There are many advantages of working out of your home. If you are a tennis fan, it gives you the opportunity to watch a lot of Grand Slam tennis. This week's column focuses on the good and the bad of the American television coverage of Wimbledon.

TNT - Many American tennis fans were concerned when premium cable channel HBO decided not to renew its Wimbledon television contract last year. Basic cable channel TNT took over weekday coverage in 2000 and while not being able to provide us with commercial-free tennis, it did a respectable job in its first year. This year, the coverage has even been better. TNT came out of the gates with 12 hours of coverage for the first two days of the tournament and has been averaging at least 8 hou rs sin ce then. The network has also reassembled its ace team of commentators and former pros: Mary Carillo, Martina Navratilova, and Jim Courier. Marv Albert, mostly know for his basketball color commentary (and a tawdry sex scandal in the mid-1990s), is also back and not quite the tennis uneducated distraction he was last year. A newly glammed up Zina Garrison has thankfully been relieved of her player interviewer role of previous years and joins Carillo and Navratilova in the booth.

So what makes TNT so good? It is a combination of quantity and quality of coverage. Each day, the network started coverage fairly early in Wimbledon's daily schedule. The bulk of the coverage was live and, for the most part, only returned to taped or earlier matches long after the sun had set on the grass courts. Having live tennis, also allows us Internet users the luxury of logging on without the fear of seeing a result or ruining a match. Better yet, one could have a truly interactive tennis experience by logging onto the official Wimbledon website and checking out the stats on matches while watching live on television.

In the second week, while NBC started their own coverage which at times overlapped with TNT coverage. This gave television viewers a rare treat - a choice of which channel and/or which match to watch. Ah, dreams of "The Tennis Channel" began to dance in my head. Hmmm? Agassi vs. Escude or Henman vs. Federer?. The Ameri-centric broadcast network (Agassi! Sampras! Roddick!) or the worldly cable channel? Or dare I even mention that TNT is the only network John McEnroe apparently does not have a commentating contract. Until NBC took over total control of the tournament in its closing days, tennis fans had it very good with TNT.

NBC - I guess it was needless to say that if TNT earns kudos its American broadcasting counterpart, NBC, takes on the "chump" role. Last year, the network faced heavy criticism when it delayed televising the Wimbledon semifinal between Venus and Serena Williams by six hours. With the match long completed, NBC teased viewers with the "arrival" of the sisters to the tournament grounds while it rebroadcast a men's match from earlier in the tournament. Each telecast this year now star ts with the caveat: "portions of this show were pre-recorded."

In a new twist this year, NBC started its second week coverage at the same time in each US time zone. So, for example, the women's semifinal began at 1pm local time no matter which time zone you live in. For myself, on US West Coast time, Capriati-Henin appeared on my television screen eight hours after they walked onto court at the All England Club. My East Coast compatriots had a five-hour delay for this match. Needless to say, being the news/Internet/tennis junkie I am, there was absolutely no way I avoided hearing and/or seeing the result prior to the start of television coverage. The headline-screaming win by Henin was all over the Internet (and not just limited to tennis related sites) and noteworthy enough to be mentioned by local morning news programs.

NBC blames "popular morning shows" as the reason for the afternoon broadcasts. I find this a little hard to believe. I would imagine afternoon soap opera fans would be a lot more livid over the pre-empting of their shows as opposed to morning talk shows or a third hour of the "Today" show. Nevertheless, if NBC is so worried about ratings maybe they should reconsider their commitment to televising tennis. We are no longer living in the dark ages when we had to wait for the morning newspaper t o see who won a tennis match. With hundreds of television channels and instantaneous news available at the click of a mouse, NBC is bringing us old news and forcing tennis fans to live in a box if they want to at least experience a match under the illusion that it is live.