Or should that be “la” scraps? Are leftovers masculine or feminine? I’ll have to call my high school French teacher, though I doubt she'd be too proud of how I’m doing in Paris this week. I haven’t gotten far beyond “bonjour” and “merci” (I’ve kept all of my “ooh la la”s to myself), and I’ve tried those two simple words about 50 different ways. I’m sure I’ve come out sounding just like an American every time.
The humidity has broken, at least for the moment, though as I type this I can feel it building again. The rain felt good last night, and it left the streets of the 16th (those in the know refer to Paris’s neighborhoods by number, so I'll dutifully copy them here) a quietly glamorous black, with cafes gleaming at every corner as far you could see. Before we enter the next weather stage of the tournament, let me look back at what slipped through the cracks of this blog over those very warm early days.
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Looking on the Bright Side
Watching Evgeny Korolev play Novak Djokovic on Monday, I found myself wondering what tennis would be like if Korolev, or someone of his ilk, was the No. 1 player in the world. He’s a ball-basher extraordinaire, a Russian whose manner seems closer to the other German pros. Hat backwards, he walks with brisk steps and keeps his head down. What if his brand of occasionally impressive but mostly artless power-baseline tennis simply could not be stopped? What would happen to the sport? What would it say about the world we live in? We used to wonder the same thing about the tall, one-trick-pony servers at Wimbledon, but they never succeeded in taking over either (other than Goran in 2001, the fluke of all flukes). Why does artistry and style, whether it's Federer’s, Nadal’s, or Sampras’s brand of artistry and style, triumph in the end? Nothing against Korolev; he can be awesome to witness for a game or two at a time, and he's playing the only way he knows how. But seeing him bash his way to defeat against Djokovic, the fact that a player like him can’t dominate seems like something to be profoundly grateful for.
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French Spazz
9:00 A.M. yesterday: It’s early enough that the grounds at Roland Garros are, for once, less than suffocatingly jammed. As I start to cross the main pedestrian thoroughfare, the hand of a security worker reaches out to stop me. Coming the other way is an army of ball kids, in their orange shirts, jogging from one end of the site to the other, singing as they go.
When they get onto the court, these kids begin to hop and bounce with spastic energy. Even when two of them are doing something as simple as handing each other the balls at midcourt, both of them might be jumping up and down as they do it. The ball kids at the U.S. Open, home of the quarterback and the baseball pitcher, throw the balls all over the arena. At Wimbledon, kids in dark blue caps raise their arms ramrod-straight over their heads—they look like they’re standing at attention—when they offer the players a ball. At the French, they've been taught to roll the balls with maximum force, no matter close to each other they are. Even from three feet away, they leap forward wildly and do a full windmill wind-up before letting the ball go. Kinda seems like overkill, but it's fun to watch.
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Baby Talk
Getting back to the language-barrier theme, it’s a humbling experience for an American, who may believe deep down that he runs the world, to come to such a thoroughly international event like the French Open. Few of us can speak French, or anything else, which leaves us, as David Foster Wallace once said of a trip he took to Italy, opening our mouths helplessly and pointing at things—menus, subway maps—like infants. It always seems to me like the French are humoring us while we barrell incomprehensibly through a conversation.
Otherwise, from a listening point of view, the pressroom has much to offer the open-eared Yank. On Saturday, a few British reporters, who follow Andy Murray around the world with the same type of vigilance that the White House press corps follows Barack Obama, were watching Richard Gasquet play the final in Nice. When Gasquet grimaced in pain in the third set, one of them said to another, “You know, he has to play Murray on Monday."
“He does?” his friend said, with the lofty absent-mindedness of a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel. “Well, that is* bloody inconvenient, isn’t it?”
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Hopping Madness
Is it possible to have too much footwork? That’s what I asked myself while watching Victoria Azarenka—you remember her; quarterfinalist last year, crushed in the first round this time—on Sunday. Between shots, she shuffled, she jumped, she even added a little hop-step with her right foot just as her opponent was making contact. Maybe she was watching the ball kids here. The upshot was that Azarenka was often late getting her feet back down on the court and in position for the next shot.
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Spring Cleaning
If you play on clay, you’ve probably had to clean the lines afterward. Have you ever wondered what the fastest way is to get around them? I’ve never found a system that seems any better than any other. You would think that the French, of all people, who need to have them cleaned in two minutes between sets, would have a routine. They do. Here it is:
Use a broom, rather than one of those wheely things, which don’t allow you to start right next to the net.
Begin at the net, on the center service line. Clean that line, then pick up the broom and walk to the one of the two spots where a sideline meets the service line. Clean the whole service line. Walk back up to the net and then clean that entire sideline. Continue cleaning along the baseline (don’t stop to do the hash mark yet), and then clean the other sideline line. Come back down the doubles sideline on that side. Pick up the broom and walk the length of the baseline, stopping now to wipe the hash mark with your foot. Clean the other doubles sideline.
I have no idea whether this is any faster than any other system. But it is a system.
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Body Language
Is there another sport that teaches you to read body language the way tennis does? Watching a match haphazardly on my TV monitor yesterday while I typed, I kept missing the actual rallies and then looking back up to see the players getting ready for the next point. I tried an experiment: From their faces, could I tell if they had won or lost the previous point? I was right about 80 percent of the time. Try it: There must be something in our faces, in the knit of the eyebrows or the set of the shoulders, that automatically communicates concern or hopefulness.
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If You Can’t Talk to Those Around You . . .
You might end talking to yourself. I was walking up a set of stairs by myself on Monday, heading toward a Marcos Baghdatis match. As I looked at his name on the schedule in my hand, I suddenly, involuntarily, burst out, “The bag man!”
When I got to the top of the steps, I looked to my right and saw two good-looking French women, in the red-and-white uniforms that the tournament hostesses wear here, smiling at me. It wasn't a good kind of smile.
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Breaking the Language Barrier at Last
This year, rather than the metro, I’ve taken advantage of my press hotel’s shuttle transport, which is a van with a big green Perrier sign on each side. My driver yesterday was a Frenchwoman who spoke decent but not perfect English. After she’d stamped out a cigarette and got into the driver’s seat, we talked about which sports we liked. She follows rugby, but not soccer; rugby is played by gentleman, soccer by dumb jerks, she maintained (yes, I’m translating a little roughly there).
She told a story about a trip to Florida she’d taken with her family, where they’d ended up staying at the house of a famous, reclusive retired American football star.
“O.J. Simpson?” was, I'm not sure why, my first guess.
“No. Jonah Miss, I think is his name.”
“I don’t know who that is . . .”
“J-O N-A-M . . .”
“Joe Namath!”
“Ah, oui!”
Sports and celebs: The universal language.
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Rain has struck Roland Garros at the moment, but I should be back with something later today.