It's been a hectic first week of action in Melbourne. Matches have ended at 2am and 4:30am on consecutive nights and the drama has been on overdrive.

Headlines...well they've been on the men's side primarily. Federer pushed to the brink of losing in the 3rd round (and with a loss he would probably have lost his #1 ranking to Nadal), Roddick out in a barn burner, James Blake back from the dead to win in 5 sets, Hewitt choking and then charging back to win the latest finish in Slam history. The 2nd week is when the drama will kick in on the women's side as they have largely been holding up the status quo end of the proceedings.

I got to the hotel last night at 5am simultaneously wired and fried from calling both Fed and Hewitt's epic matches. 10 sets of tennis. My brain frazzled from 9 hours of TV focus (trying not to be repetitive is taxing) but certainly not as whipped as the boys who were in the battle. Had to be back on site for the Tsonga-Gasquet match around 12:15pm so it was a quick turn. Thankfully today was a quick one. Tsonga won pretty handily and I had a nice 4 hour gap before the Nadal-Mathieu match up. Managed to hit indoors for an hour (jetlag now replaced by 5 set lag and the young American challengers have left to play a challenger in Hawaii so I hit with Marty Laurendeau, the coach of Dancevic/Nestor from Canada who was on the atp tour when I was) and get showered up in time to get on air at 7:30 for the opening of our night show in the studio then wait for the ladies to finish before the boys go on and I go into the bunker (our TV booth) to call the match. Mathieu defaulted after a set and 1/2 so we were on the opposite end of the time spectrum from earlier this am and finished at 10:30 which was 1 hour earlier than Hewitt-Bagdhatis started last night. I like it...

Lots of friendly faces down here from Fred Stolle to all of the Tennis Channel crew and everyone in between. The tennis world is a traveling circus and its pulled into Melbourne for its annual stop. 1 more week before it pulls up stakes. Let it be half as intriguing as week 1 and we'll have had a helluva tournament. Then its back to the States for me. OCS tennis is around the corner.

Jim

Get more information about the Outback Champions Series at www.championsseriestennis.com.