Few Sprinkles on Just a Perfect Day in Melbourne
There are heavenly nights and heavenly days, heavenly sights and heavenly ways. And, if you are a true fan of tennis, there was opening day of the Australian Open on Monday.
Tennis heaven.
At first, all a visitor from Los Angeles feels is time-zone hell. Where you came from, it is still yesterday. When you go back there, you will arrive before you left. Breakfast feels like dinner. Dinner brings cravings for scrambled eggs.
You get in a taxi and the driver is sitting on the right, but he is driving on the left. You step into a crosswalk, look to your left and narrowly miss going home in a box as the cars from your right swerve around you.
There are no dollar bills, just dollar coins. And the 50-cent pieces are twice as big as the dollars. When you pay a dollar for something, it is really only about 60 cents where you come from.
It is January, but it is summer. You are never quite sure how much of summer each day will bring, since it is measured on the local news by predictions of temperatures streaking all the way up to 35.
Yet it doesn’t take long to get a rhythm here, to understand that, unlike so many big cities, this one isn’t honking and squawking at you, isn’t pushing you to move along, to get the coins out of your pocket and on the counter right now.
Melbourne makes a subtle assault on your senses. It has a pace that seems livable, rather than survivable. It blows gently into your mind-set, much like the warm winds that frequently swirl around the tennis courts, where they are just underway with the last Australian Open of the 20th century. And the first day of that first Grand Slam of 2000 was, in terms of tennis and tennis intangibles, something special.
Tennis heaven.
*
Todd Martin will be 30 in July. As a world-ranked tennis player, he is near the end of his run, and he knows it, even articulates it with the common sense and perspective of somebody bright enough to start his playing days as a student at Northwestern.
All that being said, he is also refusing to go off into the outback without a tussle.
When last September’s U.S. Open needed a foil for the Andre Agassi show, needed somebody to step up and fill the competitive void left when both Pete Sampras and Patrick Rafter went out because of injuries, it wasn’t some 18-year-old from Australia with long blond hair and his cap turned backward, nor some blue-eye German with a bullet serve and a young body that attracts teeny boppers. It was good ol’ Todd, the 6-foot-6 plodder from Florida by way of Michigan.
He survived in the first round by rallying from two sets down against somebody nobody except his mother has heard of. Then, a few nights later, struggling from the aftermath of a flu bug and facing the lethal serves of a younger, healthier Greg Rusedski of Britain, Martin again got himself into a hole so deep that a mere mortal could never have crawled out. He was down by two sets, could hardly breathe and could concentrate only on one thing: when or where to throw up.
But Martin being Martin, he kept pushing the ball back, trying, hanging as you might if you were pushing 30 and didn’t really want all this to end quite yet. And even when he got it even at two sets each, he went behind in the fifth, 4-1, and two service breaks.
But somehow, in the city where they have miracles on 34th Street, Martin won 20 of the last 21 points and beat Rusedski.
The tennis world applauded, maybe even got teary a little. This was Martin’s moment, probably his last, but what a fine way to go out.
A few days later, Ol’ Todd gave Agassi all he could handle in the final before finally bowing out in the fifth set. The tennis world applauded, maybe even got teary a little. What a fine way to go out.
Flash forward to opening day at the Australian Open, in the twilight of the day, out on one of the three main show courts that adjoin the fancy main stadium with the retractable roof. The stands were packed, the wind warm and swirling and the scoreboard showing that Martin, who at one time had trailed former USC star Byron Black of Zimbabwe, two sets to love, was now serving well past the 3-hour 40-minute mark of the match.
It was the fifth set, 5-4, 30-love. Martin tried to go for a big one on the second serve and double faulted. Black, in his heart already packing his bags, took a deep breath, sniffed a chance. Incredibly, Martin then played three consecutive dreadful points and Black was back in it at 5-5.
It got stranger.
Black held serve easily, then Martin, serving at 5-6, played three more dreadful points and suddenly, after nearly four hours and a handful of great chances to win, was staring at three match points against him.
“At this point,” Martin recalled later, “I’m shaking my head, not really believing that I had gotten to this position after all the chances I had. I hadn’t crumbled, but now I was looking at love-40.”
He also had the sense to know that his big serve was his best chance to bail himself out. So he hit an ace, Black played a couple of loose points and then, back at deuce, Martin aced Black twice to save it back to 6-6.
At this stage, there was drama bordering on disbelief. The fans were destroyed, emotionally spent. They only knew that what would happen next would not be logical, nor predictable. And since they don’t play tiebreakers in the fifth set at the Australian, they also knew that this tidal wave could ride on forever.
Mercifully, it didn’t.
Black, a tireless competitor, hit a tired backhand volley into the net to lose his serve and Martin, serving at 7-6, finally finished it with a 116-mph serve. As he walked to the net to shake Black’s hand, the clock measuring length-of-match clicked to the four-hour mark.
Martin, a member of the U.S. Davis Cup team that will play in Zimbabwe against Black and his brother, Wayne, in early February, said his main thought after losing the first two sets was of his ever-tentative Davis Cup situation.
“I remember thinking,” he said, “that I’ll get back to my hotel and they’ll be a message there from John McEnroe saying, ‘Hey, Todd, don’t even bother to come to Zimbabwe.’ ”
*
It was still daylight, about 8:30 p.m., when Pete Sampras walked into the main stadium for his match on opening day.
