Okay great, you're stating point blank that Laver was prompted into speaking an innacurate number. So much for your previous insistence on Laver's honesty and accuracy.
Now, what's this? You're suggesting that the interviewer did NOT prompt Laver to speak a number but simply added the number himself when he composed the article? I'm getting whiplash trying to follow this.
Okay, let me indulge this. The interviewer did not bring up numbers at all with Laver, and simply added a number when he composed his article. He depended on incomplete press reports when he had a direct source, the player himself, sitting right in front of him. Never mind how unlikely it is that the reporter would not bring up the H2H, since that was practically the thrust of the whole piece -- how badly Laver was losing to his two rivals. Sportswriters and athletes chew on these numbers all the time. But according to you, they just sat back and chewed the fat and talked in general terms about how Laver sucked.
And you suggested that Rosewall did not provide Harold Kaese with the H2H, which I guess means that Kaese must have written the number in later, after Rosewall had left the room. You suggest this, even though Rosewall gave Kaese all sorts of detailed information: the match tally in New Zealand, what surfaces were used, how many tickets were bought in Australia, how many big cities were visited. Rosewall even shares the exact time that he left New Zealand -- but you think that Ken just didn't bother mentioning Laver's full H2H record. Ken is obviously keen to present the pros as better than the amateurs, so the topic of Laver's losses is central: yet in your scenario, Ken doesn't bring up the H2H and simply leaves the true number of Laver's defeats at the hands of the pros to be worked out by a newspaper reporter who couldn't even get his staff out to the backwaters where you think so many matches were played. Ken just left that in Kaese's hands, despite having seen for himself (in your scenario) that there were no reporters at half the matches.
Right.
And then of course, when Kaese publishes his supposedly incorrect numbers, along with dozens of other newspapers who publish those same numbers (!), neither Rosewall nor Laver nor Hoad nor the tour's promoters and directors bother to correct any publication. We know this because the number 13 doesn't turn up as a h2h between Hoad and Laver until 1997!
Right.
Dan, you've got the wrong idea about how reporters got their information. They talked to the tour's directors and promoters, as well as the players. At any one stop on the tour, a reporter who has missed 6 previous matches in other big cities will simply get the running tally from the tour's managers and promoters.
When we were debating the 1939 tour between Vines and Budge, I even posted a few links to articles in which the tour managers were speaking directly to reporters. In one article they told the reporters exactly how many matches Vines had lost to Budge.
Obviously the managers of the tour want to tell the press about the running tally. The whole point of this tour, the central aspect of greatest interest, was how well Laver would do against the pros. But in your scenario this is essentially what had to happen: the managers of the tour would say to the press, "You can figure out the H2H for yourselves. We'll talk to you about how many tickets we sell, what cities we're going to, the surfaces we're playing on. But we won't give you the running tally. You can work that out for yourselves. Just send your people out to the little towns where no reporters ever go, where there are no telephones, where the kangaroos outnumber the people (lots of money we'll make there!) The running tally is not something we need to provide to the media (though we know that tennis fans everywhere are interested in what the numbers are). Just work it out among yourselves."
Right again.
