Roland Garros, One Sight at a Time	05/31/2010 - 3:22 AM

You begin a trip to the French Open looking for the French in it. As you make your way through the mass of humanity on the central pathway at Roland Garros, you notice the foreign elements: A happy cry of “C’est bon!” out of one ear, an abrupt “D’accord” out of the other, and, for the first time in years, the scrape of a metal cigarette lighter right behind you. You notice strange brands of sneakers, women with big round brown eyes, men wearing pink scarves, scowling teenage boys with their hair combed from one ear to the other, giggling teenage girls gathered in a circle, whispering.

Teenage boys scowling. Teenage girls giggling. Does that sound very foreign to you? Don’t you see that every day in every town in America? By the end of the first week at the French Open, you might stop noticing the French in it as much. You might, if you’ve been to Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, begin to think that the audiences—sporty, casual, upper middle class—at these three tournaments aren't all that different for each other. If anything, it’s the crowds at Flushing Meadows that stand out as the ritziest. The division between day sessions and night sessions at the U.S. Open, which doesn’t exist (yet) at Wimbledon or the French, has created a fan division—bus-trip families during the day; black-clad Manhattan Martini-drinkers at night—that you don’t find here.

So on my last day at Roland Garros, on the tournament's middle Sunday, after a week of acclimating myself to the talk and the smoke, I took my notebook and braved the cold air and the low clouds to see what the French Open looked like, one item at a time. 

I found:

 —Security guards and ushers in spiffy red Roland Garros blazers calling out avancé! avancé! outside the front gates. If you come to the tournament, this might be the first word you hear as you make the long walk from the metro along the Bois de Boulogne to the tournament grounds. The ushers and security guards yell it for minutes on end at the crowds swarming toward them. The idea is to herd—advance—as many people on to another, less-crowded gate down the block. Short of that, the idea is to get them out of the guards' faces as soon as possible.

—The words Simple Dames at the top of the big women’s draw on site. It means “women’s singles.” As funny as it looks, I like the words above the men’s draw even more: Simple Messieurs. I imagine it as an encouragement: “Here, let me show you, it’s simple, messieur.”

—The smell of cigarette smoke drifting in from my left. Its warmth feels and smells good on a cool day. The black woman in jeans doing the smoking is taking her time and savoring her cigarette. She looks nothing like a harassed American office worker guiltily puffing as fast as possible so no one glimpses her shameful act. At least you can enjoy your cancer sticks here. At the moment, this one looks pretty tempting.

—One Franklin & Marshall College hat. One retro San Diego Padres jacket, 1970s vintage brown (a very cool uniform, now that I see it in Paris 30 years later). One Los Angeles Lakers sweatshirt.

—One woman in flip-flops. I’ve never seen much of this standard U.S. clothing item here. I’ve learned, very rapidly, that I can live without its flapping sound.

—One young woman, with a smile and a tilt of her head, selling daily programs. This may be the only thing that is incontestably better at Roland Garros than it is at Flushing Meadows. In the past in New York they’ve been sold by a man—no, a guy—who tirelessly bellows, like a hot dog vendor at a baseball game, “Pro-grams, get your official U.S. Open pro-grams right here!” The young Frenchwoman is not bellowng. I doubt she could bellow if she tried.

—Ten people at the top of Suzanne Lenglen stadium, bored by the admittedly boring match between Robin Soderling and Marin Cilic. They try to start the wave during each changeover, but it fails to catch on. They boo the rest of the crowd.

—One thin blond girl at a Haägen-Dazs stand, in a beige jacket that’s much too light for the current temperature. She wraps herself up in her arms. There are no customers for the ice cream she’s selling.

—One young couple kissing next to a sandwich stand. The man, taller, brings his hand out and considers wrapping it around his girlfriend’s back. Perhaps remembering that he’s in public, he lets it drop at the last second.

—Flavia Pennetta, in tennis clothes, with a titanic racquet bag slung over her shoulder, texting.

—One immaculately dressed young brother and sister duo walking down to the pricey seats in Lenglen. He’s in a navy checked suit and pinstriped shirt. She’s wearing a black dress and has her pulled back like a woman 25 years older. Finally, two people I can look at and say: Parisians.

—Three or four young men in various places wearing backwards baseball hats and sweatpants. Two of them are eating pizza as they walk, something my high school French teacher said no self-respecting French person would ever be caught doing.

—Two chefs, in the press dining hall, in stained white chef shirts, sitting back and enjoying their own meal after dinner hours for the media are over. Their hair is still sweaty. They’re smiling broadly.

—John McEnroe walking toward me. He’s heading right in my direction, but swerves out of the way when he sees someone—me—coming at him. I can now say that I have had an affect on John McEnroe’s life.

—A pair of young ushers at Chatrier stadium, one man, one woman, dressed in cream and red Roland Garros usher uniforms. I’ve walked past them dozens of times every day for the last eight days. They’ve been standing the entire time. Finally, today, the girl is sitting down on the staircase that leads to the court. She looks guilty, but too tired to do anything else.

—A chair umpire on Court 1 quietly intoning, “Egalité.” This is the same as deuce—“equality”—which is odd, because as my friend Chris Clarey pointed out in a very good article for the Herald Tribune last week, “deuce” originally was French. It was a mispronunciation of the French “à deux," the same way “love” was a mispronunciation of the French word for egg, “l’oeuf,” slang for zero.

Tennis is a true mixed-breed of British and French—the word is spelled the same way in both languages. The English invented lawn tennis, but the French invented its ancestor, court tennis. “Tennis” comes from the French “tenez,” (“ready!”), the word that servers said to their opponents before they started a point. In case you’re wondering, the word “serve” comes from “service.” The royals who played the game thought putting the ball in play was beneath them. To begin a point, they said “service” to a minion, who would do the menial task of serving for them.

Wimbledon may be the home of lawn tennis, but the French have a right to claim the sport as their own as well.

—At the end of the day, one light-skinned black girl waiting outside the gates for a ride home. She must work at the tournament, and she looks ready to get out of there. While she waits, she stands and looks up at the trees across the streets. She blinks many times before she drops her eyes down again. She’s thinking about something. Something other than tennis.

—In the distance, peaking over the stands at Lenglen, the Eiffel Tower. The symbol of Paris is never too far from view. Parisians may not notice it anymore, but I’ve yet to grow tired of its presence, which seems to me to be a miraculous mix of the industrial and the romantic. I felt the same way about the Twin Towers. I still miss those, and am happy to have a chance here to look up again and see something that everyone in the city can share, something that lets you know, in case you’ve forgotten, that you’re in a great place.

*** 

So maybe it’s a good time to leave. The city and the tournament don’t feel totally foreign, but it’s still a thrill to walk outside in the morning, see the café owner smoking his first cigarette, and think, “Oh yeah, I’m in Paris."

Pete Bodo takes over at Roland Garros today. See you from New York on Wednesday.

The Drive vs. the Slide	05/30/2010 - 10:11 AM

Slap slap slap.

That was the only sound inside Court Philippe Chatrier at 1:00 P.M. on Sunday as Justine Henin prepared to throw up her first service toss of the day. It should have been an afternoon of high tension and excitement in Paris, but the clouds that had settled over the stadium for the last 36 hours had done a good job muffling the crowd. Still, they hadn’t muffled Henin’s opponent, Maria Sharapova, who was set to receive serve on the other baseline. That slapping sound was the sound of her left palm hitting her thigh. Sharapova did it with such intensity, she almost looked like she was trying to draw her own blood.

