Don't Rain on My Parade

[Ed. Note: I hope you enjoy Rosangels's up close and personal report from the Artois Championships at Queens Club. What I love about this is that it captures the British public's appreciation and respect for doubles (Blackberrys notwithstanding!). I am off until Wednesday, so carry on - and thanks, Rosia! - PB]

Yesterday on arriving at Queen’s Club, the first person that approached me offered to sell me an umbrella in the club’s blue and red colours. I decided I liked it better than the one I was carrying, so bought one. Less than ten minutes later, seated in the front row on Centre Court, my mother and I were encased in a nest of three umbrellas, trying to keep out the first of the heavy showers that disrupted yesterday’s play.

Welcome to midsummer in England. Weekends at the Queen’s tournament are distinctly different from weekdays. Roger Draper, the Lawn Tennis Associations's current Chief Executive, was quoted last year as saying, not in a complimentary way,  that the club’s audiences consist mostly of "city boys and posh totty".

He believes such tournaments (and Queen’s is the UK’s second biggest, after Wimbledon) should be more accessible to children, who might be inspired by the actual….oh, yes, that’s right, there was some tennis being played. Earlier in the week I had to endure some guy beside me fondling his Blackberry lovingly in between talking incessantly about the bond markets to his neighbour, a group of loud investment bankers freely imbibing Pimms in the row in front, and a guy two rows behind who was so vocal, and so oblivious to the tennis, that every few minutes he was being exhorted by those around him to shut up or go outside if he wanted to talk. The city boys at least were (to my relief) absent at the weekend which is more of a family/fan affair.

Queen’s is a corporate entertainment-oriented event, but that’s mostly confined to weekdays. I’ve been a corporate guest there myself in the past, but have sworn never to do it again – it might mean missing Rafael Nadal on Centre Court due to being forced to socialise during an excessively long liquid lunch in the corporate dining area, and that would be a tragedy. Not to mention that it wouldn’t be the done thing in a working context to lug along a massive camera for taking pictures of the players (not that this has ever stopped me). No, I’ll find my own tickets.

This year I was able to work out a sharing arrangement with friends, as the legitimate application process only allows one person to buy a limited number of tickets. There were some true tennis fans there too, even during the week, some of whom had bought day tickets and came in later in the afternoon. Each day we spotted each other immediately, and got to talking about tennis (only during the changeovers, naturally), while doing our best to ignore the philistines surrounding us.

It’s obvious why Queen’s Club is so popular for corporate entertainment. Easily accessible from central London, less expensive than Wimbledon, and, on a warm June day like some I can remember there (not so much this week), an idyllic place to be sitting in a spacious box seat, facing the club-house with its beautifully-arranged flower-baskets, the sound of tennis balls being struck in the background. Even the eternal drone of sirens, planes on the flight path to Heathrow, and frequent fly-overs  from helicopters don’t really change that – they seem surreal, not part of the same world.

Yesterday, when Andy Roddick and Dimitri Tursunov finally got on court to warm up, I scoured the entire place with my binoculars for Jimmy Connors and failed to spot him. As soon as I put the binoculars down, I realised that he was ten feet away from us in the players’ guest box, right at the front (that is, ahead of any ordinary spectator), with Andy’s brother John on his left. Those two talked frequently during the match.

Seeing Jimmy Connors close up (my mother is a huge fan of his) was one of the highlights of her day. Watching him during the match, I could see him applauding Roddick’s play, and usually looking in his direction, even when Andy lost the points but played well. Somehow it didn’t surprise me to see that Jimmy Connors wasn’t  interested in acknowledging the other guy’s good play. He walked right in front of us on his way out – slightly smaller than I imagined; also looks and moves like a much younger man.

One thing I had forgotten - not having been so near the court recently - is how much noise there is from the photographers. During singles matches involving top players, every shot they make is accompanied by a chorus of camera shutters firing. I guess the players are accustomed to it, but it's something they must always be aware of - they know that every move they make will be intensely scrutinised and pictured. Whether Roddick's mutterings yesterday about his opponent taking long enough between points for a teabreak were picked up by microphones on TV, I'm not sure. But today he was heard complaining about the photographers.

