PARIS—This is the first morning in Paris that bright sun hasn’t come blasting through my hotel window. It’s cloudy today, and there’s a rush-hour traffic jam on the highway nearby. Which reminds me that a trip to a Grand Slam is a trip out of reality, out of daily commuting and working headaches, and into a big, two-week-only playground. It's a status-based playground, as I wrote yesterday, but I guess everything has its price. At the moment, day to day life having nothing to do with tennis is sort of hard to imagine.
Showers ended play early on Wednesday, and a few matches will be resumed today. Below are some other odds and ends from yesterday, and a quick look at another crowded afternoon ahead. As you can see above, our recent Fan Club post on Nicolas Mahut has obviously inspired great things from the man. Now that he knows he has fans, who can say how far he’ll go? Not too far, most likely: Mahut plays Federer next.
Speaking of the rain, it didn’t suit Jo-Wilfried Tsonga yesterday. Tsonga, whose match with Cedric-Marcel Stebe was called after they’d split sets, was grumpy. He didn’t like the weather, he didn’t like the commotion that the kids were making in the crowd on Lenglen, he didn’t like the line judge that he ran into on one point. Grumpy Jo finally got his wish—to get out of there—when rain start falling heavily. He and Stebe will be back out on Lenglen today. I would expect a happier Tsonga, but I would also expect a renewed fight from the hard-hitting Stebe. He’s undersized, but his tenacity is impressive.
Each day at a major we get a “state of the big three” press conference. Two days ago it was Rafa’s; yesterday we had them from Federer and Djokovic. In the press room, these are generally stop-whatever-you’re-doing events.
Both pressers were low-key, though—neither player had struggled all that mightily in their second-rounders. Djokovic admitted that he probably won’t play mixed doubles at the Olympics, and he said he was happy to see the return of Brian Baker, whom he remembered well as a talented, slightly older junior.
Federer said he didn’t remember Baker, but that he likes his story and hopes to play him, to “see how good he is.” Federer was also asked who he thought had the best return of the Top 3. He said, not surprisingly, that Djokovic is the best when he’s on, but he also mentioned how tough Nadal’s return can be, especially on clay. “He’s molded his return game around his baseline game,” Federer said, and he can drive you back with heavy topspin right away. As for his own return, Federer left that to others to judge.
In other news, Federer also testified that the Queen of England is “very sweet, very nice, very polite, of course,” and that “Daniel Nestor is incredible.” One of those things is more surprising than the other.
Tennis on TV is a game of faces, especially when you watch without sound. The constant close-ups of the players give us an unnatural one-way intimacy with them—it’s like seeing someone when they’re alone, and they don’t know there’s a camera on them (or they’re too excited to remember). The match yesterday between Marion Bartoli and Petra Martic, as I caught it on my TV monitor in the press room, was, if nothing else, a wonderfully stark contrast in close-ups. Bartoli, who was whirling and staring at her father after every point, was at her comical eye-making finest—she gouges with those things. Martic, on the other hand, was the picture of serenity as she waited to return serve. Serenity won in three.
Yesterday spelled the end of Brian Baker, folk hero. For now, that is. You have to like the way Baker came back from two sets down against Frenchman Gilles Simon, in Paris. Baker said he wasn’t overly tired in the fifth, but that he may have gotten tight after playing with nothing to lose for two sets—you have nothing to lose, until you do. But, story and surgeries aside, isn’t it great to have a new face suddenly dropped into the sport, with a fully formed game? That backhand will be worth watching, no matter what Baker’s results are going forward.
You wouldn’t think that the French Open would beat the U.S. Open to the punch when it came to finding a way to marry new technology with sponsorship opportunities, would you? That appears to be what’s happened, though, in the case of of Roland Garros’s smart-phone charging stands. If you’re running low, you take your device and plug it in at one. Does Flushing Meadows have these? I haven’t seen them, but they're a popular feature here.
Lastest tennis generational divide: Those who made jokes about Adrian Ungur’s name by referencing The Hunger Games, and those who immediately thought of Felix Unger of Odd Couple fame. I'm sad to say that I fell into the latter—i.e., older—category.
Latest running tennis-nerd joke: Calling a "Hindrance!" after something bad happens to you.
Latest tennis folk hero, now that Brian Baker has left us: Why not Eva Asderaki? Let her take charge, umpire every match, and rid the game of all noise-making once and for all.
Thursday’s highlights:
National hero Virginie Razzano is last up in the Bullring today against Arantxa Rus. We’ll see if a home crowd can get her over the Inevitable Letdown Syndrome (ILS). Rus beat Kim Clijsters here last year.
Two tall boys, John Isner and Milos Raonic, play their second-rounders. Isner gets Chatrier, against Frenchman Paul-Henri Mathieu. Settle in.
Rafael Nadal, like Novak and Roger before him, is exiled to Lenglen today, to face Denis Istomin, while Andy Murray goes first in Chatrier.
For some reason, Caroline Wozniacki also gets Chatrier, against an Australian. Have the French forgotten that she’s No. 9 now, not No. 1?
Side-court matches to watch: Marcos Baghdatis vs. Nicolas Almagro, on intimate Court 2; Tipsarevic and Chardy on the same court; Stakhovsky vs. old man Tommy Haas on Court 6
Bullring match to watch: Ferrer vs. My New Favorite Head Case (MNFHC), Benoit Paire
And finally, a match I’m hoping to check out purely for enjoyment’s sake, the Battle of the One-Handers, Richard Gasquet vs. Grigor Dimitrov, on Lenglen. The best thing about that this one? Both guys can’t lose it.