Why Roddick disappeared from CBS on Saturday

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With John Isner leading Andy Roddick, 4-3, in the first set of a third-round U.S. Open match Saturday, CBS signed off for the day and sent viewers off to the Tennis Channel for the finish, which turned out to be the biggest upset of the men’s Open, ending in a fifth-set tiebreak win for Isner and a dispiriting loss for the fifth-seeded Roddick.

But there was a problem. Not everybody gets the Tennis Channel. And if you didn’t, you were out of luck or relegated to watching streaming video on the U.S. Open site, which isn’t bad but isn’t quite your big-screen TV, especially if you are a technophobe who isn’t sure how to hook your computer feed to your television.

United States Tennis Assn. spokesman Chris Widmaier said it was part contractual obligation and part prudence on CBS’ part. The contract was that Tennis Channel had to go on the air exclusively at 4 p.m. Pacific time, which was when the night session was to begin.

Because of a nearly three-hour women’s match in which Melanie Oudin upset Maria Sharapova, CBS realized it would not get the Roddick-Isner match to its conclusion and made the decision to go off the air, as scheduled, at 3 p.m. Pacific time. CBS was supposed to show seven hours of tennis Saturday and it did, and then it decided to sign off.

This is the first year of a new contract that includes ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel plus CBS. Until last year the USA Network carried the Open. USA Network is more widely distributed, so a situation like Saturday’s wouldn’t have affected so many people.

-- Diane Pucin