Hooking seems possible only if you are certain that your opponent's shot landed in. If you know that it landed in, but you call it "out," you are hooking- this is cheating. I'm not talking about hooking an opponent whose shot clearly landed in. But knowingly lowering the threshold over your willingness, possibly resulting in fewer occasions for you to extend your opponent your generosity surrounding certain shots of his that quite arguably landed out, is an adjustment that can be made during the course of a match, and making it should not qualify one a hooker.
After an unbroken stream of line calls that he has made that all favored him, and on this day you seem to have "just missed" every line, everywhere in his court, each and every time that he was the judge of your shot (statistically, highly improbable to miss every line by such a small distance), then it is not hooking in my book if, the next time you have reasonably held doubt as to whether his shot, on your side of the court, landed in or not--because you did not see even one strand of yellow felt overlapping by even one millimeter any part of the white--yet you want badly, out of your deeply instilled sense of sportsmanship, to give him the benefit of your (justified) doubt, even while 99.99% of the ball's mass clearly appeared not to have touched any part of the line, so that, you cannot plausibly deny that the ball landed in without also deceiving yourself into believing that an outcome, objectively the less likely of two possible to have occurred, HAS occurred ("and, thus, the point is yours" you would say), then (except, when you decide no longer to grant him the, pretty-much-entirely-unseen-felt-of-the-ball, and start telling yourself, 'Yeah, I think I'm going to start asserting, as having happened, any scenarios which my eyes actually see 99.99 percent of, instead of those that I see only 00.01 of,' it's okay in my book not to award him the point.
Not to start a poor calls tit-for-tat party. That may be, however a secondary, unintended consequence of comfortably stepping forward in a spirit of friendly rivalry, and announcing, "Your last shot was out. And not only that, it was out by less than a few eights of an inch," and then, preparing for capricious retaliation from your opponent which could turn the match ugly. This sometimes may sadly be a part of competition, but that is not hooking. That is being on good grounds to send a message: "Probability supports the view that I could not possibly have hit so many (extremely tight) shots and done so unrelentingly as you have been asserting. Not even the pros can 'paint lines' (i.e. an archer's arrow pierce say, ten times consecutively, a three inch-wide-ring of airspace, circumscribing a round target's outermost concentric, physical limits, without one of the ten arrows touching the target in between, but all ten whistling by, within three inches of--no further away from--the target's outer edge) that consistently."
I believe myself capable of sensing, during a match, when it may be time for me to lower the threshold to my generosity, to reflect before automatically assigning my opponent the point after his shot was, at best, "possibly in" (by a microscopic margin, if that), though, "pretty much out." To say this with no sense of it being false seems different than hooking.
Jefferson's view that it was better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to deprive one innocent man of his freedom usually guides my call, when I'm pronouncing on my opponent's shot that has just landed ambiguously close to being 101% outside of the line. Yes, I am inclined by nature to always and forever give my opponent the benefit. My point however is that, a time may arise when an exception should be made and reflection taken, or else, I should be clinging to some vaguely altruistic ideal that is obviously not helping me against an opponent who does not appear to share my values. Besides, I have eyes of my own. Against certain playing partners, I tend to call nearly as many of my own shots out as they call, and it's not uncommon for an opponent to (in my opinion) miss a call (that should have gone against me) and for me to urge him to accept the point as my shot, from where I was standing, looked to have been out.
The game is simply more enjoyable for me when I can use it to build relationships of good will. Those who play me regularly all would agree that I am an upright sportsman. But I am an adaptive competitor, too. If you give me good reasons for suspecting you of liberally abusing your prerogative, as deciding linesman on your side of the court, I will feel no compunction over sprinkling you with some of your own pixie dust. But this has happened to me only twice over the past six months; yet it HAS happened. Both times, I thought much less of my opponent for resorting to those tactics, but I felt an obligation to myself to send him a message by discontinuing my charity.
