Serious Fun at Roland Garros

Small court: seeing red

Now one merely says, Je vais à Roland.---I'm going to (the) Roland. 

#3 wanted to have the ultimate French experience so he just up and paid for 6 entries  to the French Tennis Open, famous for its terre battue (pounded dirt).* These red clay courts are a beautiful, though screaming loud, terra cotta. After an entire day of walking & watching I didn't know whether I was more physically tired, or if my eyes were ready to fall out of their sockets from seeing so much red. The temperature was ideal, hovering between 55 & 65 degrees. Rain showers threatened, but never materialized.  Roland Garros has a-day-at-the-fair kind of aura, so tennis aficionados--a tough bunch--milled around in droves everywhere, caring very little about a few drops here & there. At least I never saw anyone sporting an umbrella.

Since we are your typical armchair sports fans, it was indeed a new & different experience for us to see the actual players on the real courts. No matter what venue, center courts or lesser courts, a spectator is simply not going to be able to see the subtleties of a game. While the players might feel your presence, they’ll not know you any better than if you were sitting in your home. It’s the camera with a zoom & superb angles, and now this marvelous machine that checks the viability of a shot or serve, that offers the absolute best view of a game. But, you’ll ask, “Why in the world would anyone pay to go to a tournament?” That is only answered one way: “Spectators seated in the bleachers are, in fact, actual participators. They make the game exciting and real by cheering and commenting. So we attended the tournament not to see the game close-hand; we attended to enter into the moment with the players. 

It’s a big deal just to get into the premises, but it is well organized. There are little vans provided free of charge at the metro station Porte d’Auteuil that pick up spectators and deposit them about 2 km away at one of the many entrance gates. The gates are designated on the tickets by a letter. Everyone lines up outside and shows tickets for provisional entrance into a kind of no-mans land.  The next gate is even more controlled with booths & turnstiles. One must show a photo I.D.; for us it was passports. Someone tears off your ticket stub which you must keep very carefully because you’re going to need it again to get into matches of your choice. However, to get into the Court Central for top seeded matches one must have V.I.P. status or pay extra.  Our tickets would only allow us to watch matches of the lesser seeds. Of these there are plenty of singles and doubles as young hopefuls beat the ball to the top or winnow down toward the bottom. 

Poor dears! They are not V.I.P.s & cannot enter the Court Central in back of them.

We got to see a lot of things that we’ve never really noticed on TV. First, the protocol for players and spectators is very strict. There is a friendly warm-up period during which attendees may find the seat of their choice. This is a very quiet, civilized process. Once the chair umpire calls for the game to commence there will be no admissions or exits  until at least 2 games are completed and players change sides.  I never realized the presence of linesmen, those guys or gals who yell “OUT,”  so loudly. Dressed nattily in conservatively designed uniforms, there were two on each side and one at each end. They stood in a military “at ease” stance with legs apart, hands held at their backs. The ball-catchers of which there are 4, are young teens who rotate their positions at the end of each game. The ball never crosses the court after a play. The ball-catchers, depending on their placement & where they have recovered the ball, hand or throw (a short distance only) the ball to the server. We did not observe much time wasted in disputing the final decisions of the chair umpire. Although, there was one case in which he actually got down from his chair to examine carefully the last trace left by the ball in the clay. He finally decided to allow a replay. As a footnote,  this kind of dispute arises only arises where the court is terre battue, as most courts are grass or hard-court. 

Notice the camera upper left. Notice the gray sky.

That cameraman to the right is about to be "bonked."

Another thing an armchair fan is not going to see is the set-up of aerial cameras attached to a high wire, that glide back and forth from match to match, or to different angles on the courts. You will note in one photo that there is a solo operated land camera. During one especially long volley the ball bopped this cameraman right on the top of his head. It surprised him to the extreme. The entire audience, including players and officials, fell into laughter for a about a minute before the game resumed in a business-like way. Have to say, the poor cameraman was a very good sport. But mostly, tennis is serious business unlike some team sports (I’m thinking of basketball & football) where there is a lot of extraneous entertainment. Add to this, crowds are very tame, responding to plays of course, but within the bounds of proper tennis etiquette. Read on…. 

We watched one women’s singles and two doubles: one women and one men. According to #3 the losers of the men’s doubles posessed the better technique. (What do I know? Why did they just lose?) For the women’s single there was a young stocky Slovak on her way up and a poor willowy Spaniard on her way back down the ladder of tennis success. The Slovak’s father was sitting just next to our party on the same row. Every time she would score a point he would shout a rapid, “Putt-putt!” We began to assume that this meant, “Good, good!.” That’s fine to cheer on your favorite, but this guy was booing the poor Spaniard when she made an occasional point & cheering when she made a bad one. Spectators around him were turning & beginning to glare. Honestly, we wanted to tell him that it was very poor manners to do that, but we couldn’t be sure that he would understand. As it turned out his daughter defeated the Spaniard -- who being considerably older had apparently already at one time been highly seeded. Who knows, maybe we watched a Slovak champion in the making. We certainly wish her well, but we hope that her father will "putt-putt" it down a bit. 

Just like the fair, the food concessions are doing great business selling mediocre sandwiches and expensive beer and pop. There’s no place much to sit down for a short half hour, except for patches of grass and a few short concrete benches. But there are several concessions doing bang-up business selling Roland Garros paraphernalia & memorabilia. And what’s the favorite color for hats & jackets? Did you guess? Terra cotta rose-red with a bit of white trim.

Do you see the benches?

*Two of the entry tickets were to include #3’s cousin & her husband.