These are high times for fans of men’s tennis. The Open wraps us with the top four players putting on a display of the modern game at its best, and the following weekend they’re in action again, playing for their respective countries in Davis Cup. Two of them, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, should be part of the semifinals, while Roger Federer, defying all laws of jet lag, plays in Sydney. That's one roundabout way of putting a semifinal defeat behind you.
Pete Bodo has the Davis Cup story here; I’ll have a wrap up of the semis on Monday. Before I move on, I wanted to take a moment to look back, in sketches, at the Grand Slam season just completed. This was the first time I’ve worked all of them, for their duration, and thinking back to three weeks spent writing from Melbourne and Paris, and nearly that long writing from London and New York, it feels like a lot. It was enough, anyway, for me to begin to get a sense of the dizzying scope of the pros’ lives. It isn’t just the length of the season, but the breadth of it as well, the way it asks them to perform in such far-reaching locations, that’s overwhelming and disorienting. And exciting.
With the last of the Slams, the U.S. Open, still fresh in the memory, here's a brief scene from each of the four majors of 2011.
For a lot of people in tennis, the Slam season begins on the hill above Melbourne Park, in the towering, decaying brown brick that houses the local Hilton hotel. The tennis center is a short downhill walk from there. On the way down, you pass what is, in the grand scheme of sports, an even more impressive sight, the fabled Melbourne Cricket Ground. The home of the 1956 Olympics, the MCG seems to be the rare classic sporting venue that has lost none of its luster even after being refurbished. Surrounding it are statues of famous cricketers soaring in mid-swing or mid-bowl. I wrote when I was there that the statues provided a crucial element to the game: its myth. These players are portrayed as athletic gods; looking up at them, you almost can’t help but become a fan of the sport (even if, like me, you have no clue what the rules are).
Melbourne Park, which has yet to match the MCG sculpturally—a dumbfounded-looking Rod Laver greets you in the middle of the grounds—is a few steps farther down the hill. It’s characteristic of this easy, unceremonious, sports-loving city that both of these venues are within walking distance of its downtown. They’re so close, in fact, that you can hear them.
Two nights before the Aussie Open’s main draw began, I had dinner downtown. Afterward, I walked back over the bridge across the Yarra River that leads to the tennis courts and eventually back up to the Hilton. Even before I got to the bridge, though, when I was still on the city side, I began to hear the pops of tennis balls being hit. At first I thought I might just be hearing things after spending 20 hours on a plane. But they grew louder as I walked. Eventually I joined half a dozen people who were standing on the bridge, looking down on the final rounds of qualifying, which had stretched into the evening. There was a fiery red sunset breaking out to my right, and I was still a little dazed at the thought of being in Australia at all—“Am I really on the other side of the world?” But there they were, matches going on under the lights, on the blue courts I’d seen so many times on TV, in the heart of the city. We watched in silence, serenaded by Melbourne’s street performers on the other side of the bridge, as the players slugged it out and the season began.
The most highly anticipated match of the French Open’s first week was the third-rounder between Novak Djokovic and Juan Martin del Potro. Djokovic’s season-spanning win streak was still alive, and fast becoming the biggest story in sports. Del Potro appeared to be one of the very few men alive who was capable of breaking it.
Roland Garros officials made the mistake of scheduling the highly anticipated encounter last on Chatrier, the center court. Even a long Parisian spring evening wasn’t long enough to get the match in, and as the sky got dark, the two players were finally tossed over to the smaller Court Suzanne Lenglen. This made for a mad, and mostly futile, fan scramble from one side of the grounds to the other. There were suddenly a few thousand people who thought they were going to see Djokovic-Del Potro and were now stuck outside of Lenglen as the match began. They weren’t happy about it, and as you might expect in Paris, they let their feelings be known.
I waited until the rush was over before I made a move across the grounds. By then the wide walkway between the stadiums was jammed, shoulder to shoulder, with angry tennis fans. They shouted and whistled and chanted and raised their arms, but there was nowhere for them to go. I slowly wove my way through the mob, past two suspicious security guards, and into the gates.
