a male streaker on the Centre Court at Wimbledon.
Morrissey, who hails from the town of Chingford east of London but now lives in Wimbledon, began umpiring at 14 when his best friend became a good tournament player and he himself never graduated from a level he describes as “rubbish”.
“It was a good way of sticking together,” he says, “and it became a good holiday job”.
That was in the 1980s, when tennis umpiring was abandoning its years of volunteer officials and paying professional umpires. Morrissey always wanted to work in sport but in his teens he never considered taking up the job professionally as the first paid umpires were a good 20 years older than he was.
He trained as a teacher in mathematics and medieval British history, but after college decided that travelling as an expenses-paid umpire with the occasional job in the post office was preferable to schoolteaching. Then in 1993, at the age of just 24, he was offered a job as an umpire with the International Tennis Federation.
Barely a year later, Andre Agassi effectively dared Morrissey to default him at the Grand Slam Cup in Munich. He earned two warnings for an audible obscenity, and when he repeated it a third time, it seemed a challenge to the young umpire.
“We’re fortunate in tennis that the code of conduct is a tool to control a match, not a series of technical requirements,” he says. “Nothing is automatic, a lot is still left to our own judgement, and I judged that it would have been unfair to the sport to have defaulted Andre for a couple of incidents in a very short space of time. I could have done, and it could have been justified, though it would have been too harsh.”
A couple of years later at the tournament in New Haven, his judgement was needed when Murphy Jensen, the younger brother in the dynamic doubles pair Luke and Murphy Jensen, used the F-word in Morrissey’s face.
“I took that as an instant default,” he says. “At the time, a default in singles meant disqualification from doubles too, so it was hard, but it was right.”
Morrissey has been very much the umpire for the big Davis Cup occasion. He was in the chair for Arnaud Boetsch’s five-set win over Nicklas Kulti in the fifth rubber of the 1996 final, he was in the chair for the four-hour four-setter in which Juan Carlos Ferrero beat Lleyton Hewitt to seal Spain’s first Davis Cup title in 2000, and he officiated Mikhail Youzhny’s come-from-behind win over Paul-Henri Mathieu which won Russia it’s first title in 2002.
He also umpired Rafael Nadal's match with Andy Roddick last Friday at the 2004 Final, and with a record crowd of 27,200 fans watching, he described it afterwards as one of the hardest matches he had ever had to officiate.
“In Davis Cup you can’t be an average umpire,” he says. “There are two extra dimensions: you have to deal with the crowd and the captains, so in Davis Cup people notice the umpire more than at a Grand Slam event. There is some recognition when you do a good job, which can be nice as long as you don’t get complacent.”
Recognition did indeed come from several quarters after his last on-court engagement on Sunday, the dead fifth rubber between Tommy Robredo and Mardy Fish. ITF President Francesco Ricci Bitti paid tribute to Morrissey at the Davis Cup Official Dinner, experssing regret at his retirement and calling him 'one of the best, if not the best' officials at the highest level over the last decade'. Then on Monday night Morrissey collected his award for Official of the Year from the Great Britain Lawn Tennis Association at the LTA/Lawn Tennis Writers' Association Annual Award Ceremony.
But none of Morrissey's experience could prepare him for the day in July 2002 when, officiating the Wimbledon men’s singles final, he had to contend with a male streaker.
“It was just after a rain break, and I wasn’t yet in my chair,” he recalls. “I looked around and saw Alan Mills [the referee] holding a red blanket to try and cover up the streaker, but he looked more like a bullfighter than an enforcement officer. The police didn’t seem to be reacting either. I looked at the players – they didn’t seem very amused, and when the man started running towards Hewitt, I decided I had to do something and grabbed him. I was teased a lot about it afterwards, especially when some of the photos came out, but it’s impossible to know how to react to a situation like that.”
Morrissey wanted to retire two years ago to concentrate on his new job as the ITF’s Administrator of Officiating. But there was a new generation of umpires who weren’t quite ready for the biggest occasions, so he agreed to stay on until 35, the age by which most players have quit.
“I always wanted to stop while I thought I was still doing a good job,” he said in Seville, “and it’s great to go out at an event like this.”
Mike Morrissey brought various qualities to the job of chair umpiring, notably a sense of communication that included playing up his London accent so as not to sound like a pillar of the English establishment. His portly figure sometimes provoked teasing, and on one occasion he broke the bottom step of the umpire’s chair at a Davis Cup tie in India after inspecting a mark on a claycourt. But on many occasions he used his weight to his own benefit, laughing at his own unsportsmanlike shape to take the sting out of a moment.
Any umpire in any sport needs gravitas, or as Morrissey puts it: “You have to fill the chair.”
He says this with a self-deprecating smile, knowing that he did so in both senses of the word.
