Hawkeye ushering in new age of line calling in Milan

The inaugural Next Gen ATP Finals tournament in Milan is coming up soon on November 7-11. It features the highest-ranked players 21-years-old and under, innovative scoring changes and a massive shift in power from humans to machine.

Hawkeye, the ultimate arbiter of challenging line calls in tennis will replace all of the human officials, except the chair umpire.

“The technology is now in a place where we feel comfortable trialling this new system in a real tournament environment,” said ATP Executive Vice President Gayle David Bradshaw to*The Independent*. “The Next Gen ATP Finals in Milan is the perfect place to do this and we look forward to monitoring the results and assessing the merits of this new system.”

The optimism of improving on human judgement for more flawless umpiring could be helpful to athletes and spectators.

Would Roger Federer prefer a quicker system that doesn’t interrupt matches for player challenges? Could Rafael Nadal find more room in the corner for deep returns of serve without officials possibly impeding his concentration? Perhaps.

But there’s always a more cautious approach that would prefer a gradual integration of Hawkeye and automated technology.

And what about the officials who could lose their jobs? Could tennis turn into a future arena of robots like something from RUR or the sinister self-preservation from the HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

So while the attention should be squarely on the young stars playing in Milan, there will be more scrutiny to evaluate Hawkeye, probing for any weakness and weighing the merits of what could be a brave new world in tennis.

The Milan eight-player race is led by Alexander Zverev. Since he'll likely make the ATP World Tour Finals in London, Andrey Rublev takes the top spot, followed by Karen Khachanov, Denis Shapovalov and Borna Coric.