Indian Wells 2013



Practice Court



It’s relaxing to have a familiar vacation, a place you go every year.  For us that’s the tennis tournament at Indian Wells, in the Coachella Valley of California.  It’s a beautiful, landscaped venue with spectacular views of the rugged mountains nearby.  But our excursion got off to a somewhat inclement start this year.  As we were cruising east on I-10 raindrops began to appear on the windshield of our Ford Focus rental and soon the semis were kicking up a thick swirl of opaque mist.  Since it was lunchtime anyway, I pulled off at Carl’s Jr. in Banning for one of our 2 or 3 fast food meals of the year (there are simply no other options out there).  By the time we got back on the highway the flash shower was over and we pushed on over mostly dry pavement.  It was still colder than usual, however, so after unpacking at the motel we headed for Tsingtao, our favorite Chinese place, on the corner of Highway 111 and Portola.  To our shock and dismay, it was gone, vanished, nothing remaining of it but a dark sign and a ‘for rent’ poster in the window.  We were forced to resort to an internet search to unearth a substitute a few miles away, which turned out to be barely tolerable. 

Outside the Main Stadium

Indian Wells is the biggest tennis tournament on the west coast and every year (this was our 10^th consecutive visit) it gets bigger.  The goal this year was 400,000.  Court 6, for example, which used to have merely 3 tiers of white folding chairs, now has 3 of permanent, bolted-down chairs plus four tiers of bleachers.  There are currently 8 match courts and 16 practice courts but by next year there will be 9 match courts and 24 practice courts.  Stadium 2, currently a towering scaffold, will be rebuilt as a concrete arena seating 8,000 (the main stadium seats 16,000).  We’ll hardly recognize the place.  The large, polyglot crowds that show up now make it hard to do the kind of court-hopping we used to do in the early days.  If you try that now, you’ll be unlikely to get a decent seat for anything.  Now you pretty much have to pick a court, get there early to seize the best seats you can find, and plan on holding them all day, while taking turns on snack and restroom runs. 

Relaxing on the Lawn

Friday, our first morning there, was sunny but chill.  When we got to the venue at 11, I was comfortable in a long-sleeved shirt over a tee.  The match of the day we were really interested in was the rising young American Jack Sock against the Croatian giant Ivo Karlovic.  It was the 2^nd match up on Stadium 2 so we headed over there to try to get good seats on the south end, where the sun is behind you.  We got some decent ones but had to sit through Petra Kvitova’s (she of the famous chicken squawk) defeat of Olga Govortsova in 3 sets, in order to hold them.  When Jack showed up he seemed in control, winning the 1^st set 6-3, and taking the 2^nd to a tiebreak.  Meanwhile, however, dense clouds were blowing in from the north and the temperature was dropping like a stone.  We kept adding layers and had put on our full complement by the time Jack lost the tiebreak.  Then he fell apart as the thermometer continued to plunge.  By the time he was beaten, we’d had enough of shivering, and high-tailed it for the car.  At least it didn’t rain, which had seemed possible.    



Ernests Gulbis



Saturday was warmer, and we went back to Stadium 2 to see David Ferrer, the #4 seed, get clobbered by Kevin Anderson in the first major upset of the tournament.  Then we watched 2 more matches that didn’t much interest us in order to keep our choice seats for the match between the young Australian hopeful Bernard Tomic and Richard Gasquet of France.  Once again, Tomic failed to live up to the hype and Gasquet beat him quickly in straight sets, enabling us to dodge over to Stadium 3 to catch the Gulbis/Tipsarevic match.  It was dark by that time, and getting cold again, so there weren’t a lot of people and we got fine seats on the north end.  I’ve always thought Ernests Gulbis an underachiever, but this night, for once, he played up to his potential, completely blowing Tipsarevic, the #9 seed, off the court 6-2, 6-0.  Gulbis was playing so fast, slamming serves right at Janko and blasting forehands past him with such power, that Tipsarevic was reeling, like a punch drunk boxer bouncing off the ropes.  He looked like he’d been hit by a hurricane.  I’m glad I finally got to see Gulbis play as well as I believed he could.  (He won another round before going out in a very tight 3 set contest with Rafael Nadal, who went on the win the tournament.)



