We'd heard a lot about Madrid's Caja Magica—the Magic Box—over the course of the last year. Its futuristic interlocking-roof design was going to provide a new architectural vision for tennis. It was going to be a key to the city's 2016 Olympic bid. It was going to become the site of tennis' mythical Fifth Grand Slam.
A tourist from the U.S., particularly one who'd just read an intriguing article about the facility and its famed French architect in the New York Times, might have expected that the road to this magical place would be brightly paved, that you'd see its impressive structure gleaming in the distance. This tourist would have been wrong, as I was Wednesday when I walked out of the metro stop in Madrid's San Fermin neighborhood. The 25 or so tennis fans who got out with me—you could recognize them us the sweaters over our shoulders—craned their necks in all directions, searching for a sign. Finally we found it, a tiny, triangular, orange scrap of metal harmlessly attached to a lamppost. It read "Caja Magica," and pointed us down a nondescript side street filled with California Spanish-style adobe bungalows. I thought about other streets I'd walked down to get to tournaments. I decided that, based on this early promotional evidence, Madrid had a long way to go before it was going to threaten the French Open as the world's biggest clay event. At the Roland Garros metro stop, you aren't just pointed to the courts; you stroll through part of the station on a bed of la terre battue.
There's nothing Magical, or even playful, about the design of this tennis facility. Wide, flat, rectangular, and moderately imposing, its sits at the far edge of San Fermin, looking more like a 1970s airport terminal than an athletic complex. The high gray walls that surround it, which appear at first to be straight out of the Brutalist handbook of office-building architecture, are revealed at closer glance to be tightly woven metal screens. This links the indoor and outdoor areas of the site, but it doesn't reduce the chilliness of its atmosphere. Walking around the grounds, you're cut off from the three main arenas, which are encased in concrete. You can't hear balls being struck, players grunting, out calls being made, or fans cheering. You have no idea what's happening or even who might be playing.
That said, once inside there's a lot to like about the main stadium, which is named after 1960s Spanish Grand Slammer Manual Santana, who was on hand Wednesday to check out this decade's Spanish Slammer, Rafael Nadal. The size and seating capacity—12,000—is ideal, and a $50 ticket will get you hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands, of feet closer to the court than an $80 ticket will get you in Ashe Stadium at the U.S. Open. The red plastic seats are comfortable and not jammed too close to each other. Most are shaded from the strong Spanish sun as well—a bonus. Even when the retractable roof is open, it's hard to know whether to call this an outdoor or an indoor arena, as the metallic-colored permanent roof juts far out over the court on all sides. (The closest comparison I can make is to the old Cowboy Stadium in Dallas, which was half enclosed at its top.) The light that does seep onto Santana stadium's clay is made all the more intense because the space surrounding it is left in the shade.
As a spectator with tickets, rather than an entitled press guy with a badge, I didn't have access to the second stadium (named after Arantxa Sanchez Vicario). Of course this only made me want to get in there more to see James Blake, a guy I normally wouldn't make a special trip to watch if I was covering a tournament. But I did have access to the third stadium, a compact and colorless space sealed off from the grounds at large. Like Santana, the sun shines brightly through the square hole in the roof here, but the walls are a bland pale gray that might remind an American of a high-school gymnasium, an effect that was only heightened by the thudding echo of the ball coming off the players' strings. As in the big arena, the modernistic Box concept is extended to the four sets of bleachers in Stadium 3, which are set at hard right angles rather than curved toward the playing field. You're very close to the players here, which is a blessing and a curse. I was close enough Wednesday to see just how little effort Svetlana Kuznetsova was giving at the end of her loss to Alona Bondarenko.
Away from the metallic indoor caverns, on the other side of a low greenish-colored moat, are the side courts. They appear for now to have been an afterthought (construction around the grounds was still going on right up until play started). There are two rows of them, and the only way to access them is to walk down a fairly narrow wooden pathway that cuts through the middle. This area is easily congested—on Wednesday a group of schoolkids brought pedestrian traffic there to a complete halt for five minutes.
The courts themselves, both inside and out, were bumpy and slippery, and the grounds crew looked like they could use a few lessons in organization and precision from the guys at Roland Garros. During his warm-up on an outer court, Jeremy Chardy dug up such a big chunk in the surface that the crew had to immediately run out with a shovel full of clay to patch it up. There were missed spots when the courts were swept and overhosing between sets—Nadal seemed to be watching the crew in semi-disbelief as they went about their business after the first set of his match with Jurgen Melzer.
These glitches will most likely be fixed in the years ahead. But what won't change is the way the ball jumps off the players' racquets in Madrid's 2,000-foot altitude. This is particularly true on the outside courts, which are open to the wind. Chipped returns floated long, and players slowed down and shortened their swings on ground strokes. They also spent a lot of time far behind the baseline; linespeople were repeatedly forced to jam their bodies up against the back fence to avoid getting a racquet upside the head. The tournament should consider extending the playing surfaces next year, if possible; otherwise someone, player or official, is going to get hurt.
They might also consider some landscaping. Out on the side courts, the parched land and wide blue sky reminded me of Indian Wells, only without the scenic mountains in the distance for perspective. The closest Madrid gets is a scrubby, dry little hill that rises meekly a few hundred feet away—can't Ion Tiriac buy a better view? Still, walking out of the side court area you could see that jasmine and grapevines had been planted along the fences, and that with a year's worth of growing and gardening the place would, as many of the players said this week, "have potential." For now the tournament's environment, inside and outside, remains raw and under-cultivated.
None of which kept me from experiencing the unique pleasure that tennis fans can get when they travel across the Atlantic to watch a tournament. There's a sense, when you sit in a stadium in Paris or Madrid or London, that you're a spy, that you aren't supposed to be there, that you've been transported to an alternate tennis universe. Or make that an alternate sports and celebrity universe. One of the mystifying experiences for an American visitor is seeing the face of a man on a Jumbotron and hearing the crowd build to a roar as the camera lingers on him. You know it must be a soccer star, the European equivalent of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods perhaps. Though all you really know is that he means a lot to a lot of people, but exactly why remains a mystery. This is a happy novelty for the U.S. fan: We get to analyze and enjoy the match and the crowd and the atmosphere with fresh eyes, as if we're seeing a tennis tournament for the first time.
The atmosphere in Madrid on Wednesday reached its peak at exactly 4:10 P.M. That's when Rafael Nadal took the court to a packed house, half of which had walked down as far as they could to take photos of him. These fans were fortunate to see the home-country hero make his debut here: Nadal had requested to play in the afternoon so he could watch a Spanish soccer match that evening. The crowd was good and wound-up by the time the match started, and they let it out between points with endless, pointless cries of "Ra-FA!" Nadal started slowly, hit more balls than normal over the baseline, shook his head at the semi-organized grounds crew, and eventually found his return groove on Melzer's lefty kick serve. He won anti-climactically, 6-3, 6-1, but watching him gather the energy of 12,000 Spaniards and send it back to them with a forehand belted through the thin air and past his opponent, you could feel for the first time a certain something in the Madrid afternoon. What was it? After three days of players slipping, sliding, pulling out and complaining, the Caja had finally found its Magica. The Box had a little Magic in it after all.