PARIS — Metzer rallied late in the third set, keeping the
ball in play until he saw an opening for his backhand which,
being a southpaw, he hits on his right. His opponent does not
favor the backhand as much, so what he did, being left-handed
also, was wait for a Metzer backhand to come mid-court and then
dispatch it to Metzer’s right like a cannon ball. That
worked.
Metzer is an aggressive and tough opponent but he does not
cover the court as well as the other fellow and he let those
cannonballs pass him. Rafael Nadal was taking charge, after
faltering in late middle games and missing some of those Metzer
power backhands. He also double-faulted more than usual and for a
while it looked as if he might be out of gas. With the match
having taken almost two hours already you could imagine Metzer
taking his momentum into the fourth set and outplaying a tired
Nadal in the fifth. He uses that power backhand from his right
and a forehand, when he needs it, that must feel like a Mariano
Rivera fastball.
You can imagine plenty when Nadal makes unforced errors and
gets the sun in his eyes while preparing to smash a lob and
double-faults more than once in a set, let alone a game. You can
even imagine that he is tiring. In reality, he sometimes sets
himself up while maneuvering to set up his opponent. He then
loses the momentum for a few points, or more precisely, control
of the point. As Bill Tilden said — but you know what he
said.
Rafa Nadal takes risks, a style some observers say is
unsuited for clay, a surface, they say, that favors endurance and
patience. However, maybe they should think about what they
say.
They will think about Rafa Nadal’s awesome return to the
clay courts of Rome and Monte Carlo and Paris after a lousy 2009
season due to ill health, and about the unexpected success of
Francesca Schiavone on the ladies’ side. At 29 she is in advanced
middle age by today’s tennis standards, so she had a fair amount
of one-last-shot support, especially as she was up against a
young Australian, Samantha Stosur, whom we will be hearing of
again before long. Speaking of ladies, the American stars Serena
and Venus Williams flopped in their singles brackets but did
quite well in the doubles.
The French enjoyed it, as they must, without any of their
hopes getting anywhere (they never do), and their football team
was looking pretty awful in the soccer world cup preliminaries,
while the Sports minister, a very pretty lady of Senegalese
origin, Rama Yade, could think of nothing better than to chastise
them for staying at South Africa’s swankiest hotel “during the
[economic] crisis.” The Sarkozy government often plays the
populist card and possibly, while a police operation cleared out
illegals who had been squatting near the Opera, she meant the
footballers should stay in a youth hostel.
Against Robin Soderling Nadal used a combination of
defensive forehands, brilliant passing attacks and drop shots to
subvert the big Swede’s all-attack game plan. As he did last year
against Roger Federer (whom he beat this year in the quarters),
Soderling showed a bad case of finals jinks, getting the
occasional point by relentlessly pushing Nadal behind the base
line, at the cost of far too many longs.
The idea of clay favoring the masters of the long-ball took
hold during the Swedish ascendancy, when the great Bjorn Borg and
his epigones Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, e tutti,
perfected a wear-‘em-out-from-the-baseline strategy. The problem
with this idea is that Borg also mastered the All-England
tournament, which is played at Wimbledon, a green London suburb,
whose courts are supposed to favor the serve-and-volley
style.
Actually, the court-specialty theory took hold with the
big-money Open era. The idea is that with the circuit as intense
and busy as it now is, players concentrate on what they know best
in order to increase their chances of doing well enough during at
least one part of the season (which follows a clay-grass-tru
schedule) to share in the big pots.
This is hooey. There was always money, or why would Pancho
Gonzales have turned pro as early as he did, not to mention Fred
Perry. However, to the degree the spectators are part of the
playing conditions, there can be a relationship between the
surfaces and them, which in turn can affect the players. France’s
Championnats Internationaux, commonly known as the
French Open, are as big an event on the Paris sports calendar as
the Tour de France bicycle race, which begins in a few weeks. At
Roland Garros spectators are well-behaved although blazers for
gentlemen and skirts for ladies are not de rigueur, and
even the African ticket scalpers along the avenue Gordon Bennett
(named, indeed, for the American newspaper genius) maintain a
polite if informal attitude.
This favors dramatic playmakers and point-savers like Rafa
Nadal, who covers the court as no one since Boris Becker or even
Jimmy Connors, because it is on these big plays that the crowd
erupts. But Soderling, the only player to have beaten Nadal here
in the past five years, showed his sportsmanship by clapping his
racket. You knew he was in trouble from the number of times he
did this, and he looked red in the face and worried and soaking
in perspiration. Nadal did not smile much but he did not look
tired and he frowned and glared, possibly because the prize money
is in euros and the euro, in keeping with its sponsors’
profligate social-economic policies, is collapsing. In the few
days I was here I could have cleaned up, but I did not have a lot
of dollars, despite Mr. Wladyslaw Pleszczynski being a real
prince in helping me get here.
Roland-Garros, on the tony, handsome, airy, spacious, green
west side, was built in the 1920s, and named after a World War I
flying ace, Roland Garros.
My father, who lived across town for many years, loved this
place, though he played at the nearby Racing Club. It is indeed
gorgeous. Still, there is talk of moving the
Internationaux to a new location to the north of Paris,
an idea hateful to the French Tennis Federation as well as the
Paris Chamber of Commerce.
In fact, scarcely 450,000 tickets distributed — not
necessarily all sold — during ten days of top tennis, may not
cut it in today’s big-time sports market. There is talk of
expanding the Roland-Garros compound, but space is scarce, with
several other sports complexes near here and the Auteuil race
tracks. Next to the stadium is a charming tiny park, called
le jardin des poetes, where small children play and you
can read verses on stones placed on the lawns.
The stade was built by the Four Musketeers in the
sense that the original Yankee Stadium was built by Babe Ruth.
Immediately upon making it their home court, the four famous aces
of French tennis went on a eight-year streak, neatly carving an
era for themselves between American and British glory
days.
French tennis never has been the same, but they do have a
nice museum here, closed during tournaments. They give names to
their stadiums, as to their streets, to keep the past
alive.
Roland Garros, born 1888, was one of the first fighting
aviators. A friend of his named Saulnier designed a machine gun
that fired through the propeller. At the command of his plane,
Garros could fight out-numbered. He was shot down in the summer
of 1916, escaped, returned to his squadron, wreaked havoc among
German airmen. He went down a second time, for good, a few weeks
before the armistice.
I hoped they would be playing here again next year and for
many years, but on the way back I stopped in the poets’ park and
found the lines of another soldier of the Great War, who fell,
too, in its last days.
Nous ne nous verrons plus sur terre
Odeur du temps brin de bruyère
Et souviens toi que je t’attends!
I cannot do justice to Guillaume Apollinaire’s lyricism,
but he means, more or less:
We won’t meet again on earth
Smell of time sprig of heather
And remember I am waiting!
