 PARIS—Today, in place of the customary Grounds Pass, I'm posting the article that I was in the process of writing when John Isner began to do his epic thing again yesterday, and all of us were called to the press box in Chatrier to bear witness. It's a look at what may be my new favorite place in the world to watch tennis.
*****
Alex Ovechkin is fidgety. He crosses his arms over his black T-shirt and bounces his flip-flopped feet on the bench in front of him. He pulls his muscle-bound legs up anxiously, and flips his baseball cap from front to back and back to front every three points or so. When he claps, he bashes his hands together as hard as he can.
Ovechkin’s girlfriend, Maria Kirilenko, is playing a few feet away from him on Court 2, and she’s lost the first set. In the past, on small courts like this, the blonde Kirilenko has been the object of crude attention from French teenagers, the way Ana Ivanovic was in this same spot one day ago—“Look at me, Ana, look here,” the kids called to Ivanovic on Tuesday, “I love you.” A similar pack of snickering boys has gathered in the rows just behind the player’s box. On another day, they might start calling to Kirilenko, but not with Ovie sitting a few feet away. When Ovechkin walks out for a second, a man comes in and tries to sit in his seat. A friend of Ovechkin tells him its taken. The man moves down and tries to take the spot where Ovechkin has been putting his feet. His friend again says that spot is taken. This might seem like a bit much except that, as my colleague Tom Tebbutt reminds me, those feet have a $120 million dollar contract with the Washington Capitals.
Court 1, the Bullring, has been described many times as one of the best places anywhere to watch a tennis match, but Court 2, its unsung—and un-nicknamed—little brother around the corner may be even better. The seats are set low and close to the court, and there are stands only at one end; the other is open and tree-lined. This is part of what is called “the country” at Roland Garros: the side courts where fans can get in for the price of a grounds pass. Or at least they can try. Once they’re there, people tend to hang out in these choice seats for a while. By noon the lines at the entrances have built to epic lengths. You could spend the better part of a day waiting in one.
It’s less corporate in the country than it is in the metropolitan areas like Chatrier and Lenglen, where fans pay for a ticket for that stadium alone—or, just as likely, get them through friends with connections. There aren’t many blazers or skinny shoes or eye-catching hats out on Court 2. Ovechkin, in his backyard BBQ wear, may have erred a little on the casual side—this may be the country, but it’s still Paris—but he’s not completely out of place. As always, there’s an overflow crowd here. Fans are allowed to stand along the top of the compact concrete stadium and sit in the aisles. You feel like you’re at a gathering here.
As in the Bullring, the first thing you notice when you sit down in a seat near the front is how visceral tennis suddenly becomes at this range. Watching the sport on TV means watching the flight of the ball from one side to the other. Watching from along one baseline, from a few feet away, means hearing and feeling each swing and, on clay, each tiny scrape of the sneaker. You’re inside the match.
Here you see the effort that the sinewy, 5-foot-9, 132-pound Kirilenko must make to stay in rallies with her more muscular opponent, Klara Zackopalova. Not only aren’t her legs as strong as Zackopalova’s, she doesn’t have the same timing on her ground strokes. Kirilenko winds up on her backhand, lets out a shriek at contact, and . . . lofts a soft topspin moonball that lands at the service line.
Still, she runs and fights and grunts fiercely to even things at a set all. After each winning shot, she twirls to see Ovechkin clapping his loud clap There’s a scrapping, no-holds-barred quality to the match in general. On one long point, Kirilenko’s shrieks escalate in volume and pitch with each shot, until the final one, let out as she hits a winning overhead, reaches the bloodcurdling level. Afterward, Zackopalova looks across the court, shakes her head, and curls her upper lip. Later, Zackopalova nearly takes Kirilenko’s head off with a passing shot. She apologizes, but I briefly foresee a hockey-like scene where the two women throw down their racquets and put up their dukes across the net. They compete without apology on the women’s side.