The thigh slap is a move that used to be reserved for juniors, mostly juniors 14-and-under. It has migrated to the pro tour over the years, but I’d never seen a player go to it as often as Sharapova did on Sunday at Roland Garros. It’s almost a tic. One on point, Henin threw up a toss and caught it. Sharapova’s reaction was to take her left hand off her racquet and begin her slapping motion again, even though she didn’t have time to get her hand all the way to her thigh. In between slaps, Sharapova clenched her left fist. When a point ended, she began to pump it again, lightly but constantly, until the next point began. If Sharapova had a one-handed backhand, she would almost surely be the first person to play an entire match with a clenched fist.

In this sense, the third-round showdown between Sharapova and Henin was a battle between the two sides of the sport: the smooth and natural vs. the willful and manufactured. My preference for one or the other vacillates, but whichever side you choose, tennis is a stronger sport for being able to contain and show off both of them. On Saturday, my admiration shifted toward willfulness, toward Sharapova. When she and Henin came out in the early evening, it was cold and misting; walking around on the grounds, you couldn’t look up without getting an eye-full of water. The weather was right on the border of being playable—“it’s not just drizzling; it’s pouring,” Sharapova said—which, as Rafael Nadal mentioned in his press conference yesterday, can play havoc with the normal dynamic of a match. That’s what happened Saturday. Henin came out particularly sharp, and Sharapova came out flat. It was 3-0 in minutes and the rallies were so lopsided that there was no reason to believe that anything could change.

But Sharapova decided—you could see it in her face—that it was going to change. It began with a highlight-reel fist-pump after she finally held serve. From then until the end of the second set, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any player, in any round, at any tournament, will herself back into a match to the extent that Sharapova did in this one. By the time she won the second, she wasn’t just winning points; she’d gone one step farther, breaking Henin’s streak of 40 consecutive sets won at Roland Garros and breaking her vaunted clay-court game down as well.

In the third set today, the rallies pitted Sharapova’s drive and length vs. Henin’s angles and side-to-side sliding defense. Sharapova got the better of this battle early, winning the first two games and going up 0-40 on Henin’s serve. But Henin is a four-time champion here for a reason. She’s comfortable enough on this surface to beat Sharapova just by playing a solid version of her normal game. Sharapova, who can’t slide or play anything like the kind of defense that Henin can, had to push herself to her limit on offense to have a chance. She reached that limit at 2-0, 0-40, when she drilled a routine backhand into the tape. This looked more like a blip than an opening, but Henin made the most of it. Suddenly her angles were beating Maria's length, Sharapova was slipping along the baseline and reaching desperately with her left hand for backhands, and Henin was holding serve with a traditional “Allez!”

Henin won a point at the net in that 0-2 game. It was her first successfully aggressive foray of the day, and, according to her, something clicked after that. “I came to the net,” Henin said, “and that gave me my confidence back. I really needed that game. After that, everything was easier to go to the net and play more aggressive. It really helped me to feel free.” So coming in does still matter, maybe not as a tactic, but as a way to get the blood flowing. And it's true, nothing makes you feel more competent as a tennis player than constructing a point that you finish with a volley. It’s interesting that even a player of Henin’s accomplishments still needs that nerve-scattering kick start.

Two more moments stick out for me from Henin’s subsequent 6-3 third-set win. At 1-2, right after she had held from 0-40, Henin played her first rally from on top of the baseline, rather than behind it. She won it with a confident, on the rise forehand. The battle of court position had shifted in Henin’s favor. The second, and more spectacular moment, came in Sharapova’s long, crucial service game at 3-4. On the final deuce point, Sharapova battered the ball from mid-court, while Henin slid from side to side, digging out balls that appeared to be past her. Finally, Sharapova put a forehand into the net. Henin’s superior clay game, her one-handed backhand and peerless sliding skill, had proved to be the difference at last. If the point had been reversed, there’s no way Sharapova, a self-described “cow on ice” on clay, with a two-handed backhand, would have been able to stay in that point.

Henin goes on to play another powerful opponent in Sam Stosur next, though you get the feeling Justine “freed” herself a little with this win and got her clay legs under her again. Her backhand, in its flair and its efficiency, was still a wonder to watch, and it’s hard to think of anyone, even Rafael Nadal, who looks more at home while working a clay court.

But it’s the loser, Sharapova, whom I’ll remember from this match. I've spent a lot of time this week admiring the smooth and the natural in tennis; seeing the pros move on clay does that to me. But in her ability to nearly do what seemed impossible through raw determination, Sharapova, who no one would say moves with particular beauty on dirt, made me admire the other side of the sport, the willful side of the sport, again. She refused to give in, for the simple reason that that’s all anyone really has the power to do. Down 3-5, 40-0, triple match point in the third, after having blown a 2-0, 0-40 lead, Sharapova walked to the baseline to receive serve. I was so accustomed to the sight by now that it took me a second to notice what she was doing as she bent to return serve. She was clenching her fist.

Paris Note: Resting Place	05/30/2010 - 1:43 AM

It occurred to me, as I started to write this post, that the most welcoming landscapes in the two places where I’ve lived have been graveyards. Williamsport, Pa., where I grew up, is overlooked by picturesque Wildwood cemetery, which winds around the steep wooded hills on the north side of town. At the center of Brooklyn, N.Y., where I live now, is one of America's most famous cemeteries, Green-Wood, home to local legends as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, F.A.O. Schwartz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Crazy Joe Gallo, and Boss Tweed. I love both of these Woods, Green and Wild. They seem like luxuries of public life, communal spaces that are spiritual rather than commercial. Like church, they're symbols of the afterlife, but without the guilt or the singing or the kneeling. Just the fact that we honor the dead by marking down their names and giving them a piece of real estate in perpetuity is proof to me that there's something good inside of us.

Both of these cemeteries roll over hills and under trees, and their gravesites are placed along crisscrossing walkways that make them feel like bucolic bedroom communities. Death in the U.S. must be kind of like moving to the ’burbs. Green-Wood is the only place I’ve found in New York where you can hear almost nothing at all. The only sound, a distant ambient hum, comes from the airplanes that fly across Brooklyn to La Guardia.

If you’ve been to, or seen photos of, a Paris cemetery, you know that they’re more urban and jumbled than they are bucolic. Flat stones and taller monuments are jammed together, with only the thinnest space between each of them, like brownstones in Brooklyn or row houses in Philly. Instead of vast lawns and curving lanes, you walk along tree-lined, asphalt boulevards that are named the same way that the real streets of Paris are named. The dead don’t leave town here. They remain committed urbanites, city slickers forever. One Parisian cemetery resident, Charles Pigeon, and his family haven’t just stayed in town. They've stayed in bed.

A comfortable spring breeze hit my face when I walked into Montparnasse Cemetery on Saturday morning. Just around the corner from my hotel, it was the most convenient tourist site for someone working 10 hours a day. But coming here was immediately a pleasure. Like my old graveyard haunts, once you’re safely inside its stone walls, Montparnasse wards off the harsher sounds of the city. The buzz of Paris’s motorbikes and the sirens of its police cars and ambulances are frozen out; they seem to come from far away. By the time you’ve reached the cemetery’s center they’ve vanished, as have the normal frantic rhythms of the city. You can walk slowly here.

Paris’s cemeteries house even more of its most famous citizens than Green-Wood does Brooklyn’s. Montparnasse, which was laid out in 1824, is not the home of Jim Morrison; he's at Père Lachaise, an even bigger and more tightly packed site a little farther from the city’s center. But Montparnasse does have a shrine to Paris’s own deceased 60s icon of music and decadence, Serge Gainsbourg. His site is on a prime piece of real estate near the middle of the cemetery—I wonder who they booted to make room for Serge?—and covered with photos and flowers. It’s impossible to miss.

