by Pete Bodo**
Dick Norman, who is a Belgian tennis player, not an American golfer or Marine drill sergeant, made a strategic career decision at the end of last year. He decided that he would forget about singles and become a doubles specialist. Many players have gone down that road before, some after knocking around on the Challenger circuit for a few years with no luck, some when they realize they have an extraordinary gift for doubles and some critical shortcoming (poor movement) in singles. Some even decided to become double specialists about two months after being weaned from breast milk, like Bob and Mike Bryan.
But nobody, as far as I know, made that decision at the age of 37. So meet Dick Norman, and forgive me for writing about a men's doubles match on the day of the Roland Garros women's singles semifinals (until later, or perhaps early tomorrow). But hey, it isn't every day that a 38-year old guy not named John McEnroe gets to play in a main draw doubles final - even Mac never accomplished that at a Grand Slam event.
It's also not every day that said 38-year old gets to final of said tournament after losing the first seven games of the semifinal, facing three match points, and winning - get this - 17 fewer points than the losers. But that's just what Norman and his partner, non-38-year-old Wesley Moodie, did Thursday. And if you wanted to heap outrageous atop improbable after getting over the hump of impossible, try this: the guys Norman and Moodie beat on the red clay of Roland Garros were Bob and Mike Bryan.
"I still can't believe I'm sitting here," Mike Bryan remarked, in tiny Interview Room No. 3, from which they don't even bother generating official transcripts. And while you might expect Bryan to have been shattered, devastated, angry, depressed and/or bitter, the truth is he was none of the above. He was in a bemused state of shock. "No, I can't ever remember another match like this one. It has the most sting to it, that's for sure."
Bob Bryan was unavailable for comment, as he was scouting the bridges across the Seine for a good place from which to jump off with Mike. Just kidding, of course - Bob couldn't talk because he was taking care of mixed doubles business.
But Norman and Moodie could, and just to add another layer of incongruity to all this, if you didn't know better you might, going by appearances, peg the wrong guy as the 38-year old. Norman, wearing a fresh and clean version of the fluorescent yellow Adidas shirt he had on for the match, is a lean, handsome, ginger-haired guy who pushes 6-8. Moodie, pale and balding, wore a black t-shirt and could be taken for a youthful 50, although he's just 30.
When I asked Norman if he were some kind of fitness freak or merely a model of good genetics, he replied "I'd say genetics. . ."
Later, Bart Lagae, my good buddy who writes for Belgium's Het Nieuwsblad, told me that Norman tries to steer clear of Ivo Karlovic because, despite Norman's sinewy and youthful appearance, he knows that Ivo works much harder on his fitness. And he doesn't like to be called on it. Whatever Norman's been drinking ought to be bottled and sold for anyone merely getting older.
By the way, if the name Norman rings a bell, it may be because of his career result, a fourth-round run at Wimbledon. Although he was taken out by Boris Becker, Norman had caused a sensation when he bombed out another former number one. But before he could get into that, Moodie chided him: "You beat my childhood idol in that one. Stefan Edberg."
"It feels like a previous life," Norman said, with a shrug. But when I asked him if people remember (you know danged well that Norman does) that great run, concedes that "Yeah, especially in Belgium. I think my name is connected to Wimbledon. Most people's brain, when you say Norman, they are going to say Wimbledon."
Norman's best ranking, achieved about 15 months after that great run, is 85, but let's remember that he hasn't "officially" retired from singles, right?
Having been pre-occupied with the big dogs here, I knew very little about Norman's campaign, so I had a lot of catching up to do. Turns out Norman has been the closest thing tennis has to the indestructible journeyman - a real-life, globalist version of that American minor league baseball player portrayed by Kevin Costner in the movie, Bull Durham. This is a guy who just last April played through qualifying and won the Mexico City Challenger to earn a whopping $5,000 (playing one more match than, say, the winner of the French Open singles will have done). I guess he meant that he was focusing on doubles instead of singles starting this year. No reason a guy can't dabble, right?
I did wonder if a guy of 38 wouldn't be a little concerned about getting laughed out of the locker room when he went looking to revive his career ("It was getting harder and harder to stay in the Top 100 in singles," Norman admitted) as a doubles player. I was making a joke there, but Norman didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea. He said:
"I think it's more the opposite. I think there are more people who envy me than people who are saying, Hey, you're crazy. What you doing playing doubles at 38? I think today there's more people who are saying, Oh, sh*&. I wish I was still playing and playing a final at the French."
And all kidding aside, a fair number of players have had late-career success in doubles - in some cases, very late career. But Norman is the oldest to contest a Grand Slam final since Sherwood Stewart did it Down Under in 1984, edging Norman out by a few months.
Moodie and Norman were a pair of tennis saddle tramps; their paths kept criss-crossing on the Challenger trail. They'd more or less become friends some time ago at a tournament in South Africa, and their wives hit it off, too. Each of them, Moodie proudly said, had two small daughters (can that be the key to successful doubles partnerships?). They decided to throw in, although it was pretty hard to pin down exactly how. When I asked how the partnership was formed, Norman said: "Um, well, I decided to start playing doubles from this year on, and Wes asked me a couple of months ago."
Moodie turned to him: "I asked or you asked me? "
"Wes asked me," Norman reiterated.
"Well, later," Moodie grudgingly admitted. "Yeah."
You know how it is with these old guys, the memory goes first.
Veterans can be hard to kill; neither the old leathery flesh nor the weathered mind is that easy to penetrate. But what happened today was borderline paranormal. Bart Lagae watched the entire match and said that until the third set, the only time Norman and Moodie played well was when they were break or match point down.
Realistically, though, both men have gigunda serves and that helped their cause in a variety of ways. As Mike Bryan said, "It was like we wanted to make Dick Norman bend (something older folks do at their peril), but we just couldn't get far enough into a point to do it."
!Dick Bryan said it could have been a 40-minute match that ended, Oh-and-two, Oh-and-three, or Oh-and-four. Only it didn't. "I was surprised by how badly Norman was playing early in the match, then by how totally transformed he was when he looked death in the eye. We had so many chances (like that 0-40 jam Moodie found himself in while serving at 4-5 in the second set), and they never had a sniff. And then we lost."
And in case you were wondering if Moodie feels like he's playing with a 38-year old, here's his take:
"By the way he moves, feels like he's 18. No, I mean, there are a lot of older doubles players doing well. I think it's just unusual that he's 38 and just now he's focusing on doubles this year, which I think can be quite amazing, actually.
It's quite encouraging to see him very excited. We've gone out on the practice court, and he's very eager to learn, bring out the video camera and videoing practice session and going back to his room and seeing what he can improve on.
So in many ways, I feel like I'm playing with a guy who's about 21 and just starting to learn things about the tour, which is good, I think."
Don't laugh- when I asked Norman if he planned to play until retirement age, Norman said "Yeah," Moodie said, "Sixty" and Norman confirmed that that was the official age for mandatory retirement, at least in Belgium.