Zackopalova has the lower ranking—44 to Kirilenko’s 16—but today she has too much firepower. Seeing her turn on a forehand and leap backward for a tomahawk backhand from this distance is impressive. The last game feels like a long death throe for Kirilenko. Her shrieks, as she scrambles and slips trying to keep the ball alive, take on a desperate quality. After one lost point, she bangs her racquet on the clay five times. At match point, she looks over at her box with a blank face—there's no fire left. Her last bashed backhand lands in the middle of the net. Ovechkin, head down, walks out; he was right to be nervous after all. As he’s leaving, one of the teenagers nearby shoves a camera toward him and asks, “Alex, will you take a picture with me?” Ovechkin keeps walking.
 *****
The two women shake the umpire’s hand and begin packing their racquet bags. Fans stands and stretch, but most don’t get up to leave. The grounds crew, dressed in black tracksuits, walk out a little sleepily and sweep the clay and dust the lines with brooms. The women's slides and bumps and divots are wiped away. At the same time, the ball kids go into formation and circle the court before running off. They high-five their replacements and join a few of their friends in a bullpen at the side of the court. The next two players, Marcos Baghdatis and Nicolas Almagro, begin to warm up.
These men are both flawed talents, and their match delivers on its promise of baseline fireworks. The fact that Baghdatis has a two-handed backhand and Almagro a one-hander is enough to offer a stylistic contrast. The Spaniard and the Cypriot drive each other from corner to corner with their backhands. Baghdatis leans forward and hits flat, while Almagro comes over his circular one-hander with wicked, knuckling topspin. His shot makes a distinctive popping sound; contact is an explosion. After many of their better rallies, fans in the front rows shake their heads at the pace of the shots and how the players can still slide far enough and fast enough to get to them. Many times it appears a point is over and a few people begin to clap, only to see the other player slide into view at the last second and pick the ball up off the clay. From up close, the mens’ shots sound like a gunfight, but their movement is like a dance.
Almagro is tense, but he’s mostly quiet. A bad error, though, will elicit a babble of rapid-fire Spanish that often ends with him repeating the word “Nada!” over and over. Almagro vents, but you don’t feel like he’s using his emotion postively. A few times, he stands and screams in the direction of his coach—not at him, but toward him. If he weren’t on a court, you might mistake him for a crazy person. Almagro’s flaw has always been his inability to resist the spectacular. When he first appeared, I thought he had as much, if not more, talent than his countryman Nadal. The difference is, Almagro is a slave to his talent. Because he can hit the big shot, he likes to try the big shot. Still, he appears, underneath the surface agitation, to believe he will win, and his game has a little more variety and flexibility to it.
Baghdatis’s problem is that he lacks belief. He’s been a Grand Slam finalist and in the Top 10, but now, at 26, he’s ranked No. 42. Today, wearing a baseball cap, he lacks his old goofy spark—it’s almost as if playing the role of the hard-working pro robs him of some of his old genius. He makes the match close; virtually every point is hard fought, and virtually every game goes at least to 30-30. But the truth comes out late in each set, when Baghdatis’s shots, which never have much margin over the net, start catching the tape. He looks over at his coach, Miles McLagan, in the corner, as if to say, “I knew it all along.”
(Aside: Watching Baghdatis dribble the ball through his legs before he serves, as he always does, I wonder whether he’ll still be doing that when he’s 80.)
When it’s over, the ball kids get back in formation on the sideline. They do their own share of running during a match. As the players mull over which ball to use to serve, and which to send back to the kids, they circle the player like pigeons hoping the crumb will come their way. Now they run off and join their giggling colleagues—there are no adult ball kids here, as there are at the U.S. Open—in the bullpen again, to await the next match.
The crowd stands again; there’s a little more excitement in the air because a Frenchman, Jeremy Chardy, is paying next. The grounds crew, again looking like they’ve just been woken up, begin their casual cleaning. One of them is smoking as he dusts the lines. The slides and bumps and divots created by Almagro and Baghdatis are covered over, all physical evidence of their battle has vanished. The clay is smooth again, ready for the next two players to be announced and take their places across from each other, to fight and dance. Life goes on in the country.
 PARIS—This is the first morning in Paris that bright sun hasn’t come blasting through my hotel window. It’s cloudy today, and there’s a rush-hour traffic jam on the highway nearby. Which reminds me that a trip to a Grand Slam is a trip out of reality, out of daily commuting and working headaches, and into a big, two-week-only playground. It's a status-based playground, as I wrote yesterday, but I guess everything has its price. At the moment, day to day life having nothing to do with tennis is sort of hard to imagine.
