PARIS—The Grand Slam Grounds Pass tradition will, provided my alarm continues to work, return each morning from Roland Garros. As play begins, I’ll try to mix news stories, observations from the courts, and a look at the day ahead. For now, since the only thing that’s really happened here so far is a lot of chatter, I’ll take a spin through the pre-tournament press conferences that the top players dutifully attended on Friday. Let’s see how a few key people are feeling.
Victoria Azarenka
Leave it to the media to create a little extra pressure for a player, pressure that she probably didn’t feel before. Azarenka was asked right off the bat, “How does it feel to start a Grand Slam tournament being the No. 1 player in the world?” She obviously hadn’t thought about it until then.
“Um, well, I have been—it’s not my first week [being No. 1],” she said. Then she got it. “Yeah, but the Grand Slam it’s the first time. I don’t really think about it, that I have to start as a No. 1 player. I’m just here to play the tournament.”
Hopefully she'll still feel that way. Azarenka did, however, admit to feeling some added pressure in general as a No. 1 player. Not to produce results so much, but to represent the sport well. “You feel kind of a little bit more responsibility," she said. "You feel more that you have to be, you know, a role model.”
Azarenka says that her assistant coach, Amelie Mauresmo, has helped in this regard. She’s reminded her just to be herself, because that’s what got her to No. 1 in the first place.
Let’s hope that doesn’t mean she’s going to go back to pulling out of events more often, as she just did in Rome.
Rafael Nadal
Rafa typically likes to remind reporters that there are no easy matches out there, and that the dominance of the top guys is nothing to take for granted. And he started down that road on Friday when he was asked, “How do you explain that only three people can dominate like that?”
“That’s what happened the last couple years,” Rafa began. “Doesn’t mean that’s gonna happen in the future. Every tournament is different. When you start a tournament here or like Wimbledon in a couple of weeks, you look out, you see the draw, and you see that any player can have a good result.”
Any player, Rafa? OK, that was going a little too far.
“Not <em>anyone</em>,” Nadal allowed. “But you have a group that can win, no?”
I wonder who he was thinking of when he said not <em>anyone</em> could have a good result?
You wonder sometimes how Nadal keeps meeting expectations on clay each year. Judging from his words, he does it the old-fashioned way, by taking it one match, and one tournament, at a time.
Referring to Djokovic’s quest for the Nole Slam, Nadal said, “The most difficult part is to win every one. That’s the first thing. Every tournament is difficult in itself. This is not gonna be more difficult because he already won three. That’s the point I want to tell. When I went to Australia in 2011 [to try to win his fourth in a row], I felt zero extra pressure to win that. Because when you start the tournament, when you play, you play day by day.”
Then Rafa wrapped it up philosophically: “I’m not happier today or less happy today [because I] won or lost that match. The life continues.”
“The life continues”: That, apparently, is how you handle expectations.
Roger Federer
One of my favorite Federer quotes of recent years was his line about how he still doesn’t consider himself to be a better player than the guys who were legends when he was a kid, like Ivan Lendl or Bjorn Borg, or the player looked up to, Stefan Edberg. Federer may have surpassed them in Slam titles, and certainly he’ll be remembered someday as the greater champ, but he can't quite get himself to think that way. We can understand where he’s coming from: Like us, he’s still a fan.
Federer started his presser Friday with a similarly wide-eyed look back. He was asked, “What would this title represent for you in your career, and how has the tournament been special and unique for you?”
“I struggled early on a bit because I had up and down results," Federer said. "It was a tough tournament for me from the start. This is, though, the place where I got my first wild card into a Grand Slam back in ’99. I lost to Pat Rafter on Suzanne Lenglen, so I have great memories.”
Apart from the fact that this shows that all wild cards are not evil, what’s interesting is that the highlight for Federer seems to have been getting to play Rafter, the U.S. Open champ at the time. Even a loss to a legend registers as a good memory.
Roger is still a fan. Last year in Australia he said it would be exciting to see Nadal try to win his fourth major in a row. This time, he says, “It will be interesting to follow Novak,” as he tries to do the same thing.
But let’s be clear about who the favorite is: It’s Rafa. “We’re crazy to even talk about it,” Federer says.
