PARIS—If you play your sport of choice on grass, or on turf, or indoors, or on asphalt, you can usually handle a little precipitation. If it rains, you soldier on and finish what you started. (Usually, yes, but certainly not always.)

But tennis on wet clay? Not so much.

The first week of the 2008 International de Roland Garros, one of tennis’s four grand slam tournaments (and don’t call it the French Open in Paris—trust me on this one), was marred by rain, which shut out many matches on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. This slam’s signature clay courts (which sounds much cooler in French: terre battue, or “beaten earth�) just don’t handle the wet conditions very well.

Wednesday, though, was more like a spring day, with heavy but compassionate clouds coming and going throughout the afternoon without disposing their aqueous loads. So with promising weather at hand (and an umbrella, just to be safe), I headed to the Roland Garros complex, in Paris’s south-west corner, just inside the Bois de Boulogne, to catch some evening tennis courtesy of a program that allows fans to fill spots vacated by departing spectators by re-purchasing the empty seats.

Too bad I wasn’t the only Parisian following this plan. When I arrived at the Porte des Mousquetaires just before 17h00, it seemed like every Athos, Porthos and Aramis in town had beaten me to the punch to snap up the vacant seats.

After two hours waiting (and subjected to watching a pair of tap-dancing clowns pantomiming a slap-fight for an hour), I reached the front of the line. The seats for the three main courts were only being resold as people left the stadium, so most customers were being restricted to tickets to the annex courts. Lucky for me, as I reached the ticket window a note popped up on my dude’s screen. “There’s one seat open on Suzanne Lenglen. Do you want it?�

A main event. Sign me up, brother.

Passing through the overwhelmingly crowded tennis village inside the gates, with reams of fans strolling everywhere (does anybody watch the tennis here? Or do they just walk between courts?), I found my seats on Roland Garros’s second-largest court. And I was in luck: The match between France’s most promising name in the men’s singles draw, eighteenth-seeded Paul-Henri Matthieu, and Spain’s Oscar Hernandez, was headed into a fifth set after Matthieu had erased a two-set deficit.

As I slipped into my plastic bucket seat, in the seventh row of the lower deck (great seats), it almost felt like cheating. The crowd was boiling over at the comeback being engineered by their young countryman, a bit of a heartthrob on the French tennis scene. And here I was, jumping into a drama that had already been playing out, with twists and turns and plenty of clay splashed liberally over the players’ bodies, for three hours and forty-two minutes (according to the official Longines match clock). It was like walking into the theatre for the last five minutes of The Usual Suspects, and gasping with the rest of the audience as the detective’s Kobayashi mug hits the floor. I felt a little dirtied myself.

But fifth sets don’t play themselves out in live-action a mere ten metres from your seat every day, right? So I joined the chants of “Paulo! Paulo!â€? and threw my hands up for the between-games “wave” that had the umpire begging for quiet (the server also had to wait while the Parisians politely applauded their own successful execution of this difficult manoeuvre—seriously, they gave themselves a hand for a wave well done!).

When the clock hit four hours and eleven minutes, and Matthieu had completed his comeback with a score line of 2–6, 1–6, 6–4, 6–3, 6–2, we all shouted “bravo!� and then fled our seats to grab a quick bite before the last tilt of the evening. My dinner was that French classic, le hot dog. I guess the Perrier and double espresso I downed with the dog helped to bridge the culture gap. Right?

Wednesday’s final match on Suzanne Lenglen pitted France’s hot young women’s star, nineteenth-seeded Niçoise Alizé Cornet, against relative unknown Gisela Dulko of Argentina. While both women were surprisingly tiny and slim in a sport where they have to compete with power hitters like Serena Williams, neither girl was particularly tough on the eyes for me—on the cuteness continuum of Hispanic-background players, Dulko falls somewhere between Gabriela Sabatini and Arantxa-Sanchez Vicario, which is basically the whole continuum.

(In case you are wondering, “Wait, was that paragraph just an excuse to link to a bunch of photos of female tennis players?”: Shame. On. You. And now, Maria Sharapova!)

Anyways, the women didn’t just stand around modeling their (how embarrassing!) identical Lacoste outfits. (Alizé had the red hat, Dulko the white.) They played some good tennis, too. Or rather, Cornet played great tennis in the first set, closing it out 6-0. A rout, and the fans loved it—except for me, I’d been hoping for a bit more drama.

Fortunately, Cornet indulged me in the second set. Or more accurately, Dulko elevated her game, producing some stunning tennis between les mademoiselles. As Dulko took control, and started Cornet running all around the court with her sublime drop shots, Alizé, Paris’s eighteen-year-old sweetheart, lost her cool. She started hitting her racket against the court, yelling at herself, yelling at her coach’s box, all petulant and pouty. And when Dulko took the lead in the set and Cornet hurled her racket across the court, the crowd let out a collective, disapproving “ooooooooh.â€? In the eyes of the Paris crowd, this was far from civilized behaviour, even coming from a young player who admitted this week in an interview in L’Equipe magazine that she was still a little green: “Roland Garros is winnable for me one day, but not this year. Mentally and physically, it’s too soon to be able to manage a tournament like this for an 18-year-old, but I’m learning.â€?

Cornet (whose first name is a nautical term meaning “trade winds� and is a perfect alliterative fit for the fans’ cries of “aller Alizé!� that accompany her every point) fought back in the third, but the unexpected length of this match and the preceding Matthieu marathon meant, unfortunately, that night was falling. And with a conspicuous absence of overhead lights at Roland Garros, the umpire halted the match at 3-3 in the third set because of darkness. Alizé threw her racket against her chair, to another groan from the fans, who, if they were like me, were principally disappointed that the time we had invested in the match wasn’t to be rewarded with a conclusion, and that some Johnny-come-latelies were going to enjoy the conclusion of our match tomorrow, as I had done with Matthieu. It wasn’t fair—what did the identity of Keyser Söze mean to them, anyways?

Alizé did manage to wrap up the match Thursday, 6-4 in the third, but unfortunately she was felled in her third-round match against fourteenth-seeded Pole Agnieszka Radwanska, in straight sets. Upon losing the match’s penultimate point, Cornet hurled her racket again, drawing the ire of the announcers. “Come on, Alizé, the match is not over yet!� they said. But with an attitude like that, young lady, it sure was!

Fortunately, Cornet has many good years of tennis ahead of her. I hope to see her at next year’s tournament. I’ll show up plenty early for my seats, though.

Tags: france, international, tennis

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Posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 2:07 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.