The young man from Los Angeles, who grew up on the hard courts of Palos Verdes, who considered Rod Laver his hero since the day Laver hit with him when Sampras was 11, and who is now in pursuit of a record 13th grand slam title that is a plateau even Laver didn’t reach, took a quick look around. He may not be able to articulate it exactly as he wishes, but he is a student and lover of tennis history, and playing the first-ever night match in a stadium named the day before for his hero was worth a quick dose of goose bumps.
Rod Laver Arena was packed, the roof pulled back to reveal blue skies and a few wisps of clouds. The temperature was perfect, not too hot, not too cold, so comfortable that it was almost as if somebody was manning a climate control button.
The Aussies were in fine form. They had just rooted their countryman, Richard Fromberg, to a thrilling five-set upset of sixth-seeded Thomas Enqvist of Sweden, and now, having had a chance for a few Fosters between matches, they were poised to appreciate the artistry of Sampras and the remote upset possibility posed by another countryman, Wayne Arthurs.
Like the Martin-Black match, this one was to be special, even extraordinary--for different reasons a different slice of tennis heaven.
Sampras and Arthurs, you see, do not hit serves, they fire missiles. Reaction time to return one of these varies between 0.04 and 0.05 of a second. All night long, their first serves were in the 125-mph range and they seldom went below 110, even on second serves.
Add to that, this tournament’s newly resurfaced courts are geared to the new breed of Aussie servers and are so fast that most of the European clay-courters have already booked early flights home. That made for a situation, a match, that may never be experienced again in the sport.
Exhibit A: Sampras and Arthurs played for 1 hour 39 minutes and never had a baseline rally. None, zero.
Exhibit B: The most shots hit on one point were six. Once.
In a 6-4, 7-5, 6-4 victory, Sampras managed only one break each set and won 92% of the points when he got his first serve in. In the first set, Sampras lost two points in his first service game and never lost another point on his serve.
The best measure of how hard these two were serving was in the crowd reaction to ball kids and linesmen being hit by one of these rockets. One male youngster took a shot to an area near his belt buckle, and the collective groan of the capacity house of 15,021 told it all.
The Aussie crowd was, well, wonderfully Aussie. It respected Sampras and applauded his amazing athleticism. But it gave Arthurs all the backing it could, and with a sense of humor. Near the end of the match, when it was obvious to all that Arthurs was overmatched and had no chance, despite his marvelous serving, a fan celebrated a good shot by Arthurs with this signature support: “You’re all over him now, mate.”
The whole place laughed, including Arthurs, who, even in a losing effort, seemed to sense he was playing a role in something special.
*
It was late night now, almost midnight, and opening day at the Australian Open was in the books. Also, vividly in the mind.
The walkway that leads to the exit is lined with a row of statues on pedestals of past Australian tennis greats, most of them still alive. Represented are Roy Emerson and John Newcombe and Tony Roche and Ken Rosewall and Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong, to name just a few. At night, a single light is focused from the ground up to the face of each statue. It is a wonderfully eerie, peaceful tribute to those from this country who have made the sport what it is in Australia today, and probably always will be.
One of the statues, of course, is of Laver. He is home in Rancho Mirage, and didn’t make the trip for the stadium dedication because he had traveled to his homeland recently and is being careful, in the wake of his stroke a year and a half ago, to not overdo it.
But he is in Melbourne in spirit, his statue getting the most traffic and his name on the huge stadium overlooking his statue.
The light shined just enough for a reading, a last gesture on this special day. The achievements were all there, including his landmark Grand Slams of 1962 and 1969.
It was the correct way to end a special day, a day of Todd Martin and Pete Sampras and an Aussie crowd after a brew or two and the sights and sounds and smells of a perfect summer experience. Oh yes, and Rod Laver.
Tennis heaven.
Notes
In day matches Tuesday, No. 1-seeded Martina Hingis rushed past Mirjana Lucic of Croatia in 43 minutes, 6-1, 6-2, leading a parade of predictability on the women’s side of the draw. With only Serena Williams yet to play in her night match, No. 13 Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario, who has been to the final twice here but never won, eliminated Julia Abe of Germany, 6-2, 6-2, and No. 6 Barbara Schett struggled to get past former U.S. junior champion Meilen Tu of Porter Ranch, 6-2, 6-7 (7-1), 6-4. . . . The men’s side had two upsets, and nearly had a huge one. Yevgeny Kafelnikov, defending champion and seeded No. 2 here, lost a first set to Jens Knippschild of Germany and had to have a groin injury administered to later in the match. But Kafelnikov, who said he has a bad back and that is what triggered the groin injury, persevered, 6-7 (7-4), 6-4, 6-1, 6-2. Also winning was No. 4 Nicolas Kiefer, who beat Guillermo Canas of Argentina, 4-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4. Upset victims were No. 5 Gustavo Kuerten, former French Open champion, and No. 13 Cedric Pioline, U.S. Open semifinalist in September. Kuerten had match points in the fourth set, but eventually lost to Albert Portas of Spain, 4-6, 4-6, 6-4, 7-6 (8-6), 6-4. And Pioline battled former top-10 player Goran Ivanisevic through five sets before being broken at love in the 16th game to lose to the Croatian, 6-4, 2-6, 7-5, 1-6, 9-7.
