my favorite writer is blogging from the bnp paribas open in indian wells, california, and his readers/fans are being spoiled by (sometimes twice!) daily dispatches that are so vigorously observant, that to turn on the actual television broadcast and see and hear the commentary on any single match is akin to being stranded in the desert: it's colorless and dry and it saps your energy but quick. you need refreshment. you want life. so you turn away from the tube, and back to his blog, where the real action is.
this is what happened to me on sunday night. "mfw" gave glorious build-up: i could envision the drive from LA to the desert (with no less than a joan didion reference) and the grounds as "the tennis aquarium" (what right-minded tennis fan doesn't wish to be out there after reading that?). and then, this brilliant stuff:
Opposition is tennis' essential quality. Two people face each other with nothing but themselves and a stick. The court's 90-degree grid and pure white lines are set off by the curve of the ball. At the professional level, the grunts of the players and the dry thud of their shots are enclosed in the soft authority of the chair umpire's voice.
All that was true this afternoon when Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark stood across from Kaia Kanepi of Estonia at the BNP Paribas. The match was played on Court 4, where the Tennis Garden meet the desert. Beyond this, there's nothing but sand and scrub grass. Call it another form of opposition.
The stands are low out there. You get a full view of the cavernous sky and its gradations of blue—it seems more prominent here, a bigger deal, than in the East—which is set off by jutting brown hills and rows of stark, white lighting towers that line each side of the courts. From this vantage point, everything is dry and stripped and hard. Wozniacki's and Kanepi's shots cracked through the air, and you could hear each individual scrape—chicka-chicka-chicka—of their shoes as they set up to hit.
and later, this:
The crowd is dozing, the second set is dragging, and the woman across the net isn't giving Dinara Safina anything to work with. Peng Shuai shovels one ball down the middle after another—no angles, no pace. It's time for the top seed to take matters into her own hands. This, of course, means that she must let out an unintelligible, or perhaps Russian, scream that turns into a full sentence—maybe a paragraph—of anger. The sleepy Southern California afternoon is punctured. The audience, collectively stunned out of its torpor, gives the players the biggest cheer they receive all afternoon. Safina wins the next two points, the game, the set, and, eventually, not without more struggle and a few more self-lacerations, the match. After yesterday's upsets, the tournament needs its No. 1 seed. Safina, not at her best, has obliged.
see what i mean?
so, on sunday night, i ran home after a long swim, ready to make a nice pasta dinner, pour a glass of wine, and giddily camp out in front of the tube for my first opportunity to take it all in with mine own eyes. and i saw...well...nothing but a big, buzzless stadium court, with gael monfils swinging wild, like his moods, on his way to yet another disappointing loss (i'm really starting to worry about him), this time to john isner. there was no remarkable commentary to enrapture me. my shoulders slumped. i plopped face down on the couch. drat.
i perked up a little after hearing that rafa was up next, against michael berrer. the players entered the stadium to "where the streets have no name" and that at least got me to turn over and face the television. (i don't care what people think or say about bono, or U2, or their music now--the video and song were fun and "rad" and very LA when it came out in 1987 and i'm still happy to hear it when it comes on.) rafa proceeded to make the night a bit more memorable, wowing the crowd with his usual brio (notably in the 5th game of the first set, with a crazy backhand slice approach off a berrer mis-hit, from a good foot outside the alley, hit extra sharply cross-court; and, immediately following that, with a defense-to-offense morale wrecker: out of position on the forehand side, rafa lobbed one over berrer's head, berrer managed a weak overhead down the middle, and sort of positioned himself right there, mid-court, in nowheresville--the phrase "sitting where he stands" comes to mind--and nadal passed him before he even got his bearings. i mean, rafa executes this kind of shot-making with delightful regularity, but berrer looked about ready to invoke the mercy rule. and the match was only 21 minutes old. poor guy. he didn't even play that badly).
but that's been about it so far. oh, it's not been terrible--i would rather have any live tennis than none at all. but like i said, some of us are getting spoiled...
one pleasant surprise: lindsay davenport has a real talent for commentary. there are times, when to watch her play is to feel yourself age. slowly. bitterly. but i always knew she was bright and well-spoken. she strikes a calm, confident tone in the booth, and she brings a thoughtful, pro's eye view:
on hantuchova: daniela has such a pretty game, her strokes are...textbook perfect, and she's a very... very nice player to watch...i really wish she would have a little bit more patience and go cross-court more. i was always taught that [you] work the points cross-court, and wait til you have the right shot to go up the line...i really feel she goes up the line too soon in rallies...
on the weakness of ivanovic's two-handed backhand: her contact point is a little bit late, most balls go up the middle of the court, or to her opponent's forehand...[she] doesn't use her left wrist all that much and it's very prone to errors, [she] misses a lot of balls late up the line when she is not on...
that's straightforward stuff, but it's more along the lines of what i want to hear and think about.
(unlike her counterpart gimelstob who is so reliant on the superlative as to be unconvincing. he makes me want to excise the words "great," "greatest," "best," and "most" from my vocabulary. i probably use them as unsparingly as he does. lesson learned.)
if you're not able to catch the matches on tv because you're going to join revelers for st. patrick's day (happy, happy, btw) or watch the NIT (meh), or later this week, the NCAA tourney (woo hoo), or you just can't find the broadcast (it's actually on an MSG channel, in nyc), do not fret. just visit the concrete elbow blog for "hi-def" observations and anecdotes from the crowd and the press room, and music and literary references (that you and i can look up later). it's writing that is far and away more compelling than what is on tv, and the next best thing to being there.