That’s not true of most of the notable graves here, even when the people in them are infinitely more worthy of attention. Befitting this bohemian neighborhood, the cemetery specializes in allowing writers and artists to, hopefully, find eternal rest. Samuel Beckett is here, but I couldn’t find him. While I was poking around on his block, though, I accidentally ran across Susan Sontag’s grave. “The Susan Sontag?” was my first disbelieving thought; the cemetery doesn’t even list her on their map. On Saturday morning the flat black stone that has her name, the years of her life, and nothing else engraved on it looked lonely compared to Serge’s. There was nothing on top of Sontag’s but a stray metro ticket and some sticky leaves that had dropped from the tree above.

I wrote the other day that finding yourself alone with a famous landmark is a strange and awesome sensation. The same is true when you’re alone at a famous person’s gravesite. But while it’s a thrill—at that moment, you’re closer to that person, that figure, than anyone else—it’s also humbling and plainly sad. I liked what I’d read by Sontag, but she wasn’t a literary hero of mine. If I’d thought about it, I would have remembered that she’d died a few years ago, but seeing her name still came as a melancholy shock. What was this New York girl doing here by herself, so far from home?

America distrusts it intellectuals and artists, which makes Paris’s commitment to honoring them a wonderful surprise (even if, as an American, part of me reflexively distrusts them as well). Avenues here are named after writers, and statues of revolutionary thinkers are scattered up and down them. Most surprising to me was seeing that even a contemporary philosopher like Charles Baudrillard, controversially post-modern to most Americans who have heard of him, has found his way into Montparnasse.

After failing with Beckett, I did find the handsome and humble co-grave of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They're tucked just inside the front gate, a few feet from a busy street. I found Alfred Dreyfus, a wrongly jailed Jewish soldier and symbol of French anti-semitism. This titanic historical figure—if you’ve read any of Proust, you know how obsessed France was with him—rests on the crowded far edge of the cemetery, under a dignified but hard-to-notice stone. I found Montparnasse's patron saint, Charles Baudelaire, who, unfortunately for him, lies in the same gravesite as the father in law he hated. And as a    former wannabe critic, I found the patron saint of critics, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. He's buried under the weirdest statue of all, what I assume is a likeness of him as an older man, grimacing in dour concern. It’s a creepily lifelike rendering. I took it as a warning to all wannabe critics: Relax, kid, or this is how you’re going to look someday.

I like cemeteries, but the afterlife is, well, beyond me—it’s all in the here and now, and that to me is exciting, not scary. By the time I was ready to leave Montparnasse, I felt energized. I felt the here and now, today, this time we have, the sun, the sky, the clouds, the people walking around with me, pressing even harder. The breeze on my face as I walked out felt a little stronger.

Stuck in the Mud	05/29/2010 - 10:37 AM

“A brown ball? So unprofessional,” Andy Roddick says to chair umpire Carlos Bernades with a sardonic shake of his head. He’s unhappy with the ball he’s just received, which has rolled through a puddle and is now half-covered by a damp spot of muddy clay.

That’s not really the issue, of course. What’s really eating Roddick at the moment is that he’s down 3-5 in the first set to No. 116-ranked Temiuraz Gabashvili out on Court Suzanne Lenglen, where the sky is gray, the air is heavy, and the energy in the building is less than palpable. This is not the start that America’s best player had hoped for, and it’s not the court where he wants to be playing. Roddick has been upset in this same stadium, which many of the players believe has the slowest clay at Roland Garros, numerous times in the past. Off the top of my head I can remember him being beaten in Lenglen by Olivier Mutis in 2004, Jose Acasuso in 2005, and Gael Monfils last year. But what can he do? As Roddick says afterward, he’s not a center court guy in Paris, but he’s not a side-court guy either. “They’re putting me on the court they feel I should be on as far as people coming to see [the match]. It’s nobody’s fault.”

From the start, you can see that Lenglen has cast its dark spell over Roddick once more. Gabashvili may be ranked 116 at the moment, but he’s always a strong ball-striker, with enough pop to hit winners from behind the baseline. In the past, he's been able to hang with better players for short periods of time before coming uncorked. Gabashvili has trouble sustaining his best form for a couple of reasons. One is his emotional control, or lack thereof. After hitting the tape with a makeable passing shot today, he stamped his feet and scrunched his face up like a little boy whose younger sister has just beaten him at Wii. It’s not hard to figure out what the 25-year-old Georgian is thinking and feeling at any given moment. You can see it in his anxious body language and facial expressions. He’s up and down, so much so that it makes him jumpy during matches.

From a more practical perspective, Gabashvili’s problem begins right at the beginning of his strokes. He has long backswings, and it takes him a while to get around to the ball. “The tricky thing for him,” Roddick said today, “is having enough time to take those swings at the ball.” But this isn’t a problem on the slowest court at Roland Garros, and you can see the difference in the pace that Gabashvili can generate when he does make contact, and the pace that Roddick is generating with his much shorter strokes. “My swings are a little bit more compact and more based on timing as opposed to the long, fluid, lengthy-type thing,” Roddick says. “You do that over and over, I’m probably gonna come up short against that in conditions like these.”

It’s a paradox of clay-court tennis that, while it obviously rewards consistency, stamina, and defense, you also must have enough juice from the baseline to put the ball past your opponent. As Roger Federer said after his last match, you have to be able to finish points when you get the opportunity on dirt. When we talk about Americans' struggles on the surface, we typically talk about how we can’t move on the stuff, or that we breed big servers and all-or-nothing attacking players rather than stubborn grinders. But while Roddick is the quintessential big-serving American, otherwise he really is a grinder, a better grinder than ever, in fact, as he proved with his strong showing on slow hard courts this spring. Roddick loses on clay, or at least on clay today, because after the serve he doesn’t hit big enough. He strokes aren't constructed or timed for this stuff.

After Gabashvili won the first set. I expected him to get tight, to let his emotions get the better of him. Roddick hung tenaciously to his serve through the second set, hoping for the same thing. And there was one moment, in Roddick’s first service game, where Gabashvili appeared to hesitate. Pushed out wide, he had a look at a forehand up the line, a shot he’d been drilling without trouble, and he tentatively pushed it wide. But that would turn out to be one of the rare occasions when Roddick pushed him anywhere. Gabashvili was able to hit from on top of the baseline and the middle of the court; a nervous player can’t ask for anything more than that. “The way the points were constructed today,” Roddick said, “I wasn’t on top of anything.”

For Roddick, was it the lack of preparation, the fact that he had played zero matches on clay before this tournament? Well, yeah, and he admitted as much. “When I was getting stretched here, I felt like my movement was horrendous,” he said. “I was trying too hard to put a Band-Aid on a problem as opposed to, you know, an actual solution.” Roddick said at the start of this event that he would never skip the clay season, because it’s at least a chance to learn. What did he learn this year? To play more beforehand? That could be it, but last year it seemed that less was more for him—Roddick skipped everything but Madrid, and ended up having the best French result of his career. 

With Sam Querrey running home, and Roddick and John Isner sent packing in blowout losses, the American quest for clay answers continues—Robby Ginepri has been left with the wavering torch for the moment. Maybe there's another, less conventional solution for Roddick. Maybe to do better here next year, he needs to lower his ranking. That way he could get French officials to exile him to an outside court. He could escape Lenglen, where the balls, and his game, are still stuck in the mud.

Stars, Sammy, and Swiveling Ivan: Friday at the French	05/28/2010 - 1:55 PM

The view from my desk got much better on Friday. Two days of heavy clouds and umbrellas were behind us. The sun, and a ton of tennis matches, were in front of us. There was nothing to do but get out and see a few. When I sat down to write about them, I couldn't think of anything better to do, on such a vivid day of tennis, but paint a few portraits—or, if that sounds too lofty, take a few snap shots—of the players who were part of it.

