Posts by Peter Macia

You Won’t See Me: The Hidden Lives of U.S. Open Ball People

Ball people are asked to be invisible, but required to perform complex physical and mental tasks in order to do so. They make it easy to miss how good they are, even when your job is to notice how good they are. They become an integral part of the match, symbiotic extensions of the players, many of whom they’ve worked with before or studied on television.