It has been pointed out to me that I’ve already written 41,122 words on the subject of this year’s French Open and my experiences surrounding it. That’s a solid 120-page book, exactly half the length of the real one I just took eight months to write. But a lot can happen in 18 days, so while we’re still here, and while TennisTV is still blocking me from seeing Queens, and while I’m finding my bearings back in New York City—the police uniforms here still look bizarre to me—I’ll wrap it up with a few last thoughts and notes and remembrances of things just past.
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Most Memorable Moment
It came at the very end of the tournament’s most memorable match, the dark, dramatic semifinal between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. It was 9:30, the score was 6-5 in the fourth-set tiebreaker. Federer was up a set and held the ball to serve, but it still felt like the match was riding on this point. If Djokovic had won it and pulled out the breaker, they would have shut everything down and come back the next day for a fifth. He would have weathered Federer’s best and some of his own worst, and had a chance to start back at square one.
It wasn’t the finest match of the year, but I can’t imagine there’s been a better piece of theater, or a match that’s been as fun to see live—the atmosphere, with its low clouds, pale light, and frenzied crowd, was nothing less than ominous. Djokovic set up to receive serve with a 43-match win streak on the line. He hadn't met defeat since last November. He was about to. Federer’s serve may not have been his fastest of the match, but it sounded like it coming off his racquet, and it looked like it when it detonated on the line, darted past Djokovic, and smacked hard against the back tarp.
As the crowd went berserk, I watched Djokovic. He looked for a second at the service line to see if there was a mark. He must have found it quickly, because he gave a little nod, put his head down, and started walking toward the net. Defeat, for the first time all year, had been felt, and accepted.
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Most Embarrassing Moment
It happens every time I go to Roland Garros. I say “Bonjour” to one of the waiters in the press lounge. We make a transaction. The waiter hands me my food and says “Bon appetit.” I smile and repeat what I just said: “Bonjour.” I like to imagine a French tourist taking something from me and saying “Hello” instead of “thank you.” Worth a good laugh, for sure.
But it does beat the time I asked for a “jambon et fromage” sandwich a few years ago, and a security guy started to snicker behind me. “Ha, jam-bone,” he said in a mock American accent.
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High Moment, Low Moment
On a less-light note, taking an overseas trip is, if nothing else, a great way to be reminded of how far up and down you can travel, when you’re on your own and out of your element, in your own head in a short period of time. The effect is intensified for me when I’m writing about a tournament. I spend a lot more time on my own, in my own brain, trying to think of something to say that doesn’t just sound like the first thing that came to mind.
The best moments came at the end of the day, after the writing was done, and I could have a glass of wine on my hotel room’s tiny balcony and watch the very, very long Paris sunset. The buildings are low, which means the sky is massive, and at this time of year it doesn’t stop changing colors and configurations until close to 11 P.M. (Recommended soundtrack: Dexter Gordon’s “I’m a Fool to Want You,” which can be found here with cool Blue Note cover art.)
But there’s an inevitable fall, a point when you can’t keep negative thoughts at bay. On a couple of mornings, I found myself walking to Roland Garros, in Paris springtime sunshine, past the trees of the Bois de Bologne, knowing that I could see any tennis match I wanted to see that day. And despite all that, I walked with my head down, staring at the ground, dragged down by some un-nameable, irrational mixture of depression and dread. Does that sound awful? Yeah, kind of. But I’m guessing you know the feeling, too. It’s been said before: You can travel far but you can’t leave yourself behind.
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Speaking of music, what goes with the City of Light? On especially light, bright days, I got into a ska/rock steady kick. One morning, standing on the metro as it traveled above ground to Grenelle Picquot, the stop where I changed, my iPod rolled over to an old, neglected favorite, “Time to Pray,” a Jamaican church-flavored gospel song from the mid-60s by the otherwise unknown Mellow Larks. Hear it here:
Download 1-12 Time To Pray
The car doors burst open as the first piano notes rolled in. I bounced down the stations’s stairs, in the sun, to the singers chanting “Hallelujah!” It was a tiny high that made one of my days, and which, try as I might with different songs on different afternoons in that same bright station, was never to be repeated.
