!90285227 by By Pete Bodo*
*[[Sorry, folks, I goofed on the auto-post; this was meant to go up much earlier today. I''ll have a Crisis Center by 11:30 am, so if you choose to comment here, keep it on topic pls.]]
If William Armstrong Custer could speak to you from his grave, he would tell you the same thing any real, living military man might: that a battle almost never goes as planned; combat is an unpredictable and messy, shaped by unforeseen circumstances and unexpected actions and events.
So it was yesterday, with the Battle of Chile - the Fernando Gonzalez vs. NIcolas Massu first-round US Open match-up that had Chilephiles everywhere licking their chops - or weeping and gnashing their teeth because it seemed unfair that the flower of Chilean tennis (both men, after all, are Olympic Games medalists) would inevitably be halved so early at the last Grand Slam event of 2009. And this event presents ample opportunity for both men, who are adept at playing tennis on asphalt.
Tennis, of course, is never as ugly as warfare, either literally or metaphorically. Those battle-shaping wild cards known to men of war - unexpected fog, a breakdown in the supply lines owing to a washed out bridge, a slacker officer who neglects a critical chore - simply don't exist in tennis. If it rains, you postpone the match. There's plenty of food in the player lounge, all of it free. Your coach decides to take a catnap in the sunshine starting with the third service game and so what? He's can't coach you anyway, once the yellow bullets begin flying.
Most tennis is played under nearly ideal and absolutely predictable conditions, and that may help explain this terrible prejudice we have for artfully played tennis, for riveting, dramatic matches that have as many sub-plots and as satisfying an ending as a well-crafted movie or novel. Who wants to watch a bad tennis match? In fact, how often do you even get the chance to watch a complete stinker, an ugly mess, a train-wreck of a match?
Almost never. Good matches are a dime a dozen. These players (with a few exceptions on the WTA side of the divide) are gloriously capable and the field of play is obsessively controlled (Quiet, please!) to ensure that nothing stands in the way of the combatants ability to produce a gem, the absolute best tennis a spectator's money can buy.
Don't you ever get sick of that much pure, disgusting, unmitigated excellence?
I do, or I would, at least more often, if we had more chance to revel in the wonders of a grotesquely unpredictable, artless confrontation that reminds us more of mud wrestling than ballet. But we're brainwashed, and I'm as susceptible as anyone. Besides, spectacularly erratic players are driven from the tour by the unforgiving ranking system. Head cases usually mesmerize us because they're fascinating in a morbid kind of way, and that encourages us to appreciate and wax philosophical over their flawed genius. We look at a scoreboard, see that some guy is winning 6-2, 4-1, and go ho-hum - no point in going out to watch that one. We're constantly herded back into the corral of excellence and pressured to bow to great tennis. Quiet, please!
For those reasons, when I saw that Gonzalez had won the first set of the Battle of Chile, 6-3, and was up a break at 4-3 in the second, I almost decided not to go out to watch. This was predictable; Gonzo was the better all-around player. But it was a little after 4 pm (which is when the late-summer sunlight goes soft and rich and the air begins to cool, which is the best time of all to watch tennis - or do most anything else), and the atmosphere in the watch-fob stadium was bound to be entertaining. To Chileans, the flag is as fashionable a form of outerwear as a black satin cloak is to a vampire, and who can resist that goofy but chili-pepperish chant:
Chi-Chi-Chi,
Lei, lei, Lei
Viva Chile!!!! Wooooo-hoooooooo!
So out I went, to sit among the fans a few rows back from the umpire's high-chair, the intervening benches occupied by many fans wrapped in the red, white and blue Chilean flags, or wearing shirts replicating it. This might still be fun, especially if Massu makes a run that shakes the crowd out of what appeared to be somnolence. Gonzo held easily in the next game, for 5-3, failing to dent the general lassitude among the spectators. Oh, once in a while a lonely voice cried out, Vamos 'Nando, or, Vamos Nico'. But on the whole, it was like experiencing the calm before the storm (when there's no storm on the horizon).
When Massu served to stay in the set, I began to better understand why the atmosphere was so dull. He went down love-30 on a double fault, crashed a forehand into the backstop, and played an all-around ugly game to lose the second set - punctuating his ham-fisted errors with guttural cries of sheer disgust.
I started to file out with the large body of fans who had decided that enough is enough; what chance did Massu have of coming back after making such a hash of things? But then I realized that it had been a very long time since I'd seen a woefully bad match, one full of shanked groundies, double faults, mis-hit smashes, cross-court backhands that mysteriously morphed into off-the-frame drop shot winners. Maybe it was worth sticking around. Maybe this match had potential.