Showers ended play early on Wednesday, and a few matches will be resumed today. Below are some other odds and ends from yesterday, and a quick look at another crowded afternoon ahead. As you can see above, our recent Fan Club post on Nicolas Mahut has obviously inspired great things from the man. Now that he knows he has fans, who can say how far he’ll go? Not too far, most likely: Mahut plays Federer next.
*****
Speaking of the rain, it didn’t suit Jo-Wilfried Tsonga yesterday. Tsonga, whose match with Cedric-Marcel Stebe was called after they’d split sets, was grumpy. He didn’t like the weather, he didn’t like the commotion that the kids were making in the crowd on Lenglen, he didn’t like the line judge that he ran into on one point. Grumpy Jo finally got his wish—to get out of there—when rain start falling heavily. He and Stebe will be back out on Lenglen today. I would expect a happier Tsonga, but I would also expect a renewed fight from the hard-hitting Stebe. He’s undersized, but his tenacity is impressive.
*****
Each day at a major we get a “state of the big three” press conference. Two days ago it was Rafa’s; yesterday we had them from Federer and Djokovic. In the press room, these are generally stop-whatever-you’re-doing events.
Both pressers were low-key, though—neither player had struggled all that mightily in their second-rounders. Djokovic admitted that he probably won’t play mixed doubles at the Olympics, and he said he was happy to see the return of Brian Baker, whom he remembered well as a talented, slightly older junior.
Federer said he didn’t remember Baker, but that he likes his story and hopes to play him, to “see how good he is.” Federer was also asked who he thought had the best return of the Top 3. He said, not surprisingly, that Djokovic is the best when he’s on, but he also mentioned how tough Nadal’s return can be, especially on clay. “He’s molded his return game around his baseline game,” Federer said, and he can drive you back with heavy topspin right away. As for his own return, Federer left that to others to judge.
In other news, Federer also testified that the Queen of England is “very sweet, very nice, very polite, of course,” and that “Daniel Nestor is incredible.” One of those things is more surprising than the other.
*****
Tennis on TV is a game of faces, especially when you watch without sound. The constant close-ups of the players give us an unnatural one-way intimacy with them—it’s like seeing someone when they’re alone, and they don’t know there’s a camera on them (or they’re too excited to remember). The match yesterday between Marion Bartoli and Petra Martic, as I caught it on my TV monitor in the press room, was, if nothing else, a wonderfully stark contrast in close-ups. Bartoli, who was whirling and staring at her father after every point, was at her comical eye-making finest—she gouges with those things. Martic, on the other hand, was the picture of serenity as she waited to return serve. Serenity won in three.
*****
Yesterday spelled the end of Brian Baker, folk hero. For now, that is. You have to like the way Baker came back from two sets down against Frenchman Gilles Simon, in Paris. Baker said he wasn’t overly tired in the fifth, but that he may have gotten tight after playing with nothing to lose for two sets—you have nothing to lose, until you do. But, story and surgeries aside, isn’t it great to have a new face suddenly dropped into the sport, with a fully formed game? That backhand will be worth watching, no matter what Baker’s results are going forward.
*****
You wouldn’t think that the French Open would beat the U.S. Open to the punch when it came to finding a way to marry new technology with sponsorship opportunities, would you? That appears to be what’s happened, though, in the case of of Roland Garros’s smart-phone charging stands. If you’re running low, you take your device and plug it in at one. Does Flushing Meadows have these? I haven’t seen them, but they're a popular feature here.
*****
Lastest tennis generational divide: Those who made jokes about Adrian Ungur’s name by referencing The Hunger Games, and those who immediately thought of Felix Unger of Odd Couple fame. I'm sad to say that I fell into the latter—i.e., older—category.
Latest running tennis-nerd joke: Calling a "Hindrance!" after something bad happens to you.
Latest tennis folk hero, now that Brian Baker has left us: Why not Eva Asderaki? Let her take charge, umpire every match, and rid the game of all noise-making once and for all.
