American scorejockeys have trouble with anything beyond "Smith" and "Jones". What gets me is the tennis announcers that continually butcher names. It's their job to know the people. And to hear them complain about how "difficult" it is to pronounce Russian names....hello! They're phonetic!
There was an announcer who did the occasional tennis event for FSN back when it was Prime Network, named Lou Palmer. He was one of those all-purpose announcers who did whatever event he was sent to. Whenever he got a tennis assignment, he would sometimes run across a name he had trouble with. But he had a technique for getting around this. He would (gasp!) ask!! He'd actually go up to the player(s) before the matches started and ask them how to pronounce their names. And the players seemed to appreciate it that someone would bother to find out, rather than mangle the name. That's professionalism.
