To Australia with Love
There was something about the lights.
Years later, I learned that I had a bad stigmatism, and that is why the big, booming lights over the tennis courts looked like huge star-flares ready to transport me to another galaxy.
It was probably a mixture of that and dehydration — I wasn’t in shape.
Which made my tennis strategy pure comedy. Tire the opponent out in the first set, lose the set, win the second set, and finally win the third set to win the match.
The plan didn’t bring me much fruition in Grenada. Damn those courts. I never played that tournament again. Which is another way to tell you my record there: 0–3. The first three matches of my career. All losses. All ugly. My opponents didn’t get tired. I did.
I sat in the backseat of the Ford Taurus, drank my water, and watched the kid who just wrecked me put his tennis racket back into a backpack with his name monogrammed on it.
And now, one week later, I was in Oxford, sitting on the bench in between sets trying to catch my breath before a deciding third set. Right next to my monogrammed tennis bag.
Just kidding, it still wasn’t monogrammed. And it never would be. Damn you, Grenada.
I stood up and took my side of the court. Flippo to serve. No chair umpire said that…I just thought it in my head. My own little movie. The villain? The tournament referee, who stood just beyond the gate, checking his watch. We were about 20 minutes beyond the curfew for a junior match. But this match had to end tonight. Neither of us had anything left in the tank. The match was down to pure heart and pushing lobs. I wouldn’t dare fade away at a pusher party.
The next things I can remember are shaking his hand, smiling at my dad, and throwing up in the bathroom about 10 minutes later. That was my gut-check match. I was in this sport for the long run.
The Australian Open is the Oxford of the professional tour.
For the non-tennis psychos still with me, the professional tour is marked by four huge tournaments. We call them Grand Slams. A slam is a shot in tennis where the player smashes the ball, which is usually falling slowly from height, from over his head while he is positioned at the net. Funny enough, the slam is the weakest shot of the man who has dominated the tennis scene for most of the last decade — Novak Djokovic.
I won’t burden you with much Djokovic talk, but just know that he owns the Australian Open. Any more conclusions can be of your own.
But back to some structural talk. The Australian Open is the first “Grand Slam” of the year. It is played on the slow hard courts of Melbourne, Australia, in the middle of their summer. After that, the tour rolls on to a few hard court tournaments in the USA before landing in June on the red dirt clay. Once the final slips have been slid and Rafael Nadal lifts the trophy up again, the show moves to London for Wimbledon, which is a fast grass court oasis (they are getting slower, but that is a discussion for another day). Following Wimbledon, professionals come to the United States for a month long swing that reaches its crescendo with the fast courts of New York City at the U.S. Open.
After the U.S., most casual tour fans tap out. The gang keeps going, flying out to Asia to play for a few months before wrapping up the year with the Tour Finals in London in mid-November.
That marks the beginning of the “off-season” for tennis. It’s only about five weeks. This is the unique part of tennis — constant and endless cruelty. Baseball, basketball, and football all have 20+ week off-seasons.
Tennis players have those five weeks to reinvent themselves. To perform some sort of special magic to convince the world they are a new player headed for new heights in January….in Australia.
Australia is hot.
Maybe that’s where my love affair with her stems from. It feels like I am watching professionals try to figure out how to chase the fuzzy ball in a Mississippi summer.
And that can be fun. Even if means losing a few gladiators to cramps or bad fitness. Not exactly a meritocracy at its worst but a perfect meritocracy at its best.
The Australian Open is the gut-check of the professional tennis season. Players come in and set the tone for the rest of their season: good or bad.
It is a bastion of opportunity. but it is also dangerous. Dangerous for the players, in that an early round loss can set off a chain reaction of terrible results, and dangerous for me, in that the odds I am fully attentive in class the next day are severely lowered.
The Australian Open matches are in the middle of the night for the Americans (and anyone in the Northern Hemisphere). Growing up, this made the two weeks down under my favorite of the year.
My dad couldn’t say no to letting me watch Federer.
“He is getting close to retirement! He could lose tonight and retire. This could be the last time to watch him play live!”
I started using that line in 2011. It is 2021, and Fed is still playing.
Dad would say okay while he headed to bed, and then I could watch for as long as I liked. It was so intoxicating to watch a player’s year get determined while everyone I knew was asleep. I was in on a secret…something no one around me would hear, see, or read about until many hours later….after the storyline was already set into motion.
So as the years passed by and many things changed (I got taller…then I stopped growing suddenly….I cut myself with a razor when I tried to shave my first time….I stopped wearing neon….I changed high schools….I changed high schools again…I broke up with one girl…..I started dating another girl….I broke up with her many times….I enrolled in college and moved away from home…you get the picture), two weeks worth of nights stayed certain.
And boy, I can’t wait for some certainty to come my way when the delayed Australian Open kicks off in February.
Whether Djokovic gets that private residence with a tennis court for his quarantine or not.