PARIS—There comes a point in the middle of a long trip when the things that I did a week ago, when they pop back into my head, start to feel like they came from some other visit in the past, maybe another lifetime. Did I really see Manet at the d’Orsay just a week ago? Was Rafa-Isner this year? What was so good at L’Ambassade d’Auvergne? Artichoke hearts? (A highlight of the week, now that I've remembered it.) Maybe it has something to do with getting out of your routine, and being hit with a million new stimuli per second, that makes the recent past recede more quickly and your time seem so much more dense with activity. Whatever it is, I like the phenomenon—it feels like life doesn’t roll along with quite so much unbearable lightness.
Either way, the French Open has reached its first Friday, and I’ve reached the moment when I’ve seen and heard enough stray sights and sounds to collect them in one place and call it a post.
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I’ll start this notebook with its most recently recorded event: Daniela Hantuchova’s not-all-that-surprising upset of No. 1 seed Caroline Wozniacki this afternoon. A single glance at any point in this match would have been enough to tell you who the superior shot-maker and pure tennis player is: Hantuchova. Her shots penetrated more easily, and with less obvious effort, than her much-higher-ranked opponent’s. As we unfortunately know, there’s a lot more to tennis than ball-striking, and Hanutchova struggles when it comes to the athletic and psychological aspects of the sport. The most interesting thing about this match to me was that Hantuchova didn’t have to play out of her tree to beat the world No. 1—purely from a hitting standpoint, she’s the better player. It’s hard to think of a match that shows just how much those other, non-hitting aspects matter in tennis.
Afterward, Wozniacki said, “She knew what she was going to do, and she was just too good. Sometimes you can’t do anything.”
Wozniacki was off, no doubt about it; she netted more routine balls and sent more of them wildly over the lines than I can remember this year. She said she tried to mix it up by using different angles and hitting with more depth, but that Hantuchova had the answers. And it was true, Hantuchova just had more pace and depth on her shots, and needed less net clearance to make them. If someone can do those things and be consistent about it, they’re going to win.
When she was asked if playing in Brussels the week before Paris had affected her, Wozniacki said no, it hadn’t mattered. She said it as if she didn’t give it a second thought, and purely from a physical perspective, it probably didn’t matter. But Slam winners, and players who dedicate themselves to winning majors, don’t make their schedules just to be physically ready for the biggest tournaments. They put everything into these events.
Wozniacki stuck to the “I’ll just go back and work harder” mantra in her presser. Is this a bluff? At one level, yes: It was reported, as it was after her loss in Melbourne, that she was in tears afterward. Is the “I’ll keep working” mantra also a sane and level-headed way to make your way from day to day on tour? Yes, but it’s also not the attitude of someone who believes that major titles should be theirs, by right or by talent. Wozniacki has yet to win a Slam, which means, among other things, that she doesn’t know what she’s missing.
But this day belonged to Hantuchova. She made the world’s best a definite second best on this day. I’ve always liked her game and shots; they're as effortless as anyone’s on either tour, and there were a couple of vintage beauties today, where she changed the direction of the ball on her backhand and threaded it up the line while making it appear as if she had barely even made contact. Now that’s smooth. And it’s not as if this is just God-given talent; a lot of it is, obviously, but from the evidence you see at tournaments, at least, Hantuchova works as diligently as anyone on the practice court.
Still, everyone who knows her was waiting for the inevitable—for lack of a more accurate term—choke. Her loss to Ana Ivanovic in the 2008 Aussie Open semis was memorably painful, and after yesterday’s collapse by Caroline Garcia, I was hoping not to have to write about a second one in two days. Sportswriters like the heroic comeback because it shows us the best version of ourselves, something better than the normal run of anxiety and mediocrity. Collapses confirm that norm. As someone who hates to see nerves get in the way of world-class tennis skills, I was happy to see Hantuchova finally rise above her own norm.
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I like it when a tennis player hits a ball just over the baseline, hears it called out, and stares across the net for a few extra few seconds. Our eyes narrow, we push our heads forward, we look as if we've been vaguely wronged. I’ve seen everyone from Maria Sharapova to Radek Stepanek make that face this week. You see it more often on clay, because of the possibility of a mark, but you also see players do it and never ask for a mark to be checked. What are we hoping to see in that moment? What are hoping to change? It’s so frustrating, isn’t it, that the other baseline remains just beyond our sight range, no matter how hard we squint?
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As far as the game’s evolution, is there a trend that’s been exhibited during this first week? I mentioned that Tsonga-Andreev struck me as an example of the place where technology—racquets and now strings—has taken the men’s game. It was a battle of violently dipping missiles fired from so far back in the court that the players' swings routinely sent linespeople scurrying and diving to avoid having a piece of graphite implanted in their heads. Pretty soon, professional courts, especially clay courts, may have to be expanded.
How has this technology affected the women’s game? There’s been talk over the last few years that powerful racquets and strings have made the WTA a land of all-offense and no-defense, where no one can keep up with the flat lasers that come off their opponents’ racquets. This is true to a degree. The Williams sisters upped the power, and other players have followed; but they also upped the speed needed to defend, which has proven more difficult for others to match. The result is a first-strike game where everyone, before they can think about variety, must to learn to hit big; finesse and nuance won’t get you anywhere if you’re getting blown off the court.
But what about the spin we see so much of on the men’s side? Two women at this tournament showed some of it: Julia Goerges and Caroline Garcia. They both had some success, they both look like players on the rise, and they’re both gone.
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The French-rudeness thing: Reality, or a stereotype promulgated by service-obsessed Americans? Let me give a few examples of what I’ve encountered this week:
—A surly and unsmiling room-service attendant who brought me my coffee and responded to my “Thank you” with a strange rasping sound that I could only interpret as a scoff of disdain.
—A wine-store owner, Serge, who was exactly the opposite: Knowing I was in a hotel, he offered to open my bottle of wine in the store. This corresponds to my past experience. There are French who are gruff, smug, and querelous, but there are others who are much more openly, even persistently, friendly than your average American.
—A story told by an American living in Paris: A French girl he knew was asked to get up and imitate an American. She stood up, flashed a huge and possibly fake smile, and said, in the dramatically vapid voice of an overly aggressive waitress or sales clerk, “Hi! How can I help you?! What can I do for you?!”
The customer, you slowly learn in Paris, is not always right. This is an incredible thing for an American, or at least this American, to process. It’s such a fundamental belief, a religion, that I still can’t quite figure out how a world like that can function.
—I stand up to walk out of the Bullring. To my right are three people. In the row above, there’s just one person, so I step over the seat behind me because it will, seemingly, be easier to get past one person than three. Except that this one person has his legs over the seat in front of him. I stand next to him for a second, waiting for him to move. There’s no way that he doesn’t undertand what I’m trying to do, but he won’t look at me. Finally, I say, “Excuse me, I’m trying to get past . . .”
He explodes. “Why me! Why me! You see how I am sitting! Why not walk down there?” I step up to the next row and leave from there.
I have to say, that did seem kind of rude.
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