Tonight on A Current Affair they reported about all of the famous tennis stars you can see in Melbourne during the Australian Open events. Usually at this time of year, I would be knocking about Crown Casino in Melbourne for the Aussie Millions (Australia’s biggest poker tournament). I am not going this year, but for the past 3 or 4 years I have seen many of those tennis stars in the Crown hotel complex.

Anyhow, on tonight’s show of ACA, they reported spotting “big hitter James Blake” in Melbourne. They showed footage of their crew interviewing “Blake” outside Crown as he stepped into a limo. They must have asked him “What are you doing?” as he replied “Oh I’m just going off to play some golf, I might play some poker in the car”.

Unbeknown to the ACA reporter, they were in fact speaking to professional poker player Phil Ivey (pictured below in the shot of mine from Aussie Millions 2006). Phil loves two things, poker and golf. I am not sure if James Blake likes golf or poker, but it seemed to make sense enough for ACA to air it.

I can just imagine the Nine ACA researchers or reporters typing “black male tennis star” in to Google, to which they are presented with the first result which talks about James Blake. “Yeah that looks like him” they must have said to themselves. Or maybe they thought, “How many rich black people can there be in Melbourne? It has to be him”.

According to Wikipedia, Phil Ivey has over $8 million of recorded poker tournament winnings, a few million more than his stunt double James Blake, who has won over $5 million playing tennis.

I shot ACA an email to tell them they confused the two, it would be interesting to see if they say anything about it.

Phil Ivey has often been referred to as “the Tiger Woods of poker”, maybe James Black has been called that in the tennis world at some stage too? I am surprised ACA didn’t say they caught up with Tiger Woods.

aca, james blake, phil ivey, poker

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