As the men walked out to start the third set, I heard a few desultory shouts of Vamos, Nico' or Go Gonzo, but nothing that threatened to fire up the crowd. Gonzalez promptly ran off four points, with Massu seemingly distracted and uncaring. Massu then went down 15-40, double-break point. but he unexpectedly slashed away and fought his way back to 1-all on a smash (it squirted off the frame in a crazy way, but as he was on top of the net, the ball still fell good).
Gonzo held the next game, surrendering just one point. He was playing reasonably well, and dressed for the part in black shorts and socks (and here I thought that was an absolute no-no), a dazzling white shirt with a silver slash across the chest, and black Adidas shoes that looked suspiciously like they were made of patent leather. By contrast, Massu had on baggy khaki shorts and a collar-less orange surfer-style shirt, with his signature black pony tail poking out from beneath his trucker's cap. Hey, look, it's Jimmy Buffet (except he's got on tennis shoes, not flip-flops), no wonder he's playing like. . .Jimmy Buffet.
On the changeover, the camera in the elevated broadcast tower turned on the crowd. They stirred, as if they felt obliged to do something (this was, after all, the Battle of Chile), and a few people waved, but they didn't seem to have their hearts in it. Massu was playing so badly that Gonzo could afford to litter the court with his own errors and still remain safely in control. that's a pretty good definition of exquisitely ugly tennis, and after a while you can get sucked in by its parallel-universe horrors.
Massu surrendered the break in four straight points; 1-3 with Gonzo up to serve.
A hefty, fit man behind me exhorted Nico' to Vamos, but it did little good as Gonzalez reeled off a break with four straight points, one of which was such a lovely backhand pass that he should have incurred a warning from the umpire. Of course, the occasional dazzler only makes the awful stuff look that much worse, so even that respite had its uses.
Down 1-4, Massu drilled a hole into the net with a backhand and then produced a picture-perfect double fault. He rallied to win two points, a feat that elicited a few lusty cheers from the fans still hoping this might become a match. But he lost the next point and gave up another break when Gonzalez smoked a forehand service winner to the corner - a regular, eyes-closed slapshot - off a first serve.
So, leading 6-3, 6-3, 5-1, Gonzalez decided to man up on behalf of ugly tennis. He was broken at 15, thanks to a deeply unfortunate drop shot he tried, from his own baseline, at break point. Way to go, Gonzo! He must have known something, though, for as soon as he broke himself to extend the match, a hefty fellow in a lime-green shirt a few rows behind me leaped up and bellowed, "Viva Chile!" Whereupon the crowd rose as one and chanted:
Chi, Chi, Chi,
Lei, Lei, Lei,
Viva Chile!!!!!
Now that was more like it. Perhaps Massu was inspired by the chant, for he won the first two points he served at 2-5 - but then promptly lost the next three, the last on a double-fault that gave Gonzalez a match point. I ought to add here that Massu's game was a great advertisement for the durability and strength of the Babolat raquet that he uses; I can't comment on the quality of strings in that frame, for the ball rarely touched them.
At match point, Massu hit a shot the had to send the heart of any conniseur of the godawful fluttering. For such a discriminating fan knows that a merely lousy match is predictable in the same way as a great one, while a gloriously ghastly match rises to pre-eminence because it contains a healthy measure of the illogical and improbable. Massu dispelled the match point with a great first serve - perhaps his best of the match.
Furthermore, Massu held serve for 3-5 with an ace.
This set up the most satisfying ending imaginable. After staving off a match-point, clawing is way back from a seemingly insurmountable deficit at two-sets and 1-5 down, Massu might have broken Gonzo again, sown the seeds of a great match onto this field of unrelieved sorrows, sent Chileans into a frenzy of dancing, chanting and flag-waving. I'm happy to report that no such thing happened, although Massu put the fear of Godot in me by winning the first two points against Gonzo's serve.
!90285738 But Massu battle back to infamy with a service-return error and a poor lob that Gonzo buried. Then Gonzo connected on a prodigious swinging volley - one that at any other point in the match would probably have knocked out a linesman on it's way to LaGuardia's Runway no. 7. Instead, it provided Gonzo with a match point, which he converted when Massu flubbed a service return.
What a fitting ending.
I walked away, slightly dazed. It's too early for me to say, I need to let the experience settle in. But I have a feeling that when some like-minded soul asks me, What was the worst match you ever saw? this one will be high up on my list.
I'll be back later with a Crisis Center post. . .