NOT INDIAN WELLS—One thing you realize after a few days at the BNP Paribas Open is that you’re not really meant to be there for that long. You’re not meant to hear the MC on the stadium court yell, “Make some noise, people!!!” as the players walk on court four times a day for 11 days. You’re not meant to hear “Start Me Up” blared at 11:00 each morning, or “Love Shack” at 10:00 in the evening to a crowd of 15 people.
Most important, you’re not meant to eat the breakfast buffet at the Holiday Inn Express in Palm Desert every morning for almost two weeks. You just aren’t. I stopped after a day or two, when the virus that swept the desert seemed like it was about to sweep over me. My breakfasts instead consisted of the donuts in the Indian Wells pressroom. I have no regrets. I credit them for helping me avoid the bug that took out two of my row-mates last week, Doug Robson of USA Today and Matt Cronin of Tennisreporters.net.
The tennis carnival has moved on, hopefully sans stomach virus, to Key Biscayne. I’m back in New York; we’ll have Pete Bodo onsite next week in Miami. Before we leave the desert behind for another year, here are a few last notes, some tennis-related, some personal, from Indian Wells 2012.
Heavy Thinking
I watched the 28th meeting between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer from a closer position than any of the others I’d seen live. Despite the outcome of this one, it gave me an idea of why the rivalry has tilted mostly toward Rafa: His shots come through with a little heavier bite in general. All other things being equal, his standard ball backs Federer up just a little more than Federer’s backs up Nadal. Federer has more variety with his location, especially from his forehand side, but there’s a sense that he has to find ways to counter what comes naturally for Nadal. This time he did it.
Reading for Changeovers
Can you take too many books on a trip with you? I’ve always overloaded, but I think I’ve begun to cross the line—there were a dozen tomes fanned out around my hotel room through the week. The problem is choosing one and sticking with it. The upside this time was that I ended up rediscovering an old favorite poet, Philip Larkin. Accessible, concise, and lyrical, he’s good for changeovers during matches, as long as you don’t mind reading poems about waking up in the middle of the night imagining your own death as you enjoy some tennis.
I finished my favorite novel so far by a favorite writer, Dawn Powell's Dance Night, and even got some traction with a writer I’ve tried many times before, Henry Green. An English novelist with a mannered, stream-of-conscious style, I’ve been baffled, in a bad way, by three of his other books. But his reputation—one critic describes him as a writer’s writer’s writer—is such that I still feel like they’re must be something there that I’m just not getting, and that it would be worth the effort to crack the code—kind of like the long car ride I took in high school thay finally made me understand the appeal of Sonic Youth; modern rock opened up to me from there. So I decided to try Blindness, the book Green wrote while he was still in prep school. How complicated could that be? Turns out teenage Henry Green it just about my level. It’s a very good book. Maybe it will help my crack the code to his grown-up books.
—Favorite Quote: “I don’t hate the wind.”—Rafael Nadal
—Favorite Practice Moment: Federer was hitting in the main stadium on the morning of the final. Highlights of his win over Nadal began to play on the video screens above. During one clip, commentator Robbie Koenig yelled, "Oh, the footwork from Federer there!”
Federer, who was bouncing the ball before a serve and had thus far ignored the video, looked up.
—Speaking of those two, some of you wondered how Nadal sounded when he said, after being asked about the slow courts, “Maybe next year they’ll be much faster, if Roger says, no? I have already this week a lot of time violation.”
He said it with a smile, but he was annoyed. He seemed especially weary of the slow-court question in general.
Sport for a Lifetime
Each year the BNP honors a veteran tennis writer with a lifetime achievement award. The past few have included San Diego’s Jerry Magee, Bill Dwyre of the L.A. Times, and Bud Collins. This year it went to Richard Evans, a Brit turned Floridian, and biographer of Nastase and McEnroe, among many other things. Evans has certainly spent a lifetime in the game—he has been covering the French and Wimbledon since the mid-1950s. And he seems to have remembered just about everything. Evans accepted his award with a speech about meeting Charlie Pasarell for the first time, in 1962. The small between-match crowd applauded politely, as they do for this ceremony every year. A tennis writer doesn’t get the cheers that a player does, but if you’re lucky you get to keep doing what you love a lot longer.
Evans has hung around long enough to get in a zinger on Twitter this past weekend. Catching sight of Victoria Azarenka's white shorts/black tights ensemble for the final, he tweeted: "I hope Anna Wintour is at lunch."
Radio is Cleaning Up the Nation...
Each spring brings a trip to California, and each trip brings another rental car with no IPod auxiliary cable. That means 11 days of radio, a shudder-worthy prospect. Most of my short drives from hotel to Tennis Garden consisted of me slowly turning the dial, through static, through fire-and-brimstone sermons, Top 40, country, Republican talk, and college stations in search of a place to stay. I managed to stop and listen a few times along the way.
—LMFAO's “I’m Sexy and I Know It” brought a laugh—climactic line: “I work out!”—until I couldn’t get it out of my head and almost began singing it out loud in the stands.
—George Strait’s “Here for a Good Time” made for an excellent end-of-day anthem. I want every day to end with me saying, “The hell with the red wine/Pour me some moonshine” and feeling like I’ve earned it. I just need to find some moonshine.
—“Nowhere Man” came out of, yes, nowhere late one night on an empty Highway 111. It sounded more perfect than ever, if that’s possible.
—Two of the most popular songs in the area are two of my old favorites from fifth grade: “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” and “Crocodile Rock.” I wrote a treatise when I was 10 about how the Top 40 had gone downhill ever since “Bad Bad Leroy Brown”—yes I did. The two songs sounded just as catchy now, and a lot more idiotic.
—The casually intertwined instrumental break by Keith and Ronny on “She’s So Cold” made me think Emotional Rescue might be worth a re-exploration soon.
—As always in the desert, I was treated to a rendition of “Raspberry Beret,” that great American ode to slackers, airheads, and their escapades in a barn during a thunderstorm. “She wasn’t too bright/But when she kissed me, I could tell she knew how to get her kicks,” is democratic art at its best. Prince had his priorities in order.
Finally, the last night, a surprise from the local college station. Singer-slacker-smoker extraordinaire Alex Chilton died during Indian Wells two years ago (I wrote about it at the time here), but his spirit was in my car when the song below came on. Few good pop lyrics are about happy situations, but “My Life is Right” by Chilton and bandmate Chris Bell (the sentiment sounds more like the romantic Bell than the ornery Chilton to me) is as infectious as it gets. And occasionally—when you’re sitting back on a sunny day, between posts, watching tennis on an outer court at Indian Wells for no other reason than to savor the moment before it vanishes for another year—it’s true.