If only Ted Watts had had the Love2scorE device in his hands maybe he wouldn’t have lost track of the score. Watts is the chair ump who infamously shortchanged Venus Williams at Wimbledon in 2004, when he erroneously awarded her opponent, Karolina Sprem, an extra point in the decisive second-set tiebreaker. Williams ended up losing 7-6(5), 7-6(6), and the Wimbledon hierarchy was left with egg on its collective face.
“I’d like to think that one point doesn’t make a difference,” said Williams. “But, obviously, it was a wrong call.”
Williams herself could have benefited from the device, considering that she, too, was oblivious to the correct score and therefore did not take issue with Watts.
“Sometimes I do lose track of the score,” she confessed.
Love2scorE is a user-friendly, hand-held scoring device that helps fans/officials/parents keep track of points, tiebreakers and sets.
“A lot of times you’re sitting down at the end of a row of courts and you can’t hear the score being announced,” said Duane Bernard, who spent years crisscrossing the country watching his son on the junior circuit. “We were trying to keep score on our fingers, our cell phones. We noticed a lot of other parents doing the same thing.”
So Bernard dreamed up Love2scorE, which is wholly designed, engineered and manufactured in the U.S. And it didn’t take long to catch on. Today, he employees a staff of 17 workers who assemble the devices in his Tucson, Ariz., home.
“You hear of ‘garage’ companies. In Tucson, it’s too hot to be a garage company, so it’s a ‘kitchen’ company,” said Bernard, who is married to former LPGA golfer Christa Johnson.
For more info, visit love2score.com.
