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over to Clijsters’s side of the net, shook hands with her opponent, and then left the court. The blogosphere exploded. The “terrible tennis tirade” became a lead segment on CNN and front-page news internationally, the defining moment of the entire tournament.
    Part of what made the episode so memorable was the kind of outrageous tirade one associates less with tennis than with, say, cage fighting. But it was also jarring to see an official essentially decide what had been a close, hard-fought contest between two worthy competitors. And in many corners, fans’ outrage was directed at the official. How could the match be decided this way? We’ve come to expect omission bias in close contests.
Swallow the whistle!
    But wait, you say; the official didn’t determine the outcome. Serena Williams did by her tirade, violating the rules. The lineswoman was simply doing her job. And if she had turned a blind eye to the violation, wouldn’t she have been robbing Clijsters? Try telling that toJohn McEnroe. Commentating from the CBSbroadcast booth that night, he remarked immediately: “You can’t call that there! Not at that point in the match.” One former NBA ref had the same reaction as he watched from his home. “Great feel for the match,” he sarcastically texted a friend.Bruce Jenkins, a fine columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, wrote, “[Tsurubuchi] managed to ruin the tournament … any sports fan knows you don’t call a ticky-tack violation when everything is on the line.”
    A few weeks after Serena’s Vesuvian eruption,
Sports Illustrated
readers voted her Female Athlete of the Decade, suggesting that the episode had done little to hurt her image. Tsurubuchi was less fortunate. She was hurriedly escorted from the stadium and flown back to Japan the next day. When we first attempted to interview her, we were told she was off-limits to the media. In fact, tennis officials wouldn’t even disclose her name or confirm it when we learned it from other sources. (Compare this to the treatment Mike Carey received from the NFL after Super Bowl XLII.) Never mind that she made the correct call and didn’t give in to omission bias. In effect, she was shamed for being right.
    A full five months later, we finally caught up with Tsurubuchi at a small men’s tennis event in Delray Beach, Florida, where she was working in anonymity. She cut a dignified, reserved figure, disappointed to have been recognized but too polite to decline a request to talk. Conversing with this reticent, petite woman—she looks to be about four foot eight—it was hard not to think of what calamity might have ensued if Serena Williams actually had acted on her threat that night. Her voice quivering as if on a vibrate setting as she recalled the incident that brought her unwanted fame, Tsurubuchi claimed that she’d had no choice. “I wish—I pray—for players: ‘Please don’t touch that line!’ ” she explained in halting English. “But if players [do], we have to make the call.”
    Would she make the same call again? “Yes,” she said, looking dumbfounded. “It’s tough and the players might not be happy … but the rules are the rules, no matter what.”
    Her call—her resistance to the omission bias to which we’vebecome accustomed in sports and in life—may have earned her widespread ridicule and disapproval, but she also won fans that night, including Mike Carey: “Making the hard call or the unpopular call, that’s where guts are tested, that’s the mark of a true official,” he says. “You might have a longer career as an official if you back off. But you won’t have a more accurate career.”
    * It bears mention that Dungy made these remarks on an NBC broadcast while talking to his colleague Rodney Harrison, the defensive back who was covering Tyree on the play.
    * Ironically, Dallas Mavericks ownerMark Cuban earned one of his first (of many) fines when he disputed a late-game goaltending call that Benson