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 Stop this ride! I don’t want to get off, but I need to.
Sleep deprivation is epidemic Sunday at the Australian Open, with continuous play for two-thirds of the last two days.
That’s 32 ½ of the last 48 hours, and it hasn’t been just ordinary tennis. Much of it has been epic tennis, filled with quality, drama – and sometimes even both.
We got a preview of things to come on Thursday night, when Marcos Baghdatis battled Marat Safin in a patchy but dramatic encounter that ended at 12:25 am Friday morning.
Then the madness really began. It started at 7:30 on Friday evening, when Casey Dellacqua toppled a shaky Amelie Mauresmo to give the local population a coveted sighting of a rare and endangered species – Australian women tennis players.
The back-and-forth third set had the crowd screaming under the closed roof Rod Laver Arena, and it had to be immensely satisfying for the radically-fitter Dellacqua to win another long contest after coming through 8-6 in the third in both her first two matches.
“Casey from Perth” finally succeeded in knocking pepper spray and the Baghdatis YouTube video off the front pages on Sunday, and has made a real connection with the Aussie public with her everygirl stories about buying her tops at Target and driving a '91 Commodore.
The buzz was still hanging in the air when Andy Roddick and Phillip Kohlschreiber walked to out to begin what should have been a nightcap but turned out to be the main course instead. Kohlschreiber made an inspired start, whaling his backhand and hitting serves he didn’t know he had. And though Roddick stayed in the match with some clutch serving at the end, Kohlschreiber just came up with too many winners – 104 in all. The match ended at 2:05 am after nearly four hours, and it was close to 3:00 am by the time they had finished their post-match press conferences.
Waking up bleary-eyed for the start of play at 11:00 am on Saturday, we little suspected that there was still much more to come. James Blake – he of the 1-10 five-set record going in – seemed like a write-off down 6-4, 6-2. But two hours later, he was pumping his fists after making his biggest-ever comeback in a match.
While Blake was talking about the win, Roger Federer was going into a first-set tiebreak against Janko Tipsarevic in what still looked like a fairly routine match. But with the tiebreak on serve at 6-5 for Tipsarevic, the soulful Serb whipped a forehand passing shot crosscourt and found himself a set up.
Federer looked like he had righted the ship when took the next tiebreak easily and went up a break in the third, but in the end the two battled for nearly four and a half hours as Tisparevic yanked Federer around the baseline but later said he had been completely flummoxed by Federer’s serve.
Federer had a career-high 39 aces, following Roddick’s career-high 42 the previous night – guess the court can’t be that slow, at least when the balls are still new.
Where was Novak Djokovic as Tipsarevic pushed Federer deeper and deeper into the fifth? Glued to the TV screen like everyone else, of course – clearly the tips he had given his compatriot were working well.
Djokovic’s press conference had been scheduled for about the time the match reached 6-6 in the fifth, but presumably neither he nor anyone else showed up – it was delayed until the match finished. That didn’t happen till 9:14 pm – unheard of for the day session.
When the press conference finally began, Djokovic was twice interrupted by loudspeaker announcements giving tram information to the mass of spectators leaving the grounds. Being Djokovic, he listened in silence and then grinned, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
A little while later, a quieter voice came through the loudspeakers: “This is an announcement. We apologize for the announcements...”
Clearly, things were starting to fray around the edges – but can you blame them?
The length of Federer’s match had created a dilemma for tournament organizers, who were now facing a packed night crowd thirsting for Lleyton Hewitt and Marcos Baghdatis. Their initial thought was to move Venus Williams and Sania Mirza to Vodaphone Arena or move the match to the next day, but Venus refused to be shunted to another court and neither player wanted to play the next day because of doubles commitments.
So the schedule went on as originally planned, with Williams and Mirza playing a 92-minute match where the individual points were close but the eventual outcome was not. By the time the men took the court, it was past 11:30. The debate over what should have been done carries on till this moment, partly because Hewitt and Baghdatis were for a while under the impression that things had been changed and they would follow Federer and Tipsarevic. But either way, the end result is that no one will forget the first Saturday of the 2008 Australian Open.
Hewitt and Baghdatis wrote the final chapter in the early hours of Sunday morning, and even those who didn’t manage to stay up till the end will be seeing highlights for a while to come. The script was sometimes glorious, sometimes ugly, sometimes comical – but always compelling. Baghdatis’ improbable comeback from 5-1 down the fourth set was fuelled by laughter, of all things – he grinned and swung his way back in the match as Hewitt tightened up on his service games. Quality was out of the window at this point and the stadium – still full – simply rode the rollercoaster of inspiration and choking displayed by both players.
A dwindling but dedicated audience also watched on television at home, one which inadvertently included Jelena Jankovic. “I woke up in the middle of the night and I turned on the TV and there was Hewitt still playing. I was like, ‘My goodness,’” she said.
The last shot was, fittingly, a beauty – a forehand return winner at 4:34 am that went straight down the line and past Baghdatis almost before anyone realized what had happened.
Hewitt fell to the ground, and finally – finally, we could fall asleep.
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