So I’m lying in my hotel bed in Melbourne last night, and my body can’t decide whether it wants to pass out cold or get up and go play three hard sets of tennis. Such is the result of flying 21 hours west and crossing the equator and the International Dateline in the process. You don’t know what day it is, what hemisphere you’re in, or what you want to do.
I was in the middle of trying to decide when, at exactly 5:00 A.M., I heard a hard knock on the door of the room next to mine.
“Oi!” a man shouted.
“Uh, what,” came a flat, dazed reply from inside the room.
“Get up!”
“Shut up.”
The man outside walked away, seemingly in triumph. I heard another hard knock and another “Oi!” down the hallway.
Please alert Foster’s to their next commercial. They should just show this scene and have their usual Aussie narrator say: “Australian for wake-up call.”
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I’ve never been to Oz, the Lucky Country, Down Under, the Land of Professional Reprobates, but I know one thing about it already: It’s the kind of place that has a lot of nicknames. What do we call ourselves in the U.S.? “The World’s Last Remaining Superpower”? Not as much fun, is it? As a tennis writer, I really should have made it here sooner. Australia is tennis history. But I took the Euro Slams and left Oz in the good hands of Peter Bodo, Kamakshi Tandon, Tom Perrotta, and Abby Lorge. More important, those 21 airplane hours were highly daunting to this, to use a tennis term, tentative flyer. But I survived them without incident this time. I also got a chance to see a very good movie I’d missed last year, The Social Network. I saw it so many times over those 21 hours, I think I have it memorized. Now I'm excited to be here and see an event that's always been a TV favorite. The career (watching) Slam is mine at last.
There were even a couple of memorable moments to the trip. When we were out over the Pacific, crossing the equator at 40,000 feet, the man sitting in the window seat next to me got up to take a stroll. I moved over and opened the blind. Outside was a Milky Way like I’ve never seen it. It looked like a thin cloud of stars stretching from one end of the universe to the other. How can it be that for all of human history we couldn’t fly, didn’t believe we were even meant to fly (see Icarus) until the Wright Brothers did it at the start of the 1900s? Now, a little more than one century later, we fly at 40,000 feet over the equator with just the stars for company, and no one gives it a second thought. I was the only person in the plane looking out the window. I guess you can never underestimate our capacity for boredom. But capitalism, realize it or not, has created wonders in record time.
The second moment came when we made our descent over New Zealand in the morning. It’s always the same, but it never gets old. You fly in total black-hole darkness for hours, and then you come down in blinding brightness. The windows are all open now; you get the green countryside below you, and then you hit the clouds. They make the whole cabin flicker with light, while they rock the plane up and bring it down with that slightly sickening but fun unpredictability—you’re on an amusement-park ride now. Seeing New Zealand for the first time, I remembered again how flying makes the world seem so much less separated. I think of New Zealand normally, and I think of someplace utterly foreign and disconnected from America, from another planet altogether—the idea of actually being there seems absurd. But it isn’t; you fly half a day and there it is, on the same globe, looking a little like a Caribbean Island. A beautiful, laid-back-seeming place; like Melbourne itself, it has tremendous clouds, fancifully sculpted like the roof of a cathedral. If I ever get my dream job as a cloud-watcher, I’ll move to New Zealand. I wish I could have stayed for a while.
I spent yesterday wandering Melbourne Park and into a tiny bit of the city itself. I’ll have more reports on both of those soon—as for its downtown, think San Franscisco, patchouli, trolleys, and naturally, a lot of fast-food joints. But I’ve got alot more to see. One thing that’s immediately appealing is how central the tennis courts are to the city. I walked over a bridge from downtown around 9:00 last night and immediately heard the sound of tennis balls. The qualifying, which has been delayed because of rain, was still going strong on every court.
For these two weeks, I’m hoping to post more frequent, slightly shorter articles than I normally do from tournaments. And I’ll be doing daily podcasts, as well as regular mailbags and live chats, so let me know how the tournament appears to you, wherever you are watching it.
For now, I'll get started with a musical soundtrack of my favorite reprobate Aussie bands. Maybe it will get you in the mood for the Open’s opening bell on Sunday night.
All you need: "Gonna happen in the city/Be with my girl she's so pretty."
90s Aussie Indie band does their soulful home on the Outback thing. Their deepest song is here, but I can't name it on this family website.
The Go Betweens, maybe the deepest and smartest of all indie bands, and the greatest product of now- flooded Brisbane. Told you the clouds were good here. RIP Grant McLennan (the singer on the right).
The Aussies had to know punk, and here it is. The Saints in fabled '77.
I went to see the Dirty Three in the mid-90s, and of course there were many many cries for them to do a cover of their most famous rocking countrymen, AC/DC. Finally the guitarist played the opening chords to "Highway to Hell." Everyone in the room was stunned at how good, how simple and stupid and perfect, they sounded. Here's an early classic, which I include for the moving video that accompanies it. Only in Australia, land of happy reprobates, would an anthem of freedom ("it was all in the name of liberty") be the story of a man breaking out of prison. RIP Bon Scott, the singer and protagonist of said moving video.
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I'm off to watch some qualies and attend a few obligatory pre-tournament pressers (see, it really is work.) Be back later.