***

Serena Williams is under control. So under control that her purposeful presence keeps the crowd inside Court Suzanne Lenglen unusually quiet as well. She rules the moment without even trying. But sometimes Serena needs to remind herself not to lose that control. When she misses a shot, she stops, stands still, and puts her left palm out parallel to the court. “Take it easy, take it easy,” is the message. After bad misses, Serena turns downright delicate. She stops, looks down, and pushes her feet up and down into the red dirt, like a cat pushing into a blanket.

Serena doesn’t need to worry today. Her opponent, Germany’s Julia Goerges, is flailing. She catches the ball late and sends it into the alleys. She knows the the pace is coming, but she can’t adjust her strokes to keep up with even a routine ground stroke from Serena. Who can? Eight years ago, I saw Serena play a match at Wimbledon right before Tim Henman. There was no question who hit the ball harder.

Late in the first set, Goerges gives Serena a short ball. Serena is out of her normal baseline stance and on top of it, with her racquet back, more quickly, with less extraneous motion, than anyone I’ve seen here. Serena walks slowly, almost gingerly, between points, so slowly and gingerly you have a hard time believing she can get those feet to move so quickly when she needs to. She stores up a lot of energy.

Serena hits with a wider open stance, on each side, than anyone else. This gives her a head start on covering the court after she hits, and helps her on clay, where she’s at a disadvantage because she rarely slides into the ball. It also lets her set up farther to the left of the hash mark on the baseline, giving her more shots at her forehand. But playing so open can get in her trouble. When she misses, it’s often because she comes off the ball and doesn’t lean into it, the peril of hitting with this stance. On clay, she needs all of her power; even today, the surface holds up some balls that would have penetrated on another court. She’ll have to hit the ball more crisply than she does today if she’s going to win the tournament.

Serena gets tight for a few minutes at the beginning of the second set, but Goerges can’t do anything with the opportunity. The interest on this morning isn’t in the competition. It’s in Serena’s command of her surroundings. Other players nod at the ball kids when they want the ball tossed to them. Serena looks at them. While her opponent stops at the first changeover of a set for a drink, Serena, like her sister and only her sister, follows the original rules and walks around the other net post without stopping. When she does walk to her chair, Goerges stops to let her go by first. Serena doesn’t look up, but there’s no arrogance in the gesture. It’s understood: She’s in control here.

“What can you learn from [this match] in terms of the kind of form you’re in for the rest of the tournament?” Serena is asked afterward.

“How can I get them to all be like that.”

***

Novak Djokovic has a clean-looking game when you see it from the outside. He’s balanced and mostly uncluttered from both sides and can take the ball anywhere. But when you get closer, you see how much work it is for him to manufacture that shiny product.

Djokovic grunts—a guttural, no-nonsense, almost painful grunt, not a grunt for effect—with virtually every shot against Kei Nishikori today. He wipes his brow from the first game. You can hear him breathing as he waits to return serve, all the way on the other side of the net. He goes to the towel early. His forehand swing is long, wide, helicopter-like; he leaps off the ground every time he hits it. When he’s pulled wide on his backhand, he slides hard into the ball and thrashes at it with a short-backswing, goalie-style flick. His drop shot can seem like a cop-out shot at times; today it looks like he's taking a well-deserved rest. Today he’s also lucky: It’s not humid. He won’t be lucky every day at this tournament.

Perhaps the only way Djokovic can make all this labor bearable is to be a character, to let his personality out when he can. When he trips on the Bullring clay today, he looks back at the chair umpire in outrage and throws his arms in the air. What can the umpire possibly do about it? Djokovic compliments Nishikori’s good shots and apologizes for his own mishits—he’s a hothead, but an honorable one. He also can take a moment, even when the match is still close, for a joke. As Djokovic gets set to serve and begins bouncing the ball, a woman in the crowd sneezes. He bounces it again, and she sneezes again. The third time he tries to time his bounce to her sneeze. When she sneezes a fourth time, he stops and cracks up.

“I just want to know,” Djokovic is asked afterward, “what do you need to do after a long match on the clay to take care of your body. Maybe with your physio . . .”

“I prefer woman," Djokovic says, laughing, "but unfortunately, I have to stay with my physio for two hours.”

***

Roger Federer is like a silence at the center of Court Suzanne Lenglen. Even his body language is silent. He goes to get the ball to serve and, twitchless, takes it, walks to the baseline, bounces it twice, and starts his motion. But he’s done it all so fast and so casually that his opponent, Julian Reister, hasn't had time to get ready.

As always, there's a big crowd to see Federer, but it’s the least noticeable big crowd I've ever seen. They watch in silence. Is it awe, or is it just that Federer seems to recede from them? He keeps his head down and finds his own zone. It’s not trance-like, the way Nadal can get, but it’s farther from the surface than Djokovic or Murray—Federer doesn’t mumble or breathe elaborately or yell at invisible people in the crowd. Only after shanking three balls off the top of the frame does he say a couple of words while he gets the towel. This is a different Federer from the one I watched up close in Indian Wells in March. There he seemed edgy from the start, and only got edgier as his opponent, Victor Hanescu, played better. Today there’s no edge. He takes a ball from a ball boy and flicks it to the other side of the court with a strange grip; he’s always liked to invent spins and shots, and he seems to be taking a moment to invent one here. Is this Federer in Grand Slam mode, at a comfortable distance from his surroundings?

Just when you think he’s gotten a little passive, when he can’t penetrate Reister’s colorless baseline defenses, Federer makes his subtle strike. At 4-4, Reister hits the first ball long. On the next point, Federer plays a little farther forward than he has been during the previous rallies. He wins it. 0-30. On the next point, he sneaks all the way to the net. He wins that, too. 0-40. He breaks and doesn’t lose another game until the third set.

Afterward, Federer is asked whether rain delays bother him.

“When it rains like this, I don’t mind those days, either. They’re just slow and nice and relaxing. No traveling for a change, no cars, no flights, no nothing. Just sitting still for a change.”

He sounds comfortable.

***

Sam Stosur’s supporters have a lot to cheer about on Court 2. She’s lost the first set but is taking a wrecking ball to her opponent in the second. Her serve and forehand sound like cannon-fire, and her sunglasses are vaguely menacing—is that a woman or a tennis-playing machine behind them? She walks boldly, head high.

Stosur wins not by moving her opponent around the court with guile or deception, or even with angles. She does it by belting one forehand crosscourt, getting a short ball, and hitting that crosscourt also, for an incontrovertible winner. She doesthe same thing three more times for the game. Stosur is not a huge person; she has, as they say in baseball, a live arm, and she’s swinging it with abandon today.

At the end of the set, her opponent hits a nice approach. Stosur is out of position, but she recovers and flicks a one-handed backhand from behind her body that touches down perfectly in the corner. Soon after, her opponent tries a drop shot. Stosur moves forward and slides toward it, like a real clay-courter. As she does, one of her people says, with glee, “Oh, she’s got this!” He's right. Stosur smacks a backhand winner up the line disdainfully. She walks back to the baseline with a cold eye—the glasses are glinting. We’ll find out more about what’s behind them soon.

***

Ivan Ljubicic doesn’t run down a drop shot. He scuttles after it. But he gets there. Ljubicic is over 30 and has no hair, but he plays deep into a fifth set with Mardy Fish. Ljubicic hits his backhand with such a closed face and a flat swing path that you can’t believe the ball can get over the net and down into the court consistently. It does. Ljubicic walks with deliberation between points. He looks a little stiff. But he’s flexible enough to hit a deft backhand crosscourt pass to set up match point. Fish is crushed. Ljubicic breaks into a swivel-hip dance. He looks like he’s rolling an invisible hula-hoop around his waist. He walks to the baseline and ends this two-day epic with an ace. It’s the highlight of the first week so far.

