PARIS—It’s always a little a startling when the third day of a Slam rolls around and you realize that half of it is over—that is, half of its 256 singles players have vanished. Not that it feels that way, exactly. What it feels like is a return to normalcy, to being able to keep up, to plan a day, to find out about results as they come in. In some ways, this can be a bit of a letdown. There’s an excitement in having too much to see and cover, of being overwhelmed the way you are during the first round. You know you can’t cover it all, so you end up just going with the chaotic flow.
It was a sunny and warm first Wednesday at Roland Garros, a perfect day to go with that flow, and a perfect day to get a closer view of the players whom we usually watch from a distance. There were good matches and big names on small side courts, and the French is the one major where a press pariah like myself can watch from the very first row. The game is different down there.
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11:50 A.M.: Court 2
Is “Come on!” the new “Adje!”? If Julia Goerges has her way, it will be. She comes from the Ana Ivanovic school of exhortations: If it feels good once, why not do it after every winner you hit?
But Goerges isn’t doing a lot of self-exhorting at the moment. The German, who is an outside (sexy?) pick for this event after a surprisingly strong clay spring, is getting pummeled from the back court by flavor-of-a-past-moment Lucie Safarova. Watching on a TV screen, Safarova’s ultra-flat, Seles-esque strokes can seem raw, unpolished, run of the mill by today’s WTA’s standards. She could be described, by the uncharitable, as a ball-basher.
But like a lot of women players, that description no longer makes sense once you break the typical viewing plane and get close enough so that the sport becomes a more visceral experience. Once you can hear the ball coming off the racquet, see the athleticism and efficiency needed just to keep up on the tour today, you witness a very different game. What looks rudimentary from afar now looks energetic. The wallop of the ball off the strings and the superb contact that the players virtually always make supersede questions of elegance—you’re close enough not to care. That ball contact, and the line drive to the corner that it creates, is all the flair I need from here.
The first set and a half, it’s all Safarova. She plays quickly, proactively, and shoots a fierce look at her people in the stands after many points. Her signature shot, her backhand, has Goerges on her heels. And she’s an elegant slider on clay as well. Safarova can’t slide halfway across the court like the most accomplished Spanish men, but she can cruise far enough to track down balls she normally wouldn’t get on hard courts.
In the end, though, the “Come on!”s work. Goerges never stops pumping herself up, and even though she gets close, she never throws in the towel mentally. When she’s losing, I start to think that she has a little too much for today’s women’s tennis, that she isn’t quite efficient enough, either in body type of strokes—Goerges isn’t made purely for tennis. She’s long-limbed and less than a speed demon, and her strokes are a little busy. When Safarova is bombing with accuracy, Goerges is too rushed to unfurl them.
In the middle of the second set, though, she pushes back. Her own baseline bombs find the corners, and, just a couple games from the match, Safarova gets the yips. She starts to pull up on that once-perfect backhand just enough to dump it into the net. She’s no longer playing quickly, looking fierce, or making eye contact with her people. After each miss, Safarova looks straight down at the court, while Goerges lets loose with another roar and another fist-pump. In the end, when Goerges rolls through the third, I start to change my mind. What seemed like too much for today’s tennis now looks like the little something extra that could raise her above the run of the mill.
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12:45: Interview Room I
Roger Federer begins his press conference by answering questions in French. Typically, the pressers start with English. When the French journalists are done, the interview room moderator says, “Questions in English, please.”
Federer smiles wryly and says, “I thought we already went through English.”
“Not yet.”
Federer, still smiling, rolls his eyes in mock frustration. “Oh, God,” he says.
1:00: Court 1
At last, my old friend, the Bullring!
What do you learn when you sit in the front row, right along the baseline, inside Roland Garros’s small and circular and fantastic Court 1? First, you find out just how much muttering the players do. They may look like masks of impassive concentration when the TV camera finds them, but once you break that viewing plane, you see that they’re one big agitated tic just below the surface.
For example: David Ferrer vs. Julian Benneteau today. When I get there, Ferrer has won the first set and broken serve in the second. No sweat, right? Not for him. He misses one shot, starts to berate himself, and never stops. Throughout the next game, he’s jabbering and nodding his head in frustration, even when he wins a point. After the next changeover, it’s Benneteau’s turn. He loses the first two points of the game and never stops talking, very lightly but perceptibly, to himself. Then he wins a point and everything is fine. He’s calm and silent. Tennis: a constant emotional see-saw between cautious satisfaction, and agitation verging on despair. Is there a sport that brings out our fundamental selves—i.e., our anxious and pessimistic selves—as well as this one?
But as the match continues, and I watch Benneteau, a consummate pro with a classic look who unfortunately possesses no fail-safe weapons, slowly begin to sink, I start to think of the game as something else: A painful example of the five-step process toward acceptance of one’s fate.
First, Benneteau acts out in anger: He trips and falls on the court, then gets up and yells at the linesman next to him, even though the man wasn’t involved in the fall. Two games later, Benneteau loses a point after returning a close serve of Ferrer’s. He walks up, inspects the mark, and tries to get the chair umpire to let him play the point over. When that request is denied, he continues to argue until the French crowd, his home crowd, starts to rain down boos—they don't cotton to anyone questioning calls here. Finally, Benneteau rubs the mark out and reluctantly moves to the other side of the court.
In the end, as Ferrer’s consistency wears him down and even his routine ground strokes begin to spray, Benneteau gives a last look over at his coach. He shakes his head and raises his eyebrows, as if to say, “Ah, well, I tried. It's over.”
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Be back later today with more from the front row.
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