Grigor Dimitrov



Sunday was a gorgeous day, abundant sunshine, in the low 70s, with a light breeze, the air dry and crystal clear: perfect for tennis.  We got to the venue just as it opened and secured front row seats at the south end of Court 7 where Frieda’s current favorite player, Alexandr Dolgopolov, was scheduled to play the second match.  We prefer to sit at the end because you can see everything without having to swing your head back and forth, you’re closer to the players, and you have their view, with the ball coming at you just as if you’re playing.  But we had to sit through a boring women’s match before the Dog came on.  Frieda, of course, was impatient for the women to finish and get the hell off the court.  Then, when The Dog finally showed up, his play was lackluster and he lost the 1^st set to Carlos Berlocq, a 30-year-old Argentine clay courter with a career high ranking of 37 (the Dog is 24 and has been ranked as high as 13).  In the 2^nd set his play improved and he squeaked it out in a tense tiebreak.  He was up a break in the 3^rd set and seemed to have Berlocq on the ropes when he pulled something in his left leg.  The Dog called the trainer but he had nothing to offer and afterward Dolgopolov rapidly fell apart, failing to win another game.  Frieda was bitterly disappointed.  We stayed around for Tommy Haas/Andujar and the French/Polish doubles match that followed, and then the beginning of a match between 2 youngsters, Matthew Ebden of Australia and Grigor Dimitrov from Bulgaria.  Dimitrov has been talked up for a couple of years now as ‘Baby Fed’ (as in Federer), and I was impressed by the smooth power of his game.  I would have liked to stay for the entire match but it was dark by now, getting colder by the minute, as it tends to do in the desert, and we had to get on the road for the hypnotic drive back to Ontario.  Later I read that he disposed of Ebden in straight sets, but went out to Djokovic in the following round.  However, he’s on my radar now as someone to watch. 

Chabon vs. Ferrante



Telegraph Avenue



I was an early enthusiast of Michael Chabon, starting with The Mysteries of Pittsburg and continuing through A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in Their Youth and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but after that he seemed to grow absorbed in family life, writing for youngsters, and ruminations on Jewish identity and, despite my admiration for his ability to compose marvelous sentences, I lost interest.  But then his latest, Telegraph Avenue, fell out of my Christmas stocking, so I took a stab at it.  To my dismay I found it tough going.  The compositional facility was still there, with a fresh angle of attack on nearly every sentence, yet the characters remained dead on the page, lifeless tokens you never believed in or cared about, and the situations never gelled into a story with any propulsive force.  The style is mannered, artificial, contrived, tarted-up, gimmicky, a disguise for the lack of anything of substance or import to say.  It’s so self-consciously clever that it becomes a barrier to experiencing anything beyond itself.  Despite being initially amusing, at some point it just becomes tedious.  I had to push myself through the book by an effort of will and, after the third section (p. 250), a single sentence that ran on for 12 pages, my progress ground to a halt.  I just had no desire to continue.

That was around Valentine’s Day, when Frieda gave me a novel called My Brilliant Friend by an Italian writer named Elena Ferrante.  Just to satisfy my curiosity, I read the 4 page Prologue, wherein the son of the narrator’s childhood best friend calls to tell her that his mother has disappeared: her clothes, her jewelry, her pictures, all her belongings, gone.  She has erased herself.  The narrator, a woman in her 60s, vows not to let her get away with it, but to thwart her wishes by recording everything she knows about her, the story of their friendship.  She will create an homage that is, at the same time, an attack, an act of revenge.  It’s a vow that sets the tone for the ambiguous and tense relationship the book describes, one that both feeds and depletes, between friends who both love and compete with one another.  I was hooked. 

Naples

Over the next 48 hours I managed to put it down on a number of occasions, but I didn’t want to, and was alert for any opportunity to pick it up again, until I finished all 331 pages.  Its plain style, in contrast with Chabon, doesn’t call attention to itself, but instead brings the characters and their poor suburb of Naples in the late 50s to life.  I felt I was living the narrator’s life with her, knew her friends and their families, and cared what happened to them.  That’s because the characters are not only fully formed, they are alive, they change, they discover things about themselves and others, the circumstances of their lives are in constant flux and it alters them.  You peer into their depths.  Ferrante’s work is intensely, intimately personal, she digs into the roots of personality with an exceptional candor and honesty.  Her characters remain true to themselves, authentic, even while changing.  When she describes adolescence, she nails what it’s like to be a passenger in a body that is out of control, and she describes it without letting any distortions of vanity creep in.  At the same time the story carries you; you forget that you are reading, you feel you are experiencing. 

Ferrante’s book is the story of a deep and complex friendship that begins in 1st grade.  The narrator, Elena, is attracted to Lila because Lila is bad.  She is prone to nasty pranks, and defiant of authority.  Yet she is a brilliant student, brimming with potential.  She is a model of courage and assertiveness who pushes Elena to exceed what she would be able to accomplish on her own.  In the beginning, Elena worships Lila, but over the course of the novel the power gradually shifts, the pivot being when Elena goes on to middle school while Lila is held back by her ignorant, plebian father, until by the end, when the 2 girls are 16, it is Elena who has become Lila’s brilliant friend who will conquer the larger world as Lila sinks back into the morass of her origins.  Appropriately for an author trained in the classics, there is a whiff of Greek tragedy in the book, the tragedy of unfulfilled promise. 

Apparently her earlier novels, The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter, are all darker, less serene, lacking the joy that occasionally breaks forth in this book, so I’m not sure if I want to go there.  But My Brilliant Friend is supposed to be the 1^st of a trilogy, and I finished it eager to learn more about the lives of the people I met in it, so I’m awaiting the sequel with keen anticipation.