*****
Thursday’s highlights:
National hero Virginie Razzano is last up in the Bullring today against Arantxa Rus. We’ll see if a home crowd can get her over the Inevitable Letdown Syndrome (ILS). Rus beat Kim Clijsters here last year.
Two tall boys, John Isner and Milos Raonic, play their second-rounders. Isner gets Chatrier, against Frenchman Paul-Henri Mathieu. Settle in.
Rafael Nadal, like Novak and Roger before him, is exiled to Lenglen today, to face Denis Istomin, while Andy Murray goes first in Chatrier.
For some reason, Caroline Wozniacki also gets Chatrier, against an Australian. Have the French forgotten that she’s No. 9 now, not No. 1?
Side-court matches to watch: Marcos Baghdatis vs. Nicolas Almagro, on intimate Court 2; Tipsarevic and Chardy on the same court; Stakhovsky vs. old man Tommy Haas on Court 6
Bullring match to watch: Ferrer vs. My New Favorite Head Case (MNFHC), Benoit Paire
And finally, a match I’m hoping to check out purely for enjoyment’s sake, the Battle of the One-Handers, Richard Gasquet vs. Grigor Dimitrov, on Lenglen. The best thing about that this one? Both guys can’t lose it.
 PARIS—What was Sloane Stephens saying to herself as she kept piling up points and games today out on Court 5 against fellow American Bethanie Mattek-Sands? It was a big moment for the 19-year-old Floridian; she had a chance to reach the third round of what she calls her favorite tournament for the first time. Was Stephens, who is also vying for a place on the U.S. Olympic team, telling herself to stay calm, stay focused, stick to the plan?
“Yeah,” Stephens said after she had wrapped up an easy 6-1, 6-1 win. “But there’s always more.”
More going on in your head? Such as?
Such as this thought:
“Because my mom is spoiled rotten, she’s going to want to try to fly first class home or something, so I got to keep winning.”
There is always something more with Stephens, who likes to talk and is good at it. And you get the feeling that, after some time spent learning the WTA ropes, there’s going to be more from her as a player. Stephens reached the third round at the U.S. Open last year, and is at a career-high ranking of No. 70 as of this week.
Admittedly, Stephens didn’t have to do too much against a wildly erratic Mattek-Sands, who was off from the start and kept going for, and missing, big shots throughout. But you could see that Stephens, who trains for this event in Spain and says clay is her favorite surface (Why? “I really don’t know”), can play on the foreign red stuff. She’s a smooth mover who covers the corners well. She wins free points with her serve. And she can change pace mid-rally, juicing up her backhand down the line or running around to finish points with inside-out forehands. Stephens also has a unique and deceptive style—it can appear lackadaisical, but it isn’t. She stands mostly straight up and down, keeps her footwork rhythmic rather than hyper, and whips over top of her two-handed backhand. Today Stephens kept the ball deep and let Mattek-Sands hit herself out of the match.
Stephens, who beat a quality opponent in Ekaterina Makarova in the first round, is nothing if not confident about her chances here. “In 10 years," she said with a smile on Monday, "I better have won this one time at least, otherwise I'll be one unhappy camper.” (Unfortunately, this also led her to darker thoughts about the future: “In 10 years I’m going to be 29. Oh my God!”) For now, one more win will put her a step closer to another dream, a trip to the Olympics. Her next opponent, Mathilde Johansson of Sweden, currently ranked 93rd, is certainly beatable.
Win or lose, though, Stephens will still be living the dream. She says she just keeps trying to have fun, and the irrepressibly fast-talking way that she says it lets you know that she's enjoying the tennis life at the moment. When Stephens was asked what it means for her to be in the third round, she didn’t hesitate to flash a smile and a superlative:
“It’s awesome,” she said.
 *****
Fifteen years ago, another young Florida-based African-American woman came to Paris talking about future titles, and relishing a chance to slide on exotic red clay. That player was Venus Williams, and it was hard not to see the parallels between Williams and Stephens today. Even the Paris weather could have been a metaphor for their current situations. Stephens played in the early afternoon sun and won easily. By the time Williams took the court for her second-round match against Agnieszka Radwanska, clouds had rolled in, the temperature had dropped, and rain was threatening. One night after her sister had helped set Chatrier on fire, Venus walked out to a half-filled, mostly dead arena.
