Twitter Watch: Oct. 4

The shots back and forth, the poor officiating, the fake politeness, the inconsistency, the stretches of tedium punctuated by a game-changing zinger: A U.S. presidential debate is a lot like a tennis match, don’t you think?

Many people from the sport's Twitter universe felt that way while watching President Obama and Mitt Romney rally on Wednesday night. Here’s a look at what a few of them had to say about that hard-fought, and at times hard to follow, four-setter slog in Denver.

@bgtennisnation (MrsG typing) Driving over fogged out GGBridge, listening to NPR; yellow card on the moderator-no clue-lost control from the start.

@bgtennisnation is Brad Gilbert, of course, and the typist for this tweet was his wife, commonly known on Twitter as MrsG. He’s issuing his customary yellow card to Jim Lehrer for acting like an ATP chair umpire and allowing each candidate too much time to make their points. Fair enough, except that Brad may have, as is also his custom, jumped the gun a bit. As most of us didn’t learn until later, the rules had been loosened this year to allow for more one-on-one...debate.

@CoCoVandey Lets see what’s up. It's debate time! It’s my first time voting. So here we go!

Twenty-year old WTA player Coco Vandeweghe was obviously fired up to to start the evening, but like BG, she was soon perplexed by Lehrer's laid-back-bordering-on-senile brand of moderation:

@CoCoVandey How come Jim Lehrer doesn't ever interrupt Obama and has pretty much interrupted Mitt every time. #weaksauce

Sounds like we have a Young Republican in the game. Coco soon got an answer to her question, and in the grand tradition of Twitter, it wasn’t overly polite:

Jeremy ‏

@CoCoVandey Because Obama is the president? Duh.

If CoCo saw things from the right, California tennis writer Joel Drucker came at things from the other end of the court, at least to start:

@joeldrucker Obama perhaps up an early break? Though perhaps more due to Romney not getting enough first serves? Very slow court.

The tennis-debate analogy was right up Joel’s alley. This is a man who can relate pretty much any situation to the sport. He describes the late author John Updike as the “Ken Rosewall of writers” (he’s right, by the way), and once had this to say about website commenters: “They need pace.”

Leave it to another Aussie with an ironic nickname, Darren “Killer” Cahill, who brought a level head and outsider’s eye to the proceedings, to sum the evening up best:

@darren_cahill Twitter timeline on Presidential Debate > Presidential Debate.