It can’t be an accident that people come to the desert to do their consciousness-altering. A few hours in this strange, dry, diffuse, all-encompassing, deceptive heat is enough to make you start seeing things. I sat and watched a terrific first set between Jose Acasuso and Mikhail Youzhny without being able to shake the feeling that there was something hazy and buzzing right in front of my eyes. An air-conditioned press room was the only thing that saved me. Lucky me—I may still be wandering in a daze if I had to stay outside all day. So, that said, you may want to take a few of these Day 2 observations with a grain of salt.
I can’t think of any other format right now, so I’ll stick with the tried and true timeline. It suits the experience of the early days of any big dual-gender tournament, where you pop from place to place to place in a futile effort to see it all.
8:00 A.M.: Yesterday I felt shockingly clear-headed when I woke up. Today it’s back to normal—i.e., grogginess. The night before involved large margaritas and end-of-night pool playing at the local swank hotel I’m not staying in. My last memory is seeing a group of side-parted, jacket-wearing, big-choppered, blindingly-white young people walk into the bar and thinking: “Finally, after all these years, I have found them: The Republicans.”
9:00 A.M.: Overheard by Sarah Unke in the Holiday Inn breakfast room: A woman reviewing the assets of one 20-year-old Spaniard named Rafael Nadal—“I can’t wait to see Nadal. Those guns and those buns!” Sarah said she laughed so loud the group of ladies looked over at her. She had to pretend she was laughing at something she was reading on her computer.
11:00: It’s practice time, and Nadal is back at it, going through a full, fast, 60-minute workout two hours before he’s scheduled to play a match. Today he starts a little distracted, maybe edgy or nervous. He gets the nerves out by drilling a couple forehands into the back fence. After that, he settles in and you can hear him grunting from four courts away.
Just like yesterday, while Nadal grunts, Andy Murray is busy moaning a few courts away. He’s hitting with Novak Djokovic today and playing as poorly as yesterday. Gilbert has this piece of advice after one point: “You hit your nice first serve, then you just push the next ball back in and lose the advantage.” Murray nods and stares at the ground. At the end, Gilbert looks at him sternly and says: “I want 15 minutes of good effort. This is a guy I want you to give a good effort against.” I’ll be curious to see how Murray plays in matches this week; if practice is any barometer in tennis (I’m not sure if it is), he’ll struggle. When I walked away, I heard him muttering, “You have no game.”
Djokovic, meanwhile, looks solid. His kick serve is nastier up close, and you can see from just a few practice points that he’s more naturally aggressive than Murray—he transitions to net with absolute ease. I imagine Gilbert wishing his own student did a little more of that.
12:00: Indian Wells really does offer unique viewing access of the players. There’s a lawn next to the courts where the Euros get out and play soccer, in full view of everyone. Today, Djokovic and Marcos Baghdatis are among the participants. Baghdatis is the only guy with his shirt on. That’s probably a good thing; I was told here that he refuses to practice more than three straight days because he doesn’t want tennis to feel like a “job.” His fitness regimen consists exclusively of of rec soccer.
1:00: I see a crowd four-deep surrounding an empty court. This can only mean one thing: Superman is coming to slap a few balls around. And right on time, Roger Federer appears to claps and whoops and “oh-my-God”s and “he’s so cute”s.
Superman looks, well, a little sleepy. He emerges from the throng unsmiling, head down, his mop of hair in his eyes. He looks like an overgrown prep-school student. The crowd immediately goes silent.
There’s another player with him, someone I’ve never seen before. Unlike every other pro on the practice courts, Fed has no coach, or anyone else, with him. Yesterday I told you that the pros make every shot count—not Federer. To say he’s “relaxed” to start would be a gross understatement. He’s just flicking his shots back, testing his strings, trying not to move too much. He starts a few rallies by hitting the ball between his legs—pretty cool. He’s the anti-Nadal even on the practice court.