It was clear during the first changeover that Venus’s mood was just as melancholy. Between games, she leaned back, not touching her racquet, and closed her eyes in stone-faced resignation. Venus was a step—or two, or three, or four—slow from the start. She struggled, and often failed, just to catch up to Radwanska’s returns of serve, and Aga is hardly the biggest hitter on tour. The first set was over in 28 minutes, and Venus’s best moment was a stare that she flashed at Radwanska after the Pole passed her with a sharp running forehand. Aga was very good from start to finish. In the second set, she came up with a scrambling lob winner from the front of the court, and lofted another from the baseline to reach match point. She’ll play Svetlana Kuznetsova next, and perhaps Ana Ivanovic after that.
Venus signed autographs when it was over, prompting some to speculate that, 15 years after her celebrated debut here, we might not see her on this court again. But Williams said later, in a press conference that was strangely melancholy and upbeat at the same time—you might say Venus was laughing to keep from crying—that she’ll be back in Paris next year, and that this was all just “the start of a process” of learning to play with the auto-immune disease she has. Some days are better than others, she says, and she never knows how they’ll turn out when she wakes up in the morning.
“I don’t have the magic answer,” she said with a smile. “If I did, you know, I’d be in the third round.”
“I’m still playing a professional sport,” Venus continued philosophically, “so I have to be positive. I’m gonna have ups and downs. [But] I haven’t gotten to the ‘Why me?’ yet. I hope I never get to the ‘Why me?’ I’m not allowed to feel sorry for myself.”
That’s Venus, the strong sister, head always up. Right now she’s finding the bright side in her Olympic hopes. She talked today about her love of the Games, how her father inspired her to aim for them, and how, “When I leave the Olympics, I go through withdrawal.” She said that’s why she was here playing today.
At the moment, Venus has a singles spot on the team by ranking, but she talked tonight about just playing doubles and mixed doubles—it’s all up in the air. Two players would need to pass Venus, who is ranked 57th, to keep her out of the team's four singles spots. One of those players is currently ranked 13 places below her, and is in the third round at Roland Garros. Her name is Sloane Stephens.
 PARIS—The French Open has not one but two Kids’ Days. The first is held the Saturday before the tournament began; the second is today, on the opening Wednesday. It doesn’t take long, as you approach the grounds, to hear that something different is happening. A block away, you start picking up a high-pitched ambient sound in the air. As you get closer, you realize that this sound is made up of many squealing, laughing, and chattering young voices. By the time you reach the big black iron gates of Roland Garros, you can distinguish individual words. Or, more precisely, one word, cried out over and over, from every direction, in a steadily ascending wail: “AlllllllaaaaaaAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!” (That’s allez, in case you don't understand French children well.)
A high percentage of the people in this country play tennis, there’s a healthy semi-pro system here, and few nations produce as wide a variety of steady Top 100 professionals. Exposing kids to the sport early must not hurt. And while these rambunctious packs of pre-teens make the already-crowded grounds a little more chaotic, they also inject a fresh and comical—if not always innocent—enthusiasm, one that you can hear all around you.
You hear the kids in the upper reaches of Chatrier shouting, “Allez Rogi!” throughout Roger Federer’s match. You hear teenage boys whistling rudely as Ana Ivanovic walks onto Court 2—“Smile for me, Ana, pretty smile.” You see teenage girls hustling for the front row as men's matches begin. You see the younger ones eating ice cream and waiting, as quietly as they can, in the long lines that form outside every court here.
Mostly, though, you see them bunched up on top of one another near the long ramp that leads out of the player area below Court Suzanne Lenglen. Not only do you see the kids here, you have trouble getting around them. They form a sort of flying wedge that extends 50 meters beyond the entrance to the ramp, and slows traffic through the middle of the grounds. As each new body emerges from Lenglen and wanders upward, every face, every pair of eyes, every oversize tennis ball and pen and magazine, leans forward a few inches, ready to pounce.
