By Thomas Swick
Well, it was a fun first week at the French Open, except for the losers and Rafael Nadal.
Though I wish Caroline Garcia had tweeted during an Andy Murray match that “the guy playing on Suzanne Lenglen right now is someday going to be No. 3 in the world.”
It was hard to watch the young Frenchwoman deflate after her brilliant start against Maria Sharapova. When she was up 4-1 in the second set, Martina Navratilova noted that “she gets so much clearance over the net that you don’t feel nervous when she hits the ball.” Immediately afterwards Garcia starting hitting long, so I guess it wasn’t technically a jinx.
You watch a match like that – Garcia lost the next 11 games – and you wonder how much of it is one player’s determined refusal to lose and how much the other’s paucity of belief in her ability to win. The best tennis, of course, results when two players with the former meet, though there are plenty of matches between players who share the latter. The crowd greeted Sharapova, the one who didn’t fold, with boos and jeers in a stunning display of loutishness that rightly received the censure of Navratilova.
Something similar, in terms of an irresistible force meeting a suddenly moveable object, happened in the Nadal-Andujar match, when Andujar lost the third set, and the match, after holding a 5-1 lead. The crowd, though less vociferously, once again showed its displeasure with the fighter.
Almost all of the men looked tough. You watched the ball ripped back-and-forth across the net and you couldn’t believe it was landing on clay. The game has become so high-powered that it almost transcends surfaces.
But it wasn’t just power. The first week showed once again that there is no player more beautiful to watch than Roger Federer when he’s winning easily. Even when he’s wearing red shoelaces. Nobody hits such a perversely angled forehand. Of course, it’s hard to imagine his one-handed backhand standing up against poundings from Nadal and Djokovic. It’s like pitting a bow and arrow against a blaster rifle. (Which explains why Federer, for all his other accomplishments, may be the last one-handed No. 1.)
And there were two scary moments in the first week that had nothing to do with firepower. Sabine Lisicki, after her match with Vera Zvonareva, was carried off the court on a stretcher. (Apparently it was nothing more serious than cramps, and profound disappointment.) On her website she announced that she had recently been diagnosed with gluten-intolerance, which means she will now be on a wheat-, rye- and barley-free diet. Considering what it’s done for Djokovic, she may not be the only one.
The rangy Serb continues to be one of the worst dressed and most idiosyncratic players on tour. His bag check – a fairly predictable feature of the Tennis Channel – turned up a toy racket, a driver’s license folder that held a picture of a saint, a bracelet containing individual portraits of saints, and a seashell on which a picture of his patron saint had been painted. He also extracted a Serbian cap, which he immediately put on, and a Serbian flag. God and country.
These are the little things you discover by watching hours of tennis on TV, especially early in a tournament, when lopsided matches necessitate small talk among the commentators. We learned last week that one of John McEnroe’s children is studying creative writing at Columbia and may soon get his first book published. Sharapova, somewhat less auspiciously, is coming out with a candy called Sugarpova. (It sounds as if it will make you energized, but will it also make you shriek?) And Cliff Drysdale, after a montage of scenes from Paris, wondered aloud: “Are the French really more romantic than the rest of us?” No one in the booth ventured an answer, and, unfortunately, viewers were not asked to weigh in.
The second scary moment in the first week, at least for the male players, came during the on-court interview with Nadal after his first-round, five-set victory over John Isner. “C’etait trés difficile,” Nadal told the interviewer, who then asked if he wished to continue in French. He declined, perhaps wanting to save his best for the final.