Paris Note: On the Metro	05/28/2010 - 9:33 AM

Is there any good subway writing? How about, if you’re French, metro writing? I don’t mean graffiti, that scourge of 1970s New York whose disturbingly beautiful scribbling can still be spotted on the odd metro car in Paris. We thought of it as a sign of impending chaos back then, but now, seeing it in full flower here, I wonder whether New York should consider having graffiti artists re-spray its trains. There’d be a lot more to look at in the morning, without the old menace.

Back to the first topic: Surprisingly, I’ve never come across much writing about riding the subway. You’d think it would be a common topic, considering that it’s such an important aspect of millions of people’s daily lives. But maybe important is the wrong word, and maybe the lack of subway lit shouldn’t be so surprising. A daily train ride is dead time, in-between time, something to get past, something you don’t even have to try to forget. It’s something not to talk about, let alone write about.

All that changes when you're on a different transit system. Suddenly we take everything in, notice the details, remember what we see, and maybe even—am I really saying this?—enjoy ourselves. My hotel in Paris is eight stops and one change of lines from Roland Garros. At first I bailed on it and opted for the press transport vans, which are more inconvenient and take you from the hotel door to the gates of the grounds. But the urbanite side of me felt like that was cheating somehow. No standing, packed together with my fellow man and woman, trying to avoid eye contact? No lugging my computer bag, filled with laptop, cords, chargers, dozens of Euro coins, and a few heavy books I’m never going to get a chance to read on this trip? I was drawn, irrationally, to the metro.

In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta details, with stoned amazement, the “little differences” between Los Angeles and Amsterdam. Of course, his little differences mostly have to do with eating at fast food restaurants. “You get a royale with cheese!” There are plenty of tiny differences between the subway and the metro; for a veteran rider of one, the other can seem like a Star Trek-style alternate universe, the polar opposite in even the most miniscule details. Here’s a sample of one traveler’s trip from one of those universes to the other.

***

The man in the ticket booth is on the phone, laughing, showing off the big gap in between his two front teeth. He’s annoyed to notice me at the window, holding a crumpled 5 euro bill. “Use the machine!” he yells back over his shoulder. He goes back to his conversation. I hear him laugh harder. 

The machine, the machine, it’s in French only, it won’t take paper bills. A 10-ticket pack? Why not. Good for Zones 1 and 2. Is that where I am? Seems like a good guess. Turnstile to my right. How does it work again? The ticket goes where? Let the Parisians going to work go through first. Can’t screw it up and have them sighing behind me. The ticket goes in and comes out in the right place. The bar moves when I push it. I’m in! If only I could get this excited about working the turnstile correctly every morning in New York. Might look pretty pathetic after a while.

Play it nonchalant now that you’re in, like you’ve done it a million times before. Keep moving, like you’re going to work. Wait, you don’t know where you’re going. The map on the wall is clear. Take a left, go downstairs, no problem, it’s all working. Steve Tignor: citizen of the world.

The station is small, human-sized by New York standards; the trains are endlessly long there, more people than the eye can see. Even four years since I last rode on it, the metro station, its sights and sounds, is immediately familiar. The curved white roof—lighter than in those New York dungeons—the yellow seats, and that drone. The drone, what is that drone? It’s ominous and soothing. The train is here already, mushing in on rubber wheels instead of screeching in on steel. Paris does it slow and steady. No long waits like in New York, no people standing at the edge of the platform leaning out perilously over the rat-filled tracks, waiting for 10 minutes to see a light at the end of the tunnel. But then again, no express in Paris, no 2-train rocking and careening from Times Square 30 blocks to the Upper West Side, like a ride on Space Mountain.

Right, you have to open the doors yourself here. The first time I rode the metro I made sure I followed a Parisian in, but I couldn’t keep doing that forever. I had to leave the train by myself eventually. Crowd of dull-eyed French people watching; I couldn't screw it up in front of them. Pulled the lever up and prayed. It worked; the little jarring jolt when the door opened sounded good, felt good, like you were in control of the train for half a second.

It’s 9:00 this morning and all the cars are crowded, but not New York sardines-against-the-glass crowded. I can maneuver into the middle of a car. The doors make that drone sound when they close; make a short ding-dong sound in New York. Alternate universe. Police sirens in Europe are two-toned, they sound like they’re going up and down. In New York they sound like they’re swirling. 

Riders are less comatose here. Part of riding the subway in New York, of walking in New York, is having to compare yourself to everyone you see, gauge your place in the world every few seconds. A few days before I came to Paris I stood in front of a young guy, better dressed than me, good shoes, dark suit, hip hair, cool oversized glasses. How could I measure up? I thought: I’ll bet this guy pays his bills on time. I’ll bet he mops his floors regularly, I’ll bet he knows how to cut a bagel in half without slicing his finger. Just then, he opened a little bag he was carrying. A bottle of something had spilled inside it and was leaking. He looked disgusted. I smiled a little, on the inside.

You don’t have to worry about any of this in a new city. Everything is observation and curiosity, without the terror of judgment. I take a seat and a older, white-headed gentleman—his hair is still cut at a rakishly cool length—in a brown suit makes room for me with a small smile and a nod. That’s way too much politeness for New York. The train goes above ground and cuts through a neighborhood of fine apartment buildings. I sit up; I’m the only person looking outside, craning his neck to keep the Eiffel Tower in view. This little dose of the urban gives me a thrill, the same thrill I see little kids in Brooklyn get when the F train rises up and offers a view of the Statue of Liberty. Across from me is a serious-looking woman in her mid-40s, reading, with that unique French style that seems young for her age yet totally appropriate to it.

We approach the Porte d’Autheil station, where I get off to go to Roland Garros I stand up next to a young woman with long brown hair in a trench coat and a blue-and-white nautical scarf. When I first moved to New York in my early 20s, seeing an interesting-looking girl get off a subway car could give me a mysterious, deathly sort of pain, as if I were seeing a potential future life of mine being killed off in front of me before it began (subway rides aren’t totally forgettable experiences after all). That was a long time ago, and that feeling is long gone, too, thankfully. You come to know eventually that you don't have infinite lives.

Seeing this brown-haired woman calls up only the pleasure of curiosity: This is a Parisian girl. But there is something I recognize about her when I walk past. Her eyes are raised upward a little, and her lips are pursed just slightly. It’s a look that says to the car, in a polite but firm way, “Don’t even think about trying to talk to me.” 

Yes, there are little differences between New York and Paris. And then some other things are exactly the same.

Ringside	05/27/2010 - 9:33 AM

Andy Murray is running straight toward you. He's running so fast you begin to think that, to avoid the low wall that's the only thing standing between the two of you, he might have to do a flying leap in the general direction of your skull. Murray starts sliding at the doubles sideline. He keeps sliding until he’s threatening to take your front row seat. You realize something else at this moment, now that you’re at court level, that you never realized quite so viscerally before: Andy Murray is not small. A collision would probably work out better for him than it would for you. At the last second he tries to flick a backhand down the line, but he can’t bring the ball back into the court. Murray ends his slide just in time to stand straight up and avoid falling over the wall. He looks down the court, into the stands on the other side of the net, where a group of his opponent Juan Ignacio Chela’s fans are sitting next to Murray’s entourage. It’s not clear which of these groups he’s referring to when he points his racquet in their direction and mutters, in a tone of downbeat exasperation, “Oh, shut up.” 