It’s an odd sensation to visit both sides of this scene: the fans and kids massed outside, the people who make the tournament happen eating and lounging on the inside. To your left, when you walk down the ramp, you come to Lenglen’s press room, occupied mostly by photographers, and its outdoor dining area, where people linger over their lunches under canopies. (As a good overworked American, my own lunch is usually a pre-packaged club sandwich and a Pepsi at my desk.)
Walk through a couple of doors and you come to the player lounge and dining area. Instead of the desks and computers that fill the press room, the lounge has walls of TVs and couches. This morning Marion Bartoli did a few last stretches in preparation for her afternoon match on Lenglen. Judy and Jamie Murray talked about getting something to eat.
From there you take a turn and walk down a long hall lined with posters and abstractly designed mirrors. Dark-clothed security guards talk in pairs. The scene is casual; players in shorts and flip-flops, with perma-tans and wet hair, greet each other with up-grip handshakes and half-hugs. If you hadn’t see these smiling 20-somethings on TV, would you even consider trying to get their autographs?
When you turn the corner and begin to ascend the ramp, you realize that there are plenty of people who want the players' chicken scratch on a piece of felt, or who just want to get any kind of glimpse of them—to point and say, “That’s Nicolas Mahut, right there!” As you continue upward, dozens of faces, hats, and sunglasses along the railing stare down at you. The hunger for fame, and the paucity of celebrities who appear at any given time, is great enough that even when you’re identified as a nobody, the eyes stay on you for a split-second longer, just in case they’ve been mistaken.
Roland Garros has style and tradition and good ice cream, but it also creates that essential, and essentially weird, dynamic needed for modern show business: the scarcity of the star. Of course you couldn’t have the players walking around among the great French unwashed, but there’s a strange hierarchy around that ramp. The athletes, dressed for a pool party, watch the tube, play video games, and pick at pasta, while the press sits and writes about them across the hall, and fans gather above them for a sighting.
This is how pro sports—show-biz for sweaty people—functions and thrives. There’s excitement and fantasy and vicarious pleasure in the star system, and the French Open probably wouldn’t be desirable to attend if it were as relaxed and open and status-free as your local club tournament. The fans have status, too; they have tickets.
Still, the ramp is weird. I’ve never seen anyone famous walk up it.
 PARIS—I woke up to two thoughts this morning. First, I remembered that Virginie Razzano has to play a second-round match at some point; after one of the biggest upsets of all time, I hope she doesn’t suffer the biggest letdown of all time. Second, since the advent of the 32-, rather than 16-, seed system at the majors a decade ago, upsets of that magnitude are rare in the opening round. This has its pluses and minuses. A shocker like that is a thrill for an evening, and its buzz will reverberate for a few days. Unless Razzano turns this into a miracle run, though, we’ll be missing Serena’s presence at some point. No matter: Last night was one of those “this is what sports is all about” evenings, and you’re lucky to catch them, and to get caught up in the feelings of anarchy that they inspire, when you can.
But: Onward. It’s sunny again in Paris. Rain is in the forecast, but it’s been there a few times this week and hasn’t appeared yet. Here’s a look at a few of the things that were pushed to the margins on what was, in truth, mostly a very routine Tuesday.
*****
Yesterday Rafael Nadal added his thoughts about the 2012 verstion of the Babolat ball: “It's fast. The ball is fast,” was his immediate, blurted answer, though he modified that assessment slightly as he went along. Nadal eventually concluded that, thus far, after one match on a hot day, they were a little slower than last year.
What did Babolat do to the balls, exactly? I asked Sylvain Triguigneaux, who runs the company’s equipment program at Roland Garros and other tournaments. He said that, despite having what he believed was a successful debut in 2012, “Some of the players complained that the ball was too hard. So we had a meeting with the FFT, who requested that we make an adjustment. We softened the ball a bit for this year’s tournament.”
Triguigneaux also said that the Babolats are used in the Nice, Brussels, and Strasbourg run-up events to Roland Garros, but getting them installed in Monte Carlo, Madrid, Rome, and other big events is difficult, because each of those tournaments negotiates its own ball deals.
There has been a ball change in Paris this year. It’s just that, not all that surprisingly, the players can’t agree exactly what its effect has been.
