Actually, of course, it’s not all about Roger – just mostly about Roger! : > But blog-wise, it seems like fun to review each of his five matches.
Which leaves out Monday and Tuesday, which, for the first time in my history with the tournament, were pretty total losses – no big names and just a few exciting matches. Not one of the big guys played until Wednesday – though we were quick enough to get to watch Rafa, Roger, Tsonga, Lubicic and lots of others practice on Monday. Later in the week, we got to see Brad Gilbert, famed player, coach and commentator, play with one of his kids.
Monday morning we managed to get early entry into our hotel, unpacked and dashed to the tennis center. I had already looked at the schedule and knew there were only a few matches that were going to be exciting. We got to see Ivo Karlovic beat Gael Monfils – Gael learned a lot in the match. Karlovic is to uni-dimensional to be particularly interesting. Then the evening match was two wild cards, both, sad to say, pretty much head cases – Marat Safin and Robby Ginepri. It would have been better not to give them wild cards.
Not an exciting day – and it felt like the hottest day I’ve ever spent there – which temperature wise was not true, but it sure was draining.
Tuesday was another not exciting day – except for watching scrappy Leyton Hewitt beat Robin Soderling, who had beaten Rafa Nadal at Wimbledon. When we found out the evening match (courts are busy all day, just one or two featured matches in the evening) was John Isner (another of the tree people – very tall and moves like one) and Tommy Haas, who is wonderful, but not having the greatest year – we bagged it and went to the movies.
So for us, the tournament really began on Wednesday.