Well, I’m here. I limped off the plane in Melbourne a couple of hours ago, after one of the most miserable flights I’ve ever. . . oh, you know what – who cares? Nobody cares! You don’t care, even I don’t care.
There’s something about Australia. It greets you with fragrances borne on warm breezes and this general atmosphere that just kinds of asks, “And you’re all stressed out because?” It kind of makes you think twice, and so you surrender to the mellow mood, even if you’ve just spent a day-and-a-half in transit, watching one dumb movie after another and eating stuff that goes off in your stomach like a cherry bomb.
My cabbie was a Lebanese, an Alawi Muslim. His sect, he told me, consists mostly of the poor and disenfranchised, but they aren’t extremists. He figured that Usama Bin Laden holds Alawis in even higher contempt than he does Christians, Jews, Americans and Brits and, given his druthers, would probably exterminate them first. The cabbie loves Australia and tells his three sons to think of themselves as Aussies first and anything else second.
As an Alawi, he said, he could never have improved his life in the Leb. The Middle East, he told me, is an “evil” place where extremism is the preferred mode of belief and nobody has a chance in life unless he’s connected to the powers that be.
I heard from the cabbie that Andy Roddick had been beaten by Marcos Baghdatis while I was in transit. It was a surprise, given how Roddick had been playing, but hardly surprising in light of Baghdatis’s CV. He was the No. 1 junior in the world in 2003, despite coming from a family that could not really afford to finance his junior development, on an island nation (Cyprus) with absolutely no tennis tradition. Here’s a good backgrounder on the amazing saga. At some level, though, the specifics always become irrelevant. Baghdatis put it this way when he was asked how a Cypriot became interested in tennis:
Don’t you just love the last two sentences?
Maybe I’m just a tennis nut, but I find it extraordinary that in a world full of Bollettieris and IMGs and maniacal parents, kids like Marcos Baghdatis (substitute Hicham Arazi, Younes El Ayanaoui) can still make it big, It says a lot about talent and individual drive and determination. It says a lot about the unique nature and demands of tennis, too. Is this a great game, or what?
Baghdatis names Pat Rafter as his role model, partly because of the way the Aussie former U.S. Open champ carried himself. Yesterday, while Baghdatis was being quizzed about his voluble cheering squad, a reporter pointed out that although Baghdatis’ fans didn’t look like tennis types, they were very good about not disrupting play or using gamesmanship. It turns they had a little tennis orientation session with their hero. Baghdatis explains:
I’ll be taking a closer look at his game tomorrow, when he plays Ivan Ljubicic.
It turns out that Baghdatis’s father, Christo, the owner of a small clothing shop in Cyprus, is Lebanese (wonder if he’s an Alawi Muslim), and Marcos has 21 cousins in Melbourne. That accounts for the support he’s had in all of his matches here. One of the signature features of the Australian Open is the number of people who turn out, faces painted and wearing flags for capes, to cheer for players from various Aussie feeder nations, like Greece, Croatia, Slovakia et al.
These are Aussies, not foreigners who traveled to Melbourne to cheer their countrymen. The immigrant culture here is very vibrant; yet you don’t hear people describe themselves as, say, “Italian-Australians.” It’s like they want – and have it – both ways.
Hingis later – Federer too, although I’m not sure I can last that long today. . .