It seems that at each Grand Slam I write about the “best court in the world to watch tennis.” I’ve claimed the title for the Grandstand at Flushing Meadows, the old Court 2 at Wimbledon, and, at the start of this week, Court Suzanne Lenglen here at Roland Garros. I guess when I find a court I like, I suddenly can’t imagine watching a match anywhere else.

But my first love, my first favorite, was the Bullring, where I saw Murray yesterday. I loved the courtside seats because they could make a match seem unforgettable even when it wasn’t a classic in the broad scheme of things. You almost certainly remember Marat Safin dropping his pants against Felix Mantilla on this court in 2004, but what are the chances you ever heard about the five-set, third-round throwdown between Albert Costa and Xavier Malisse that same year, in which Malisse, against every odd, came back from two sets to one down to win. It was incredible to me then, watching the length and quality and variety and competitiveness of their rallies, the amount of talent required and energy expended on each side, that this was really just another match among thousands, and that each player would have to forget it as soon as possible. One shot would inspire a whispered “Holy ----,” the next get would elicit a mumbled “Jesus Christ.” Afterward, it almost seemed like it had all been a waste, that these guys were too good at what they did, that the skills of the pros weren’t impressive in the ordinary sense of the word—they were bizarre. This isn’t a reaction I’ve had anywhere else.

More than most tennis courts, the Bullring feels like an arena, where athletes stage contests for the fans. We’re close enough to feel like we’re not just observing from the outside, but have broken down the barrier between actor and spectator. To the degree that it’s possible, we’ve entered the match. Nowhere else can you get a sense—as in seeing, hearing, feeling—of the force that two professional tennis players throw at each other on every point.

Maybe this is only true from the press seats, I don't know. They’re up close, along one of the baselines. You can hear the players breathe as they wait to receive serve in the ad court. You can also hear what they say under their breath, which, in Murray’s case, is virtually impossible for this American to understand. That may be a good thing.

I watched two matches in the Bullring on Wednesday. The first was between Svetlana Kuznetsova, the defending champion, and Andrea Petkovic, a 22-year-old Bosnian native and German citizen who has carved out a persona as the WTA’s resident Goethe-reading hipster (she says she eats at McDonald’s, too). There’s a lot to like about her game. She’s tall and lean, with short, sharp strokes that she has no trouble landing a few inches from the baseline, and a service motion with the virtue of simplicity. By the time I get to the Bullring at the start of the third set, though, Petkovic has held, and lost, four match points. I don’t expect much resistance from her from here on.

I’m happy to be wrong. While she goes down 4-1, there’s nothing in Petkovic’s demeanor to indicate that she has caved mentally. She takes her cuts, pumps her fist, and accepts Kuznetsova’s winners without acting like the world is against her. She saves a match point at both 2-5 and 3-5 before finally bowing to Kuzzie’s superior force, 6-4. Petkovic also, from what I can tell, grunts in German. She’s a pleasure to watch.

But it’s her opponent who’s the revelation. Kuznetsova’s level of motivation has never been clear to me; she can zone out for entire matches. From here, you can see that, for today at least, she’s a whirlwind of emotion and desire. She exhorts herself after every point, hits and moves with abandon. By the end, she isn’t grunting, she’s yelling as she makes contact. You can see her open her mouth as she starts her swing. Kuznetsova finally ends it by thumping—walloping, crushing, obliterating, leveling, pick your adjective—a crosscourt backhand that has a thunderous ring to it (it really does). It’s not hit particularly close to the sideline, but  there’s no way Petkovic is getting anywhere near it. The match is over a minute later.

What was the difference watching this match from here instead of on TV? From my pressroom monitor, errors appeared to have been produced by mental lapses or stupid risks. “How could Petkovic hit that into the net? She must be choking. Kuzzie, will you ever learn?” But when you get on the court, you can see that while there are pointless misses, the majority of them come because each player feels that she must live with a certain amount risk in her game—Petkovic aims for the baseline; Kuznetsova swings from the heels—because if they play it safe, they’re going to get killed on the next ball. Women’s tennis 2010: Don’t call it a bash fest; call it an arms race. For better and worse, hitting the hell out of the ball is playing percentage tennis. Only seeing it up close, closing the distance between yourself and the players, will let you appreciate this. Stylistic variety? That's an aesthetic element of the sport which is emphasized by the colder, distanced view of the TV camera. Here you feel the sparks of the athletic combat that goes on beneath.

Next up were Murray and Chela, and right away my perspectives on these guys were upended. I think of Chela as a pro and little more, a guy who does his job without a whole lot of passion or anger. I was wrong. Every lost point, every Murray winner, elicits a grimace of agitation from the Argentine. I also think of Chela as a dull and steady baseline par excellence. Also not true—by any reasonable standard, he pummels the ball. There’s an unpolished quality to his strokes, especially his serve, but that doesn’t rob them of their pop, or their powerful sound.

Murray I knew was good. But like I said, you forget how big the guy is, how physical his game is. Do you wonder sometimes when you see him on TV what he’s doing out there? He looks like he’s just flipping the ball back into the court and gliding from side to side. Not true. There's an explosive effort involved in even the easiest-looking slide along the baseline. Murray isn’t flipping the ball back; he’s fighting the ball off. His serve, which has never been noted for its blistering pace, rattles the entire net when it catches the tape.

From an emotional standpoint, you might see Murray as a whiner, a guy who’s always got some niggling complaint about something. Up close you can hear him mumble to himself, take deep breaths, get annoyed at an invisible person in the audience. Taken together, these little tics and gestures begin to seem like Murray’s method of competing, of bracing himself, bit by bit, moment by moment, for the psychological strains of a match. It’s the pep talk of a fundamentally pessimistic person, and it doesn’t look like an easy act to pull off. When Murray tells the crowd to shut up a few inches from me, it isn’t anger that I see in his face. It’s embarrassment over his missed shot, over his small failure. Every tennis match is a performance where flubbed lines are a given. But that doesn't make flubbing a shot in public any easier.

There are many more moments I could describe from the Bullring that you won’t get anywhere else. Let me finish with a tiny snapshot of one rally. Murray began it by moving Chela wide to his forehand side, so far wide that Chela had to execute a long slide into the corner of the court. You could hear the clay crunch under his feet. He got there just in time to reach out and throw up a towering lob. From my seat, it arced straight upward, toward the sky, much higher than lobs normally appear to go on TV. Finally it came down, with a solid thud, an inch from the baseline. What a shot! Murray, blinking no eye, calmly set up and drilled a perfect bounce overhead into the other corner ("Wow"). Chela slid there, clay crunching under his feet again, and buzzed a ridiculous slice crosscourt ("Jesus Christ"). Murray was on it in a flash and . . . 

You get the picture, I hope. That’s tennis in the Bullring.

Kids' Night	05/26/2010 - 6:23 PM

Out on the Bullring on Wednesday evening, we closed up shop early. Juan Ignacio Chela started complaining about the light, or lack thereof, a little after 9:00 P.M. At the end of the next game, he asked the chair umpire to stop play. The umpire said there was enough light. Chela asked, not unreasonably, “How can you tell?” and pretended to hand him his racquet. Andy Murray, Chela's opponent, seemed ready to keep going, but agreed to put it off until tomorrow. Too bad: It was a pretty gripping match from my seat in the first row. But then again almost any match is gripping from those seats in the Bullring. More on that tomorrow.

I walked out of that court thinking the day was over, only to be greeted by what sounded like a full house of many thousands inside Chatrier. I jogged over to the Jumbotron outside the stadium to see what was going on. I knew Gael Monfils had been on the verge of finishing off Fabio Fognini earlier. Now, as the din inside rose again, the screen showed Monfils getting set to serve. It could only be match point, I thought. The score flashed; it was 3-4 in the fifth, and Monfils was behind. What was going on in there? I jogged up to the press seats in Chatrier.