But what I listened to mostly was Dylan. He turned 70 at the tournament’s start, which was a little shocking to me. I thought he was at least 80. But he was old before his time—at 21, Dylan was already singing “In My Time of Dying” and “See That My Grave is Kept Clean,” like a man who had seen it all and was ready to look his maker in the eye.
It’s a testament to how much an inspiration Dylan was, over multiple generations, that the best songs by two great and very different artists were tributes to him: “Song for Bob Dylan,” by David Bowie (“Some words of truthful vengeance/They could pin us to the floor”; “You sat behind a million pairs of eyes and told then how they saw”), and “History Lesson II” by the Minutemen (“Mr. Narrator, this is Bob Dylan to me/My story could be his songs/I’m his soldier child.”)
Count me as another; Dylan’s lines form part of my unconscious. One example: For a long time I used to go around with the phrase, “It’s doom alone that counts,” repeating itself in my mind—I’m sure you do as well. I didn’t know where it came from, until I heard Dylan sing it in the middle of “Shelter from the Storm.”
Dylan’s most Parisian song is “Love Minus Zero”—“In the dimestores and bus stations, people talk of situations/Read books, repeat quotations/Draw conclusions on the wall.” Listening to him for an extended period there, I was floored by the volume and variety of his immortal lines.
It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be
I like to do just like the rest
I like my sugar sweet
Bankers’ nieces seek perfection
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring
If my thought dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
Girl by the whirlpool
Looking for a new fool
Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parking meters
And on and on. One of his best songs, “Visions of Johanna,” is nothing but immortal lines, one after the other, and it includes my favorite Dylan scene:
In the empty lot where the ladies play blind man’s bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls, they whisper of escapades out on the D-train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight and ask himself if it’s him or them that’s insane
Many times have I heard a conversation, at work, on the street, in the subway, in the press room, and wondered, “Who's insane? Them or me?”
Thank you, Mr. Narrator, for telling me how I saw. And happy belated birthday.
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The night of the Djokovic-Federer semi, I finished my post at about 3:00 A.M. I wanted a glass of wine, so I went to the deli down the street (“Epicure Fine” said its yellow neon light) on the off-chance they might still be open. They owner had just shut the grate, but he saw me and let me in. When I picked up a bottle of Sancerre, he recognized me. “You had that before?"
“Yes.” I didn’t want to tell him this was probably the fourth bottle I’d bought from him since I’d been there.
“So it’s good?”
“It does the trick.”
He gave me a bag of cherries to go with it. I walked out thinking, “The French aren’t all bad.” A couple of days later, though, I was back in there. I realized he wasn’t French; he was German.
When I got back to my room that morning, I noticed a Tweet from the NY Times’ Chris Clarey. He had just filed his own story on Federer-Djokovic. I mentioned it to him the next day, and that I'd finished just before him. He summed our thoughts up. “It’s nights like those,” Chris said, “that made us want to be tennis writers in the first place.”
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I started this post with a memorable moment from Federer-Djokovic, so let me finish with another, one that isn’t as somber as the sight of Nole in defeat. It came a little earlier in that grand fourth set.
Federer had a break point, and the two got into a long rally, the kind of rally where a great shot elicits a collective gasp from the audience, which, when the other player returns the ball, elicits a collective “Shhh” from the rest of the audience. And then the point keeps going.
It ended, finally, with Federer trying a drop shot and putting it into the net. The crowd erupted in disappointment. They rocked back and forth. They put their heads between their knees, put their hands over their faces, leaned all the way back and looked at the sky. Mirka laughed, and so did Novak’s mother.
Later, it reminded me of something the NFL quarterback Dan Marino said after he retired. He said he missed the feeling that he used to get on Sundays, the feeling that he “controlled the afternoon.” Not his afternoon. Not his family’s afternoon. Not his friends afternoon. The afternoon. It felt like Federer, for that moment, controlled all of Paris at that moment.
Federer was asked after the final whether he could ever step back in the middle of a big match and appreciate the moment. He said, yeah, he could . . . after he won the third set—which means, essentially, that no, there’s not much time for appreciation when you're in the war zone.
So I’ll try it for him. Watching Chatrier seethe and rock and crack up with laughter at itself after that missed drop, I looked at Federer—who was not laughing—and wrote this down in my notebook: “Must be nice to a be a really good ----ing tennis player. You can start a riot with a drop shot.”