Paris: Blogging the Tube

Slowly but surely, U.S. television is taking us deeper into the Grand Slams. Yes, the choices ESPN makes are frustrating to serious fans, but they do a more thorough job than NBC ever has in the past. This weekend marked another small step forward, as the Tennis Channel joined ESPN in putting a full-court press on the French Open. Granted, the network is widely unavailable in the U.S., and its first two days of coverage were utterly decimated by rain (I’m willing to bet that the Serena Williams-Tsetvana Pironkova first-rounder passed Connors-Krickstein as the most replayed match in history). Much of Sunday and Monday were given over to improvised conversations between Martina Navratilova, John McEnroe, and Bill Macatee about the old days at Wimbledon (or something like that; I hit the mute button as fast as I could).

Still, by Tuesday the sun had appeared and the Tennis Channel put its large and motley crew of commentators to work. The network has infested Roland Garros with not just McEnroe, Navratilova, and Macatee, but Thomas Blake, Chanda Rubin, Justin Gimelstob, Rennae Stubbs, Barry Mackay, Ted Robinson, Leif Shiras, and probably half a dozen other people I can’t remember right now. Between all these people and the usual suspects from ESPN, who take over in the afternoons, is there any room for French fans on the grounds anymore?

So maybe it’s not such a bad thing to blog this one from the living room. I can watch from 5:00 A.M. on if I so desire and see a lot of it live. It’s not quite like sipping a café au lait at the long press benches above Court Chatrier, but a fan’s gotta do what a fan’s gotta do. Here’s a day-one recap from the living room at home and the conference room at work, with helpful real-life details to give you that “you are in Brooklyn” experience!

5:00 A.M.: Asleep, but not snoring I don’t think. The plan is for my DVR to handle the first hour and a half.

6:30: Hitting the snooze button (first of four times).

7:10: Making coffee, keeping all lights off, crawling into a rocking chair from Princeton Seminary (my grandfather's at one point), and starting the DVR. What comes up first is a promo featuring John and Pat McEnroe. It concludes with John screaming—what else?—“you cannot be serious!” It seems like a cruel, but not completely unjust, fate that Johnny Mac’s life is still defined by four words he spoke 26 years ago.

7:30: Martina Navratilova is calling Jelena Jankovic’s first-round match. Navratilova has a squeaky-mouse voice and isn’t exactly a laugh a minute, but she’s a solid announcer who has definite opinions without getting strident about them. She also can be good on tactics. On Sunday, she mentioned that Serena was driving her crazy because she wasn’t moving in to meet the ball earlier when she had the wind behind her back. I hadn’t thought of that, and it was true, in the first set Serena was reaching forward for the ball rather than getting her feet there.

Jankovic, menawhile, is hitting well this morning, particularly on her forehand side. As Martina says, she’s doing a good job of opening the court with her down-the-line forehand, which is not typically her stronger shot.

7:45: John McEnroe and Ted Robinson are calling the Roger Federer-Michael Russell match. Is McEnroe a great tennis commentator? I’ve never been able to decide myself. This 2001 piece in Slate hammered Mac for the banality of his “insights” (banalysis?), and it's true that at one point today Mac offered this pearl about Federer’s game: “It’s pleasurable to win a few free points with your serve.” Despite this, and his tendency to complain about how the sport is run without offering any plausible alternatives, I like McEnroe. He’s smart, has a good voice, and can make a match seem important just with his presence. Perhaps he was too much of a natural at the game to be able to analyze it to its depths, but he never aggravates me. After months of Doug Adler on TTC, that’s all a man can ask at 7:45 in the morning.

As for Federer, he’s hitting his forehand with a longer cut today. He seems to be relishing going after it again and not worrying about anything else.

Once he finishes off Russell, the TC switches courts to show some of Nicole Vaidisova’s first-round match. She hasn’t played much during the clay season and is a little rusty, but she works her way into the match and looks good by the end.

8:00: Two drawbacks of a TV sports blog by me: (1) I often watch with the sound muted, reading a book, and listening to music; (2) As I said, I own a DVR, which means I can skip anything I want. This is particularly essential with the TC, which runs (and runs and runs) some of the worst commercials anywhere, some of them for snap-on teeth, new ringtones, and get-rich-working-from-home websites (“I love the lifestyle—and the money’s great, too.”). Hey, try it, 36newfuture.com, maybe it works (but I'm not clicking on it myself).

This morning I keep the sound on but I do pick up my book, The Rivalry by John Taylor, a thorough and entertaining chronicle of the NBA in its “golden” 1960s. (A good read for frustrated Sixers fans!) On weekends and evenings, I’ll also switch on the radio to WFMU, a hipster public station in Jersey (listen along to a show here; I like "Teenage Wasteland," a garage-rock program on Sunday afternoons). That may sound like a lot of distraction, but I rarely miss a point. Is tennis really that slow?

8:30: OK, the Tennis Channel is often hokey and low-budget, but this morning’s broadcast should satisfy most ESPN-haters. The best part of the show is what’s not there—TC is not using its studio booth and Bill Macatee between matches. This means that, for now at least, there’s no equivalent to Chris Fowler and his extraneous recaps, interviews, and profiles in courage. After the Federer match, the camera heads straight to a sidecourt where Fabrice Santoro is up to his old tricks, and then on to Richard Gasquet’s opening games. This is as it should be.

8:45: Between games, TC is running short testimonials about clay from various tennis luminaries and quasi-luminaries, like Federer and Jimmy Arias and Matt Cronin. Arias talks about how playing on the surface will help save your joints as you get older. I’ve seen the segment maybe 10 times already, but this is the first time I notice that the Har-Tru company has its logo in the corner of the screen. Whether this is an ad or real TC coverage is not clear to me.

The theme continues with Leif Shiras’s player interviews. The ones I've seen have all included a slightly odd question about what it’s like to play on clay. This is a logical thing to ask during the French Open, and I may be paranoid, but something in the back of my head is still thinking about the Har-Tru sponsorship.

That’s it from the living room. I’ve got to get to work. From there I watch Igor Andreev hit what looks like a right-handed version of Rafael Nadal’s forehand. If anything, it’s even heavier and more vicious. Andreev hits 10 times as many winners with it as Roddick does with his forehand and leaves the American shaking his head at Roland Garros once again.

Same for James Blake, who loses to the borderline-unfair Ivo Karlovic. I would guess Dr. Ace is the first right-hander who hit flat 130-mph serves out wide in the deuce court. You only get a few chances against Karlovic, and any mistake can spell the end of a set. The knowledge is enough to make Blake choke on a couple key points.

Finally, I catch the end of the first set of Nadal vs. Juan Martin del Potro. Nadal is back into his impenetrable-fortress mode. Del Potro hits well and hangs with him until 5-5. At that point, he begins to jump at this shots in a vain attempt to get them past Nadal. Nothing doing—he just hits them out and is broken. The rest of the match is a formality.

My final thought as I walk away from the TV for the day is that if Federer and Nadal keep playing this way, it’s going to be a helluva final.