We’re set for Day 2 in Melbourne, but the weather is still only half-cooperating. It’s cloudy and chilly again, which feels like false advertising. So far this isn’t the Australian Open I’ve seen on TV.
But there have been mitigating factors. Around the corner from my hotel, past the breakfast room that's charging, allegedly at a discount, $30 per person each morning, is a coffee shop where you can find the Melbourne daily papers. Reading the tabs each morning is a Wimbledon tradition, and one I’ve continued down here. It helps that the tennis coverage, particularly that of the Melbourne Age, is very good. They don’t do over the top, “Boom Boom in the Broom Closet” headlines like the Brits—it takes real class to pull that off—but their writers know the sport and act like their readers know it and care it about as well. During the U.S. Open, the New York papers can seem like they’re trying to explain an exotic WASP custom.
So far this week in the Age, sports columnist Richard Hinds has, tongue in cheek as usual, written an open letter to a certain missing star entitled, “Serena, Bring Back that Nauseating Braggadoccio.” Linda Pearce has written two very nice profiles, of Roger Federerand Sam Stosur. I was happy to learn that the latter, like me, doesn’t like to fly, that “crazy thoughts” invade her head when she’s in the air. How you can be a tennis player and dread flying even for a second is difficult to imagine. Now I think I have to root for Sam to win it all.
Best of all was a column from former Australian Open tournament director Paul McNamee. He wonders if the Aussie Open is on the verge of going from friendly to greedy—it seems, actually, that the transition has already been made. I had no idea that the last two women’s finals failed to sell out. Two years ago, when Serena demolished Dinara Safina, there was an embarrassing ring of empty seats at the top of Rod Laver Arena (4,000 in total), and that even the Serena-Justine final last year wasn’t enough to pack the place. A standard ticket to the final is $289, which is daunting even by New York City standards (though in my brief time here I’ve been surprised by the priciness of Melbourne in general; $45 dinner entrees is not how I picture the land of Oz, but maybe it’s a sign of economic health, I don’t know). The ticket for the men’s final has been raised this year to $339, prompting McNamee to wonder, with some reason, how the men and woman can be paid the same when people aren’t charged the same to see them. But it isn’t just ticket sales that are hurting. Because of the late night scheduling—it gets later and later here and at the U.S. Open every year—prime time viewing was down 30 percent last year.
From a press perspective, people are indeed friendly, but the Aussie Open offers no public access to the players’ pre-tournament practice sessions. Photographers escorted into them, and were allowed to stay for 15 minutes. Practice sessions have become another source of entertainment for fans everywhere else. The U.S. Open devotes the day before the tournament to showing them off.
But all is not wrong in Oz. Yesterday morning as I walked through the grounds, I could hear a familiar grunt coming from inside one jammed side court. It wasn’t a dramatic match; rather, it was a public Rafael Nadal practice session, and the fans who were practically hanging off tree limbs to get a view couldn’t believe their luck. That’s more like the Aussie Open as I pictured it.
Enjoy it on TV tonight. I’ll be back with regular posts again. On the docket for me: Jovanovski, Oprandi, Tomic, Young/Cilic, Ivanovic, Del Potro, and, of course, the most-hyped showdown of the first round, Hewitt/Nalbandian. The papers have been trying to get sparks to fly in that one, and yesterday they finally scratched one out. Nalbandian said, perhaps accidentally, that Hewitt “was” a great player.
Good enough: It’s on.