Tennis
/ A ProfileThe Line Judge Who Remembered Everything
For twenty-nine years, Colette Martel called lines at Roland-Garros. She is retiring with a notebook full of every close call and one unresolved grudge.
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Photograph — Elin Marchetti
Colette Martel has watched tennis balls land on clay more than almost anyone alive. She has, she estimates, called roughly 340,000 lines in her career, which is more lines than most of us will look at, full stop, in our whole lives.
She is seventy-one, lives alone in a small apartment in the 11th, and keeps a notebook — cloth-bound, because they always are — in which she has recorded every close call she remembers.
“A line is a line. Either the ball touched it or it did not. I have never agreed with people who want lines to be a matter of opinion.”
— Colette Martel
The author
Contributing Writer, Cricket & Tennis
Priya writes about the arithmetic of cricket and the loneliness of tennis. She files from wherever the Test match is.
In this issue
The Long Quiet of a Goalkeeper
Football · 18 min
A Small Theory of the Pick-and-Roll
Basketball · 11 min
The Unfinished Mountain
Long-form · 22 min
Contributing Writer, Cricket & Tennis
Priya writes about the arithmetic of cricket and the loneliness of tennis. She files from wherever the Test match is.