There I was greeted by a surprise: The stadium was mostly empty. After a long day of sporadic rain and sporadic tennis, there were scattered pockets of fans and many more empty seats between them. It’s just that those pockets were making as much noise as you get at 10 normal tennis matches put together. The worst, or best, offenders, depending on your point of view, were sitting right in front of the press area. As far as I could tell, there weren’t more than 20 of them, all of them teenagers. It was pretty impressive what they could do with their voices and the backs of their chairs. What were they doing here, anyway? It hit me: It was Kids Day, an annual event at Roland Garros, and it had gone very wrong this year.

Or, depending on your viewpoint again, very right. This, I thought as Fognini lost his mind and the din rose backup one more time, is what soccer is all about. It’s not the sport that counts; it’s the audience. Here were 20 kids, likely not poor kids, who brought an edge of mayhem that you normally don’t experience at a tennis match. They were funny to watch as well. After standing and chanting and banging their seats, they all fell back into them on cue and went silent, just as play was about to begin again. Half the time that they were chanting, they had one eye on the TV monitor in the press section to see if they were on camera. A lot of the time they were.

Maybe it was the ominous sense of darkness encroaching, but all hell was on the verge of breaking loose down on court. While Fognini lost it trying to get off the court, Monfils seemed to may have made the mistake of his career staying on it. Fognini appeared invulnerable from the baseline, all the way up to match point, when he suddenly became very vulnerable, gagging the final game away. Monfils, cramping, could only arm his serves by then. Worse, though, was the fact that he had no answer to a guy who is clearly an inferior player. Monfils’ lack of any transition game was exposed; he couldn’t do anything other than try to rip the ball past Fognini from behind the baseline. He’s lucky to be playing on Thursday.

Was it too dark? Not when Fognini began his rant, as far most of us here could tell. But then again, as Chela said, how can anyone know but the players? Monfils wanted to continue, but I’m guessing he regretted that decision a few minutes later.

There was a wild edge to the night, one that, among the Slams, could only happen at the French Open. U.S. Open fans get loud, but since the edgy days of the at least the early 1980s, they’ve lacked the unity of purpose and mob-like viciousness that characterizes the French crowd. There’s something contagious about their reactions; their hisses and boos take on a life of their own, the noise swelling up and filling the air in the stadium before receding just as quickly. Like I said a few days ago, there’s less distance between the players’ actions and the fan’s reactions here than anywhere else. Where else could 20 teenagers raise an unholy ruckus, and make what might have been a mediocre and too-long second-round match into the tennis version of pro wrestling. Except that, as Fognini stood in front of the umpire, waving his racquet up and down, and the French hiss lashed higher, it seemed to me that no tennis match this year was going to feel quite as real, or quite as ridiculous, or maybe even, if you were in the building, quite as entertaining.

The Fly in the Ointment	05/26/2010 - 12:48 PM

It’s been a hard day to figure in Paris. This morning it was bright and humid where I was in Montparnasse, but from my hotel window I could see colossal storm clouds beyond the Eiffel Tower, in the direction of Roland Garros. Later, while fans were running for cover, play continued on one outside court, No. 10. In all of Paris, it seemed the sun was shining only on that rectangular patch of clay. Currently the rain has held up, but five minutes ago it was bombing down grape-sized drops, and there are more clouds moving this way.

So what does a tennis fan do now in these uncertain moments? French TV has been showing yesterday’s “lot of ugliness” between Andy Roddick and Jarkko Nieminen, but I think even Roddick would agree that we can do better than that. How about we talk about Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal? That might kill some time.

***

It’s the fly in the ointment of immortality, the chink in an otherwise flawless piece of armor. It's Roger Federer's head-to-head record against Rafael Nadal, and, if the two were to meet in the final of the French Open 10 days from now, it might just be part of the tennis conversation again. Not that we’ll have much of an idea of what to do with it. Their H2H, in which the greatest player of all time trails 7-14, has to be the most difficult statistic in tennis to gauge. Even Pete Sampras, a staunch Federer supporter, wasn’t sure what to do with Federer's 2-5 record against Nadal in major finals. It might get even more difficult in the coming years, as Federer enters the latter stages of his career and Nadal comes into what are traditionally a great player’s prime seasons.

Two years ago, when Nadal was in the process of beating Federer five consecutive times and ascending to No. 1, some began to ask a not unreasonable question: How can Federer be considered the best ever when he has a lopsided losing record against someone from his own era? In 2009, Federer seemed to answer that question once and for all when he completed a career Grand Slam at Roland Garros and broke the men’s record for Grand Slam titles a month later at Wimbledon. Those pesky head-to-head numbers, which remained 13-7 in Nadal’s favor at the time, didn't fit into the happy theme of the moment, namely, that in Roger Federer we were lucky enough to witness a living legend, the greatest, the best there ever was. This designation, as the hokey quality of that last phrase indicates, is mythic, of course; but sports fans need to believe. Not having a gold standard, an immortal, to point to, to bow to, to aspire to, seems a little Godless—not to mention boring. It felt good to believe in Federer, a happy person who had no glaring hole in his resume.

Except for that pesky H2H, which we agreed to forget, or rationalize, or dismiss.

We were right to believe in Federer, for several reasons. (1) The fact that one guy has found a way to beat him doesn’t invalidate Federer’s dominance of everyone else, everywhere else, for as long as anyone else. (2) Federer has been punished for doing better on clay at the French Open, where he’s lost three finals to Nadal, than the Spaniard has done on hard courts at the U.S. Open, where he has never kept his final-round date with Federer, a five-time Open champion. (3) Finally, and most crucially, tennis players can only be judged by what they set out to accomplish. The best of them play to win the most prestigious tournaments, not to beat certain opponents, and by that measure Federer reigns supreme.

Last Sunday, though, for the first time in a year, the head-to-head numbers made a cameo appearance in the ever-evolving and never-to-be-resolved Goat drama. Nadal beat Federer on clay in Madrid to up his record to its current 14-7. Ten of those wins have come on Nadal’s favored clay, but surfaces aside—and you can’t punish a guy for being so good on one of them—he wins two-thirds of their matches. What’s more important, though, and what’s often not mentioned, is that Nadal hasn’t just built those numbers on a mound of red dirt. He’s 1-2 on grass (all in Wimbledon finals) and 3-3 on hard courts. One of those hard-court wins took place in the most important match they've played on that surface, the 2009 Australian Open final. At the Slams, Federer's specialty, Nadal is 6-2 (2-2 on surfaces other than clay).

Like I said, this one stat doesn’t undermine Federer’s other accomplishments. But let’s say the H2H continues along the same lines that it has for the last six years, with Nadal dominating on clay and holding his own when he does reach finals against Federer on other surfaces. What if Nadal gets to 16-8, 18-9, 20-10? What if, as Federer reaches 30 and beyond, it gets more lopsided in Nadal’s favor? Is there a number that we won’t be able to ignore? Will the H2H ever mean anything, or will we just have to dismiss it because there are two many variables involved for us to explain that the greatest of them all lost most of his matches to his most important rival?