Superman and his partner do speed things up, of course—there are about 500 people watching, after all. But in the 20 minutes I watch, I don’t think I see Federer hit a single full-swing forehand. At one point he sits down and a fan screams, “Roger!” Federer lifts his head slowly in the direction of the sound and stares blankly for about 10 seconds.
There are two things I notice about Federer in this setting, where I’m not distracted by real points. First, he’s longer than any of the pros I’ve seen here—that is, his height and arm length give him enormous range. Second, he generates the most racquet-head speed, with the greatest ease, of anyone. Federer is, if nothing else, the greatest wrist-snapper of all time.
During all this, I get a chance to overhear a few fans’ perspective on Federer. I guess I would describe it as “slightly misinformed.” When he comes out, the guy next to me says, “That’s Roger Feder-ah.”
“Feder-ah?” his wife asks.
“Yeah, Fed-er-ah. With an ‘a’”
The weirdest aspect of all this to me is seeing Roger Federer pick up balls. He doesn’t look like he enjoys it. At one point he tries to start a rally while he’s up at the net and hits the first ball into the tape three straight times. The crowd remains silent.
2:00: Youzhny-Acasuso—two fine players give us the best set of the tournament so far while highlighting the glory of the one-handed backhand. Their points alternate between slice wars, where each bends lower with every shot, and flowing topspin backhands to the corners.
The one-handed backhand is a shot that can have a signature. Acasuso’s is the elaborately smooth take-back, Youzhny’s the oddly gripped push through the contact zone.
2:30: The sun is just about to go through me by now, but I troop deep into the outer courts to watch U.S. surprise up-and-comer and dude-next-door Sam Querrey put a beatdown on Christophe Rochus, who’s a full 14 inches shorter than his opponent.
Querrey wins and looks pretty good doing it. He’s got Federer-like racquet-head speed on the forehand, and his Karlovic-ian serve will save him from many sins over the coming years. Next step, as my colleague James Martin points out: Improve the slice backhand for defensive purposes. Right now it sits up and doesn’t skid through.
Querrey’s a Southern Cal local, and he’s been followed here by some high school buddies. Their shirts are off and they’ve painted letters on their chests that spell “Samurai!” Except the “S” won’t stand up, so they keep showing their support with “amurai!” For his part, Querrey, laid back man that he is, walks into his press conference, takes off one of the sneakers he just played in, and relaces it right on the interview table as he’s answering questions.
5:30: Ah, the sun has disappeared—beautifully, behind the towering hills surrounding the courts. I head out to see a little of Gasquet and Argentine youth Juan Del Potro. You couldn’t ask for a better tennis setting—the courts here are much easier to navigate than at Flushing Meadows and Key Biscayne, and there’s a pleasantly lax sensibility to the tournament in general. Gasquet and Del Potro put on a solid exhibition of power-baseline-slow-court tennis for the folks. (It’s more entertaining than it sounds.) Del Potro goes down in a tight first set after a fit of overhitting. But I like his power, and his two-handed backhand—he attacks it, rather than just flipping it back into the court and waiting for a forehand.
12:30: Let me go back a few hours and end with my favorite, and most unexpected, part of the day. I went out to watch Olga Poutchkova, another touted Russian blonde who has proclaimed herself a model/player. Next to me are two 40-something California-type sports fans, dressed in their playing gear and baseball hats. Except that they’re rooting hard for Poutchkova’s Russian opponent, the terminally nondescript veteran Elena Likhovtseva. After one forehand winner, they both blurt “Wow! at the same time. One adds, “I love the way she jumps into that shot!” After a miss by Elena, one moans, “Oh, she was there!”
Likhovtseva notices them cheering during one changeover and makes a quizzical face—“Who are those guys?” But she also smiles slightly, and actually begins to play better. She breaks back, wins the first set in a tiebreaker, and closes out the second over her higher-seeded and much younger opponent.
I know these guys sound, well, a little weird on paper, but they aren’t in person. They’re classic American sports fans, but they respect tennis enough to get excited about it the way they would for any other sport. It’s a heartening thing to see, and yet another reason to keep coming to tennis tournaments.