Inside it was a different story. There was rapt attention all around the arena, a sense of collective awe at seeing two stars at such close range. You could hear every grunt and slide and frustrated admonition. I took the lone remaining seat in an overstuffed press section right behind the baseline, where Djokovic was roaming the far reaches of the court. He seemed to be sliding all the way from one sideline to the other. From the outside, you could hear the yells and chants of the unlucky fans from Chatrier. The two men played superb tennis under the chaotic circumstances, and they played it in the most sporting manner imaginable. Djokovic and del Potro applauded each other’s winners, and overturned calls in their opponent’s favor, as a matter of course.
There was, briefly, a moment of chaos on the court as well. Del Potro, after losing the first set, turned the tables in the second. Djokovic was rattled; he looked as frustrated as he had looked in months. But darkness fell just in time, one more thing that went the Serb’s way in his do-no-wrong 2011.
If you run, you can make it from the back of Wimbledon’s main press room, where the American media is stationed, across the All England Club's main thoroughfare, under the gangways of Centre Court and up the steps to the press benches, in the 90 seconds of a changeover. Sometimes, if you’re late, the usher—who dresses in what looks to me like full military regalia—will see you coming and hold the rope open for an extra second, saying “Hurry!” as you run.
Other times you don’t make it. You might see someone you know along the way, or you might be stuck behind a slow-moving fan, or you might barely avoid a full-on collision with a moving truck. When that happens, you stand in line and watch the scoreboard and groan every time it goes to deuce and wonder what moment of brilliance you just missed when the crowd roars. One time this year I was at the front of the line, and the usher caught a glimpse of the photo on my credential. He squinted, “Is that really you?” I said yes, it was me, when I first came to the tournament in 2002, sans facial hair, and that I didn’t really feel the need to make myself look any older. He smiled and nodded and showed me his photo, which, judging from his spiky hairstyle, looked like it was taken in 1983. From what I can tell, the hair is mostly gone now.
We all know how frustrating it can be to have to stand in line outside a court while play goes on without you. But I don’t mind it as much in this spot. On a sunny day, the light blasts out of the stadium and down onto the steps, and the ball makes the distinct echoing sound that it doesn't make anywhere else. The steps lead up and into the light, and it's a moment of high anticipation as you climb them. If it’s not tennis heaven up there, it’s the closest thing we’ll ever have: Centre Court.
By midnight on the U.S. Open’s final Monday, the press room in Ashe Stadium had cleared out. Of the hundreds of desks in there, three were still occupied. I had just finished a post about the men’s final when we received an unequivocal message: the lights went out. The Open was shutting down; it was time to go.
I picked up my stuff and tried to do as I was told, but the doors were all locked. Finally I ran into a grounds worker who led me through a mini-maze of corridors, to the one remaining unlocked door, which at that moment was propped open with a wooden block—if that block had slipped, I might still be in Ashe Stadium right now.
It had only been four hours or so since Novak Djokovic had won the final point over Rafael Nadal before a full house of 23,000 people. And only about three hours since a group of his Serbian countrymen had filled an entire stairway, chanting, “Olé, olé, olé, No-lay, No-lay!” But now the National Tennis Center was a ghost town, deserted except for the clean-up crew, who had their work cut out for them. Ashe appeared to be in a state of lockdown, with all of its massive gates firmly bolted. Had there really been a tennis tournament here for the last two weeks?
All of the exits to the grounds were also locked, except for one small one on the north side, an area I had never even seen before. I made it through and headed over to the commuter railroad that would take me into Manhattan; I had half an hour until the 1:00 A.M. train. I was the only person on the station platform, my only company was the buzz of crickets. They sounded strange in concrete-heavy Flushing Meadows; usually they’re drowned out by all of the trains, planes, and automobiles that crisscross each other in this transportation hub.
The lights above Ashe were still on full blast, and the American flag at the north end of the court was still blowing straight out in the wind. But where there had been non-stop activity for the last three weeks, there was silence and emptiness now. Everyone had cleared out. Djokovic was likely dancing on a bar somewhere in Manhattan, while Nadal was probably asleep on a plane over the Atlantic. Had they ever been there at all? Had the Open ever happened at all? Tennis, like the traveling carnival it is, had staged its show and moved on.