I’d say that the only way Federer's status could come into question in the future, and the H2H become a decisive factor, is if Nadal makes a run toward his Grand Slam record. But while tournament titles are how players should be judged, it also can’t be forgotten that tennis is, at its heart, a head-to-head sport. Unlike golf, your success or failure is always in direct relation to the success or failure of the person on the other side of the court. It's both a special psychological difficulty and a cruel satisfaction of tennis that you don’t just win with excellent play; you also must make a specific opponent lose. This adds another mental element and level of anxiety to the game, and explains how certain players can "get in a guy's head." That's why a head-to-head record in tennis can never be meaningless. This one is more meaningful than most: It proves again how the greatest-ever exists only in theory and myth, and that when we descend from the abstract stratosphere of statistics, of Slams won and weeks spent at No. 1 and consecutive wins on a certain surface, the sport is still about individual matchups, played and adjusted to and figured out one at a time. Federer remains the best, the Goat, for his ability to dominate more of those match-ups than anyone. Nadal, for now, has a more peculiar title. In the old World Wrestling Federation, he would have owned the Intercontinental belt. This was a kind of side champion, but it was a champion nonetheless. In tennis, where, despite the differences in surfaces, there is only one belt, Nadal is the fly in the ointment, the guy who makes the Goat seem a little more mythic than real again. Nadal's title isn't as exalted, but it can't be argued with: He’s the best at beating the best.

Picking Up Le Scraps	05/26/2010 - 8:26 AM

Or should that be “la” scraps? Are leftovers masculine or feminine? I’ll have to call my high school French teacher, though I doubt she'd be too proud of how I’m doing in Paris this week. I haven’t gotten far beyond “bonjour” and “merci” (I’ve kept all of my “ooh la la”s to myself), and I’ve tried those two simple words about 50 different ways. I’m sure I’ve come out sounding just like an American every time.

The humidity has broken, at least for the moment, though as I type this I can feel it building again. The rain felt good last night, and it left the streets of the 16th (those in the know refer to Paris’s neighborhoods by number, so I'll dutifully copy them here) a quietly glamorous black, with cafes gleaming at every corner as far you could see. Before we enter the next weather stage of the tournament, let me look back at what slipped through the cracks of this blog over those very warm early days.

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Looking on the Bright Side

Watching Evgeny Korolev play Novak Djokovic on Monday, I found myself wondering what tennis would be like if Korolev, or someone of his ilk, was the No. 1 player in the world. He’s a ball-basher extraordinaire, a Russian whose manner seems closer to the other German pros. Hat backwards, he walks with brisk steps and keeps his head down. What if his brand of occasionally impressive but mostly artless power-baseline tennis simply could not be stopped? What would happen to the sport? What would it say about the world we live in? We used to wonder the same thing about the tall, one-trick-pony servers at Wimbledon, but they never succeeded in taking over either (other than Goran in 2001, the fluke of all flukes). Why does artistry and style, whether it's Federer’s, Nadal’s, or Sampras’s brand of artistry and style, triumph in the end? Nothing against Korolev; he can be awesome to witness for a game or two at a time, and he's playing the only way he knows how. But seeing him bash his way to defeat against Djokovic, the fact that a player like him can’t dominate seems like something to be profoundly grateful for.

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French Spazz

9:00 A.M. yesterday: It’s early enough that the grounds at Roland Garros are, for once, less than suffocatingly jammed. As I start to cross the main pedestrian thoroughfare, the hand of a security worker reaches out to stop me. Coming the other way is an army of ball kids, in their orange shirts, jogging from one end of the site to the other, singing as they go.

When they get onto the court, these kids begin to hop and bounce with spastic energy. Even when two of them are doing something as simple as handing each other the balls at midcourt, both of them might be jumping up and down as they do it. The ball kids at the U.S. Open, home of the quarterback and the baseball pitcher, throw the balls all over the arena. At Wimbledon, kids in dark blue caps raise their arms ramrod-straight over their heads—they look like they’re standing at attention—when they offer the players a ball. At the French, they've been taught to roll the balls with maximum force, no matter close to each other they are. Even from three feet away, they leap forward wildly and do a full windmill wind-up before letting the ball go. Kinda seems like overkill, but it's fun to watch.

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Baby Talk

Getting back to the language-barrier theme, it’s a humbling experience for an American, who may believe deep down that he runs the world, to come to such a thoroughly international event like the French Open. Few of us can speak French, or anything else, which leaves us, as David Foster Wallace once said of a trip he took to Italy, opening our mouths helplessly and pointing at things—menus, subway maps—like infants. It always seems to me like the French are humoring us while we barrell incomprehensibly through a conversation. 

Otherwise, from a listening point of view, the pressroom has much to offer the open-eared Yank. On Saturday, a few British reporters, who follow Andy Murray around the world with the same type of vigilance that the White House press corps follows Barack Obama, were watching Richard Gasquet play the final in Nice. When Gasquet grimaced in pain in the third set, one of them said to another, “You know, he has to play Murray on Monday."

“He does?” his friend said, with the lofty absent-mindedness of a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel. “Well, that is bloody inconvenient, isn’t it?”

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Hopping Madness

Is it possible to have too much footwork? That’s what I asked myself while watching Victoria Azarenka—you remember her; quarterfinalist last year, crushed in the first round this time—on Sunday. Between shots, she shuffled, she jumped, she even added a little hop-step with her right foot just as her opponent was making contact. Maybe she was watching the ball kids here. The upshot was that Azarenka was often late getting her feet back down on the court and in position for the next shot.

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Spring Cleaning

If you play on clay, you’ve probably had to clean the lines afterward. Have you ever wondered what the fastest way is to get around them? I’ve never found a system that seems any better than any other. You would think that the French, of all people, who need to have them cleaned in two minutes between sets, would have a routine. They do. Here it is:

Use a broom, rather than one of those wheely things, which don’t allow you to start right next to the net. 

Begin at the net, on the center service line. Clean that line, then pick up the broom and walk to the one of the two spots where a sideline meets the service line. Clean the whole service line. Walk back up to the net and then clean that entire sideline. Continue cleaning along the baseline (don’t stop to do the hash mark yet), and then clean the other sideline line. Come back down the doubles sideline on that side. Pick up the broom and walk the length of the baseline, stopping now to wipe the hash mark with your foot. Clean the other doubles sideline.

I have no idea whether this is any faster than any other system. But it is a system.

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Body Language

Is there another sport that teaches you to read body language the way tennis does? Watching a match haphazardly on my TV monitor yesterday while I typed, I kept missing the actual rallies and then looking back up to see the players getting ready for the next point. I tried an experiment: From their faces, could I tell if they had won or lost the previous point? I was right about 80 percent of the time. Try it: There must be something in our faces, in the knit of the eyebrows or the set of the shoulders, that automatically communicates concern or hopefulness.

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If You Can’t Talk to Those Around You . . .

You might end talking to yourself. I was walking up a set of stairs by myself on Monday, heading toward a Marcos Baghdatis match. As I looked at his name on the schedule in my hand, I suddenly, involuntarily, burst out, “The bag man!”

When I got to the top of the steps, I looked to my right and saw two good-looking French women, in the red-and-white uniforms that the tournament hostesses wear here, smiling at me. It wasn't a good kind of smile.

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Breaking the Language Barrier at Last

This year, rather than the metro, I’ve taken advantage of my press hotel’s shuttle transport, which is a van with a big green Perrier sign on each side. My driver yesterday was a Frenchwoman who spoke decent but not perfect English. After she’d stamped out a cigarette and got into the driver’s seat, we talked about which sports we liked. She follows rugby, but not soccer; rugby is played by gentleman, soccer by dumb jerks, she maintained (yes, I’m translating a little roughly there). 

She told a story about a trip to Florida she’d taken with her family, where they’d ended up staying at the house of a famous, reclusive retired American football star.

“O.J. Simpson?” was, I'm not sure why, my first guess.

“No. Jonah Miss, I think is his name.”

“I don’t know who that is . . .”

“J-O N-A-M . . .”

“Joe Namath!”

“Ah, oui!”

Sports and celebs: The universal language.

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Rain has struck Roland Garros at the moment, but I should be back with something later today.