By Mike McIntyre
Who’s got the fastest hands on tour? Rafael Nadal or Justine
Henin perhaps, or were you thinking of Andy Murray or Elena Dementieva? Try
thinking outside of the box, or, more specifically, outside of the court. I’m
not talking about the video review operator on center court or Roger Federer’s
racquet stringer. Take your search into the players and media area and you will
find a woman whose fingers are infinitely faster than any of the above.
Meet Linda Christensen, one of the ATP and WTA Tour stenographers. Able to
type between 260-300 words per minute is a regular occurrence for this
behind-the-scenes specialist who captures every sound uttered by the players in
their post-match press conferences. Employed by ASAP Sports, Christensen gets
the transcripts completed within moments of the players leaving the press room
and into the hands of reporters and tournament organizers who can then share
these valuable moments with tennis fans all over the world. In her spare time
she also works as a CART provider (Communication Access Realtime Translation)
which specializes in translating classes for deaf children who are in junior
high and college.
A tennis enthusiast since the 1970s when her grandmother got
her to watch Chris Evert, Christensen was initially trained as a court
reporter, a role she fulfilled for 23 years. After years of working in the
high-stress environment of the legal world, Christensen, a self-described
sports enthusiast, decided to make the transition into the world of
professional sports transcribing. Since the fall of 2007 she has covered
college football, golf and most recently tennis where she began at the 2008
Australian Open.
I had the chance to talk with Linda last summer while
covering the Rogers Cup in Toronto.
There were many late nights where the two of us left the press room well past
midnight. Getting back to the hotel past 2am is one of the tough realities of
her job that she balances with the many positives she described to me one
afternoon. Here is a unique behind-the-scenes glimpse into the vital role that
Christensen plays in professional tennis.
Q: How does this fantastic
process work with the machine and the audio and how do you put it all together?
A: It’s a training where you
learn to write phonetically and it's a different language. So instead of typing
one individual letter on a keyboard like your laptop, phonetically we make
words and phrases and even whole sentences at a time so that we're able to take
down up to 260-300 words a minute. And then that data is sent wirelessly into
our laptop, fed into our database, and it
is translated into English.
Q: And phonetically, it's a hard
concept to grasp for someone who is used to just your typical keyboard. But when
I look at that machine there, you've got far less keys, they're not labelled at
all. So does each key correspond to a sound?
A: A sound. Or combinations of
keys. Lets just take the word "much." If you were on your laptop you
would type m-u-c-h. When we write "much" it could be the initial
"m" the "uh" and the final "ch" sound so we can
write “much” all in one stroke. Or in court if you want to just say commonly
used phrases, when an attorney addresses the jury he or she might say,
"ladies and gentlemen of the jury," and we have that in one phrase,
one stroke of our shorthand keyboard.
Q: Would you do the same thing in
the tennis world then?
A: Yeah. “Backhand,” “cross
court,” “hard court,” “grass court,” “clay court” are all pre-programmed in
there as one stroke on the keyboard.
Q: Is it conceivable that someone
could, with a regular keyboard, keep up with it all?
A: I don't believe so. I don't
think anybody's ever been able to type that fast.
Q: What's your evaluation process
like? How are you evaluated or how are you reviewed each year or what kind of
process do they have in place for that? Or are you just on your own when you go
to tournaments?
A: A little of both I guess.
People read our transcripts in the company and we usually work with colleagues.
This kind of tournament (Masters 1000 level) we work solo because they're
smaller, but at the Slams we work in tandem with a computer person and a
writer. And so we evaluate each other and challenge each other to be faster and
more accurate.
Q: How hard is it to pick up? When you started in 1983, how long did it take
you to become comfortable with this process?
A: Well, I can say that the
attrition rate in court reporting is very high. If I were to say a beginning
class, let’s say, is 25, I would be hard-pressed to say that maybe one or two
other people that started when I did are still doing it. It's a very high-stress
job. I'm talking legally. And then there's
a whole other part of the business end and dealing with personalities like
lawyers and paralegals, and deadlines. If they're in trial and they need
something right away, you have to pull an all-nighter to get that transcript to
them. And, you know, with ASAP, we say "When all is said we're done"
- journalists have a deadline to meet and we know we're under the wire to get
them their quotes from these interviews.
Q: In terms of tennis, who are
some of the more difficult players to keep up with or understand and
transcribe?
A: At the French Open in 2009 -
the Serbians all speak very good English but they're very fast and fortunately
they have a good cadence with how they speak. And Ana Ivanovic can be very
quick, very rapid-fire. I was working as the writer for her interview
at the French and I had a scopist - meaning the computer person - a young man
working with me, and we are able with our software to gauge how many words a
minute people talk. Anyway, Ana Ivanovic
came in from a win and she just “took off,” and my colleague, after the
interview, said that she had at times during the interview gotten to 330 words
a minute. She was pretty quick. Others have very heavy accents. Dinara Safina can be very difficult to
understand, as is her brother Marat. They have a very heavy accent. James
Blake,(laughs) all the journalists know that he speaks very fast. And it's kind
of a joke and he realizes that he's our nemesis, because he's even looked at us
and said, "I know you hate me." ‘Cause he just really likes to talk.
Q: Do you ever get to a point
where you're struggling to keep up or has it ever happened to you that you're
falling behind - how do you compensate for that? How do you deal with those
situations?
A: Yes, that is difficult. You
learn a skill called trailing or carrying where you learn to be behind a
sentence or two and you keep it in your mind and you catch up. If we have any
questions, everything is also recorded to our hard drive simultaneously, so if
we think we might have missed something or misheard, we can listen to that at
the time we edit it before we send the final transcript.
Q: Any memorable moments in
particular? Particular tournaments or interviews that stand out for one reason
or another?
A: Well, yeah, the Australian
Open of '08 my colleague and I - there were just really long matches, and
everything for the women went three sets and everything for the men went five.
And it being Australia,
we took Lleyton Hewitt, he won over Baghdatis, and we took Lletyon's interview
at 5:30am. We stayed up all night waiting for that. And the tennis fans of Australia
are true fans. There were kids in the audience and nobody left (early). Last
year at Montreal Marat Safin threw in some choice words. He's funny. He's
very funny. He was retiring and was asked a question about his sister and just
held nothing back and let the expletives fly. So that was fun.
Q: Do you have to transcribe
those expletives word for word, verbatim?
A: Yes, pretty much.
Q: Any awkward moments between
reporters and players
A: I can't think of a specific.
Only when players lose and they don't like to be asked what they think are
seemingly stupid questions. So they get kind of testy.
Q: Favorite tournaments for you
in the year and a half that you've been doing this?
A: Indian Wells
is wonderful, as is the Sony Ericsson in Key Biscayne. The Slams - the French
is great, everything is translated and the translators are great. The US Open
is gruelling because they have lights that they can start matches very late at
night. So last year every other night is 3 to 4 AM into bed, and that gets a
little tough after two-plus weeks