The scattered, small tournaments that inevitably follow a Grand Slam are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there’s a letdown effect. In Melbourne, there was no question that every game, point, and shot mattered; watching Rotterdam today, I found myself wondering exactly what the long-term significance of a rally between Tomas Berdych and Dmitry Tursunov could be.
On the plus side, your mind, with less to engage it, has more freedom to wander. It’s free to look past the players and, particularly when the tournament is in a small indoor venue, at the crowd that's watching them. Over the course of a match, as the camera at the side of the court focuses in on the server, you can get to know the people arrayed behind him. If you keep watching for a week, you might see those same people return, dressed differently each day. (It reminds me of the two season-ticket holders who are always in the front row for Red Sox games at Fenway Park. Baseball fans, have you ever noticed them? One looks a little like Robert Redford; the other usually wears headphones and a leather jacket. They always sit a few seats apart, but don’t appear to be part of the same group. I’ve always wondered if they know each other.)
What do tennis fans in Rotterdam look like? Well dressed, for one. There didn’t appear to be any dock workers in the front rows, anyway. The men wore jackets and ties, and the women had their fancy hair on. The men sat back; the women sat forward; one of the kids—who was also in a jacket—had his head in his hands. He looked like he’d just been grounded for the weekend. Other people read newspapers or fiddled with phones or just sat there, staring straight ahead. I found myself wondering what they were doing there.
Tennis is a world game, and that extends to its spectators. At least in the pricey seats up close, they tend to play to stereotype from tournament to tournament and country to country. To my eye, Dutch tennis fans resemble the Swiss, though there was a certain wax-figure quality to many of the fans who came out in Basel last fall. Rotterdammers tend to move now and then. When I think of German fans now, I think of the retirees of Hamburg who were huddled in winter coats each spring, in the years when the tournament was a lead-in to the French Open.
The slouchiest were in L.A., when the WTA’s tour championships were held there. That may be because, with so many empty seats, there was so much room to slouch. By the evidence of the Hopman Cup, the tennis fans of the greater Perth metropolitan area are good, stolid, undemonstrative folk. The fans in Melbourne are crazier on TV than they are in real life. Generally it’s just a few pockets of the face-painted making the noise. There’s a slouchy quality to the spectators at the Italian Open as well; they look like the anti-Dutch in their dark jackets and jeans and enormous sunglasses. The cameramen there are very good at leering with their lenses over the most attractive women in the crowd. As for the French, I always picture them in blazers, leaning back and smoking, but that’s probably true for about 1 percent of the crowd at Roland Garros at any given moment.
The audiences at the game’s biggest events have changed in the past 30 years. Believe it or not, there used to be a rowdy edge to matches in Centre Court, back when there were standing room only sections stretching down both sidelines. Hundreds of young people were jammed so close that they fell into each other and over each other, as they stood for the duration of five-set matches. They were close enough, apparently, for John McEnroe to smell them. In 1981, he walked along the sidelines staring at the fans in those sections and holding his nose. “This place reeks!’ he yelled a few times. “You people are vultures!” McEnroe quickly thought better of that last comment and amended it: “You’re lower than vultures!” Still, the groundlings burst out in a mad celebration when he beat Bjorn Borg in the final that year. After a series of riots at soccer stadiums in the 1980s, the All England Club was forced to tear out the standing room only sections and replace them with regular seating. The place no longer feels as if it’s about to burst at the seams on finals day.
Something similar has happened at the U.S. Open. When Flushing Meadows opened in 1978, Tennis magazine described the fashion sense there as “the cheerful slob flamboyance of the New York sports fan.” There were halter tops, Sassoon jeans, and shirts unbuttoned to the waist. A lot of men went shirtless—some things have changed for the better. After a brief dalliance with the masses, the tennis audience has gone back toward the upper crust. Though who knows how real that dalliance ever was. In 1978, the concession stands at the National Tennis Center, unlike those at Shea Stadium across the way, sold quiche.
As I said, the spectators in the front row in Rotterdam don’t seem to represent anything like the masses. But it’s better than no fans at all, which was the case at the start of the Robin Soderling-Philipp Kohlschreiber match this afternoon. Whatever they look like, I always think the same thing when I see tennis fans from any country: I hope they’re enjoying it. In the early rounds at these smaller tournaments, it can be hard to tell.