Iranian-American Ali Nili umpires for Wimbledon final

July 12, 2015

Ali Nili, a 37-year-old Iranian-born American, will be the chair umpire for today's men's final at Wimbledon.

Ali Nili

Nili is one of the ATP’s only ten full-time umpires, and one of the 25 umpires in the world who have earned a gold badge. Umpiring wasn’t what he set out to do. "I wanted to play. I wasn’t good enough." He sounds comfortable with that. He has worked at all four major tournaments, but the match between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic on Centre Court today will be his first Grand Slam final.

In a long match, umpires have to stay in place throughout, climbing down only when the match ends or, on clay, if someone wants a mark inspected. It’s not surprising, therefore, when Nili says (on Tennis Panorama News) that ,"My only pre-match routine is go to the bathroom!" When he’s working at Wimbledon or one of the other Grand Slams, where the men play five-set matches, he doesn’t drink anything until the end of his last five-set match.

Nili earned his first international certificate in 1998. Like players, umpires start out in the weeds of the game – small, local events or junior matches. As they learn, gain experience, and improve, they move up the ranks through a series of certificates: white, bronze, silver, and, finally, gold. A tournament like Queen’s, with a singles main draw of 56 and a doubles draw of 16, uses six umpires, four from the ATP’s group, the rest contractors.

Nili jokes about preferring women’s matches at the major because they’re only best-of-three sets, but you have to suspect that every umpire would have liked to have been in the chair for the historic 2010 Wimbledon first-round match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, which went to 70-68 in the fifth and took more than 11 hours over three days to complete! "The better the match is, the easier it is to keep your level of concentration. You do a tough five-set match which lasts four hours and when you sit up there it feels like a half an hour," Nili shares.

Ali Nili in Shanghai 2014

Mistakes still do happen, of course. Umpires are taught not to dwell on them. "We just really always think forward. We always just think about the next call. The more you think about what happened the more chance there is that you’ll miss something else because you’re losing concentration. Usually, at least in men’s tennis, if you call the score wrong for two points in succession one of the players is going to tell you." Modern technology helps: umpires have tablets that connect directly to the scoreboard so when he punches in the score everyone sees it and it feeds through to TV. A wrong score popping up in those circumstances generally gets a reaction in the stadium.

The hardest thing to learn, Nili says, is "to see the ball well." Most, though not all, of the top rank of umpires play tennis themselves. "And then communication and not taking things personally."

Ali Nili

Asked to name the stand-out matches he’s umpired, Nili picks first the 2008 match between Rafael Nadal and Carlos Moya, which stretched to three tiebreaker sets and took two hours, 35 minutes to finish. “The longest three-set match ever played on hard court,” Nili says, and also, "Every point was really amazing. That’s probably the best tennis I would say, I’ve umpired."

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