PARIS—One advantage of the compact nature of Roland Garros is that it’s easy, during a slow hour in the second week, to stumble onto a junior match. The side courts where the kids play at Flushing Meadows are mostly off the main thoroughfare, and I somehow managed to miss the junior event entirely at Melbourne this year until the finals, which I couldn’t miss because they were played inside Rod Laver Arena. In Paris you can walk a few yards from Chatrier and get a glimpse of a player you might be watching inside that great stadium three or four or five years from now.
In the Aussie finals, I had my first look at Chicago native Taylor Townsend, who won the girls' title in Melbourne at the auspicious age of 15. On Tuesday, with an hour to spare before the women’s quarterfinals were scheduled to begin, I looked for some juniors to watch and happened upon Townsend, the top seed here, again.
The match was on Court 6, which is situated near the middle of the grounds, but feels far more out of the way when you actually go in and sit there. This was the same court where, a week or so ago, I had wedged myself into a packed and noisy set of bleachers on a very warm late afternoon to watch Brian Baker take on Xavier Malisse.
That match feels like years, or at least many seasons, ago. It’s a mellow scene now, on this much cooler and breezier spring morning. No ushers or ropes keep fans out of a junior match; we can come and go without having to wait for a change of ends. Not many people come, of course. The stands are half full, mostly with family members, coaches—including, to see Townsend, USTA junior development director Jose Higueras—and spectators searching for a place to eat a sandwich before the pros get underway. There’s room to sit down and lean back in the small, semi-elastic seats that are the standard at Roland Garros, and which seem to have grown more elastic over the years. You can virtually lie down in them if you like. They’re very good, among other things, for keeping an eye on Paris’s slow-moving clouds during changeovers.
What are the differences between a junior and a pro match? One that becomes clear after a game or two is that the chair umpire is calling everything except the service lines. Because he has a microphone, he doesn’t have to scream, the way line judges do. When the ball lands long or wide, there’s a slight delay before he almost whispers “Out.” It goes with the mellow vibe. In the time that I’m watching, there are no arguments over his calls.
Other differences. Juniors, or at least junior girls, do things like walk over before the coin toss and have a friend throw them some sunscreen while they dance to whatever their listening to under a set of giant headphones. Between points, they'll look at what people are eating in the stands. In the warm-up, if one of them hits a bad feed to her opponent while she’s at the net, the two girls will look at each other and crack up. Junior girls, if they start to celebrate a shot and then hear it called out by the umpire, will put their hands over their mouths in embarrassment. Junior girls, or at least Taylor Townsend, will fold their sweat pants up neatly and correctly before putting them in their racquet bag. She'll also wear a white bow in her hair when she plays.
Later, I get a chance to see another promising U.S. junior, Alexandra Kiick, whose father is Jim Kiick, running back for the fabled, undefeated, perpectually champagne-popping 1972 Miami Dolphins. Kiick, 16, looks good in a three-set win, but most entertaining is the running dialogue she keeps with herself. After grazing herself on one missed forehand, she walks back to the baseline shaking her head and muttering.
“I mean, who hits their leg on a shot?” she asks in self-disgusted amazement. Despite this moment of clumsiness, Kiick wins.
Townsend also wins, before losing the next day, both times in three sets. Patrick McEnroe says he likes her “easy power,” and you can see why from up close. Townsend can flick a forehand past her opponents seemingly at will, and she has good hands around the net. In her second-round match, she serves it out impressively at 5-4 in the third, winning one point with a delicate drop shot and the next with a powerful overhead. The following day, though, Townsend can’t escape her up-and-down play, and despite making a terrific comeback to win the first set, falls in three to Slovakia's Anna Schmiedlova (pictured above).
Everything is raw out here, on these spring mornings at Roland Garros, from the play to the emotion. Sometimes the girls don’t quite believe what’s happening themselves. As Kiick asks herself, after one of her forehands flies wide for no apparent reason: “Who does that?” Juniors do.
The future—possibly the pros, possibly the money, possibly the fame—will get here soon enough. But, and this is the fun part for fans, it hasn't made it to Court 6 quite yet.