Nicolas Mahut wreaked havoc on our day yesterday, and I don’t just mean his dismissal of Rafa in the singles on Friday, which after the Djoker’s exit at the hands of Arnaud Clement on the same day essentially meant a virtual no-name semi between two French guys that my mother had never heard of (not me – but I’m a hard-core fan type). After the rain delays, that semi was, to my great relief, banished to Court 1, and we got to see doubles. The Bryans won, and then we had to endure the finish of Benneteau and Mahut (delayed because of the singles earlier) versus Knowles and Nestor from the previous day, so that the winners could play Hewitt and Henman.

Those two didn’t get on court until after 8pm. The light was poor by that time; Knowles and Nestor never left the court, and the match commenced after an abbreviated warmup. Nonetheless, for what remained of the crowd, it was the match of the day, and more noise was made for Tim and Lleyton than for anyone preceding them. They lost, but not without some very entertaining and good-humoured tennis being played (the second set was a lot closer than the first).

Lleyton Hewitt in a relaxed mood was yelling “yours, mate!” at every impossible shot, and made quite a few of them himself; he in fact was almost flawless on the volley, unlike Henman. Tim clearly was enjoying the wildly partisan crowd, and indulged us by making a few line-call challenges at our insistence, one of which went his way. If I had to pick my other matches of the week, I’d say that Roddick’s match (and eventual win) over Britain’s Alex Bogdanovic was exciting, though not as much as it would have been if the latter had won, which he was two points away from doing. I know relatively little about Bogdanovic other than the fact that he arrived in the UK from Serbia at the age of eight (he was  born in Belgrade), his family having fled due to the troubles in Yugoslavia. At one, later stage, Jeremy Bates threw him out of the UK Davis Cup team for having a poor attitude.

I understand that Bogdanovic has recently been working with Peter Lundgren, and perhaps this has paid off. For two sets he went toe-to-toe with Roddick; excellent groundstrokes, and the advantage of a decent lefty serve. Late in the match I felt that he suffered some loss of concentration, which Roddick was able to capitalise on. The crowd was intense in supporting Bogdanovic, but I imagine that had they known him better, he would have had even greater support – Roddick also had quite a few fans in the crowd, and last year when I saw Bogdanovic play Nadal at Wimbledon, I’d say the latter had more support.

So, the guy has yet to make an impression on the British public. Beating Roddick sure would have helped. For me personally, watching Rafa’s matches this week was the highlight. Five days after seeing him look invincible in winning his third French Open title, I watched him lose to an inspired Nicolas Mahut on the grass at Queen’s – not tamely, but with the worst body language than I have seen from him for a while.

Early in the week, virtually everyone I watched (with the possible exception of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the Surbiton winner, who put out Hewitt with some inspired tennis) was playing badly (loads of shanks and misses) - understandably, with the switch from clay to grass. But Rafa was also, in his early matches, stepping up into the court, moving in to deal with second serves, volleying confidently, and moving his feet well.

Mahut didn't allow him to do all this, and he couldn't pick up his serve much of the time - even the second serve was often big. Mahut probably had the day of his tennis life in beating both Ljubicic and Rafa, but until that point, he was so anonymous to the Queen’s organisers that when they announced that he was coming on court to play Rafa, the first public announcement said that Ljubicic was to play Nadal. Nicolas Mahut is not even in the main draw for Wimbledon - he'll need to qualify. After beating Arnaud Clement in the semifinal, Mahut eventually lost the final (his first on the ATP tour) to Andy Roddick in a third-set tiebreak, playing some very fine grasscourt tennis in the process, and holding a match point in the second set. The crowd may not have heard of him before, but this was probably the best Queen's final we have seen for some years.

-- - Rosangel