*****
Staying with Rafa for a minute, his presser yesterday upstaged his straight-set first-round win over Simone Bollelli. Most of the relevant Nadal bases were covered.
—First, the all-important question of the color of his shirt. What was this mysterious tint called, exactly? Nadal had no idea.
“I will check,” he said. “I let you know next time. I let you know exactly the name . . . That's a good question.”
—Did he have any idea whether Bjorn Borg would come to see him play the final? (Borg has said that he has no plans to make the trip)
“You know,” the practical Nadal said, “we are in the second round. That’s the thing. I have enough work to do thinking about the next round, and not think about if Bjorn will be here or if I gonna play the final.”
—The next reporter mentioned that a French player claimed that Chatrier was a difficult court to play on. Did he agree?
Nadal smiled and said, quite correctly, “I’m not the right player to say I don’t like that court.” What was he supposed to say, if only the match had been played somewhere else, I would have beaten Soderling in 2009? Nadal’s conclusion: “It’s one of the most charismatic courts in the history of tennis.”
—Blue clay: Would he go back on it if it were improved and wasn’t slippery?
“In my opinion, I already know was a bad decision," Nadal retorted, "and I didn’t change my mind two weeks later. We cannot accept in the middle of the clay-court season a tournament with completely different conditions.”
—His public injury talk: Did he see an advantage or disadvantage to mentioning his ailments, rather than not mentioning them?
“I don’t see an advantage or disadvantage,” Nadal said. “Because at the end the result is the same. You are injured, you are injured, even if you say or you don’t say. So all the thing we can talk about is if you prefer to come here and say the true, or you prefer to come here and lie. That’s the only point.”
—Finally, we went a little off topic:
Q: I read that your favorite place in Roland Garros is the locker room. Is this true?
Nadal: “You know, I spend a lot of hours there. That’s the true, no?...You can see all the matches, you have a nice lounge for the players. It’s one of the best locker rooms in the world.”
Roland Garros, owner of the GLROAT—greatest locker room of all time.
*****
In the Herald Tribune, Christopher Clarey has a look behind a remarkable statistic: In 2002, there were 11 men at the French Open who were 30 and over; this year 37 over-30s started the tournament. The French already have a name for them: the "trentenaires." There’s no clear-cut answer as to why there are more of them these days, though one of the old-timers, Jarkko Nieminen, hazards a guess. “There’s more depth in the game every year, more good players, so the competition is tougher,” Nieminen says. “Over all, players are in very good shape, and obviously for a young junior, it takes a few years to build up the fitness.”
The leader of the senior set is clearly 34-year-old Tommy Haas, who qualified for the event and won his first-round match yesterday. Haas says he still relishes the opportunity to play, and wants to give his 1-year-old daughter a chance to see and remember him out there. He's not sure he's going to make it that long.
*****
Favorite line from Virginie Razzano’s presser: “I always believe everything is possible, even if things are tough.”
Favorite line from Serena Williams’ presser, about Eva Asderaki: “Was that the one who did my U.S. Open last match last year? I just really had a flashback there.”
*****
Wednesday’s play is set to begin as I write this, but here are a few things to look for:
—Top seed Novak Djokovic goes out to the second court, Lenglen, and he does it right away, at 11 A.M. sharp, against Blaz Kavcic
—Juan Martin del Potro is also out early; he faces Edouard Roger-Vasselin, a man who lives five minutes from Roland Garros. He shouldn't be late.
—Melanie Oudin gets a sterner test today, from Italy’s Sara Errani
—Folk hero Brian Baker returns, this time to Chatrier, to face Gilles Simon
—Roger Federer vs. Adrian Ungur, second on Chatrier
—Sloane Stephens vs. Bethanie Mattek-Sands in an American girl battle; Stephens is looking to be on the proverbial verge of . . . we'll see
—Juan Carlos Ferrero vs. Marin Cilic, a nice one for little Court 6
—Pablo Andujar in a possible upset of Stan Wawrinka
—Another Williams returns late on Chatrier, when Venus takes on Aga Radwanska in the women’s match of the day
*****
I should have a report on that last one this afternoon, along with a little local color. See you then.
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