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| South Entrance |
The Masters 1000 tennis tournament at
Indian Wells this year was all about Stadium 2, the new 8,000 seat
concrete stadium built since the tournament was played last year and,
although I was a skeptic about the project, I have to admit they did
a fabulous job with it. The General Admission seats in the 2nd
tier provide an excellent view of the action, and they are real
seats, with armrests and, most importantly, backs, a vast improvement
over the bleacher planks of the previous Stadium 2 and the lesser
courts. Not only that, but due to the cantilever construction of the
upper tier, half of them are shaded during at least part of the day
and, given the power of the sun in that desert environment, shade is
a big plus and something none of the other stadiums offer. On top of
all this, concessions and plenty of restrooms are right in the
building, so everything you need is close to hand. Even when the
stadium was packed it was rare to encounter the restroom lines that
were once common.
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| Stadium 2 |
The downside of all this is that once you have established
yourself in some excellent shady seats you are extremely hesitant to give them
up. All the incentives are to stay put,
because you know there is no chance you will be as comfortable anywhere
else. Hence, you miss out on the fun of
wandering the grounds and taking in the beautiful landscaping, the rugged
mountain vistas, and scrambling for seats in different stadiums to see the
precise matches you want to see. This
tendency was exacerbated by the fact that we came into the tournament later
than usual this year. We have been
attending this 2-week tournament annually for over a decade and usually we
arrive on Wednesday or Thursday of the 1st week and fly home on
Monday of the 2nd. (We really
can’t take more than 3-4 days of this madness.)
But this year, because we made our reservations late, we were unable to
get a room for Friday night, so we flew down on Saturday and started the
tournament on Sunday. Because we were
deeper into the tournament at this point, there were fewer matches going
on. Out of 9 match courts, only 4 were
being used on Monday and Tuesday, and the best matches, for the most part, were
being played on Stadium 1 or 2, and our tickets were only good for nosebleed
seats in Stadium 1.
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| Isner/Querrey inside Stadium 2 |
We were, of course, quite curious about the new stadium and
so when we arrived on Sunday morning we headed directly over there to check it
out. We found wonderfully shady seats on
the east side that made a dull opening match tolerable, but after a couple
hours the sun found us, and the longer we sat there the hotter it got. The night before at Ralph’s in Palm Desert
I’d spotted Nikolay Davydenko in the produce section with his wife and
child. He reached #3 in the world back
in 2006 but is on the downside of his career now. He played John Isner in the 2nd
match and by the time Isner had beaten him in straight sets, we felt like we
were being barbecued. The temp was
pushing 90 and the sun felt like it was going to set our clothes on fire. We had to abandon our seats, we simply
couldn’t endure it any more, and Frieda, who is an accomplished seat spotter, uncovered
2 excellent ones on the shady west side.
From there we watched 4 more matches that gradually got better as the
afternoon wore into evening, leading to Grigor Dimitrov, and then, under the
lights, the best match of the day, Isner/Querrey playing doubles against the
French team of Chardy/Simon.
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| The Concourse |
We had noticed that the seats on the south side of the
stadium were shady all day, so on Monday we arrived a little earlier and headed
directly over there, but other folk had obviously figured this out as well and occupied
them, so we returned to where we’d sat the day before and suffered through the
sun for a couple of hours until the shade crept slowly over us. 1st we saw Andy Murray; then one
of Frieda’s favorites, Gael Monfils from France; then Stanislaus Wawrinka from
Switzerland, who has come into his own in the past year or so, displacing
Federer as the #1 Swiss player and reaching #3 in the world. But after that we hit some dull matches and
Frieda got antsy, because her favorite player, Alexandr Dolgopolov from Ukraine, was vying
with Nadal in Stadium 1. She very much
wanted to see it but our tickets were only good for 1 section of the nosebleed
seats, so far away that you could barely see the ball or recognize who was
playing, and even those were probably full.
So she disappeared for awhile as I watched the birds flying around the
stadium and then tried unsuccessfully to take a nap sitting up. She returned all excited because she had been
watching the match on a TV out in the hall and Dolgopolov had taken the 2nd
set and was up a break in the 3rd. She insisted I should go watch some of it, so
I went out to the hallway to have a look.
At first I was disappointed because Nadal got the break back and it
looked like he was going to turn it around, so I wandered out of the stadium into
the concourse where all the walkways converge and soaked in the nighttime
atmosphere, the people milling around, the accent lighted palm trees with their
fronds standing up like punk hairdos, and then strolled over to the Tommy
Bahama bar under a soaring white canopy underlit with lavender lights where
the match was being shown on a jumbotron.
By the time I got there Dolgopolov had broken Nadal again and was
serving for the match at 5-3. If
Dolgopolov was actually going to pull off the upset, I knew Frieda would want
to see it, but I couldn’t believe he would.
Surely he would choke and Nadal would do what he always does: win. I sat down in an aluminum chair to watch and sure
enough, Nadal proceeded to win 8 straight points, breaking Dolgololov at love
and then holding serve to level the set at 5 all. Dolgopolov was choking so badly that I felt
embarrassed for him and I didn’t think Frieda would want to see it. I thought he must feel utterly humiliated in
front of all those people. Nevertheless
he managed to hold it together enough to get into a tiebreak and kept it close until
he got a match point, whereupon he hit an unbelievable blistering backhand down
the line. The place went crazy,
everyone jumping up and down and clapping and screaming. But then Nadal challenged the call and on the
replay it was clear that the shot had gone out.
Dolgopolov served again and this time Nadal’s return went wide. As the crowd went nuts again the camera
showed Dolgopolov standing there with a dazed look, like he couldn’t believe
he’d actually done it, he’d actually beaten Nadal. I went back to Stadium 2 and Frieda was in a
dark funk: the most exciting match of the tournament, involving her favorite
player pulling the upset of his career, and she had missed it. She was inconsolable. Even the last match of the day, an excellent
doubles contest between Federer/Wawrinka and Gulbis/Raonic could not lift her
mood.
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| Tommy Bahama |
Tuesday we got to the venue even earlier, waited in line for
the gates to open, ran to Stadium 2, waited in line there for the doors to
open, and then split up, Frieda heading to the south side to see if she could
get us seats in the perpetually shady section while I ran for the section we’d
been in the day before, trying to get seats in the front row, which I did. After a few minutes Frieda showed up saying
she had found nothing but that the seats I had were perfect. Being in the front row meant it would take
longer for the shade to work its way down to us, but there was a high haze
filtering the sun and moderating its effects, so it was tolerable. The 1st 2 matches of the day, the
Canadian up-and-comer Eugenie Bouchard followed by Gasquet vs. Verdasco, went
pretty fast. By the time we got to the 3rd
match, a good one between Grigor Dimitrov and Ernests Gulbis, which Gulbis won
in 3 sets, we were well in the shade.
Then we had to sit through a couple of dull matches to get to the finale,
the Bryan brothers playing doubles, which was superb, but by then Frieda was
too exhausted to stay for the whole thing.
After 3 days of 10-12 hours of tennis, both of us had pretty much had
it. Attendance this year reached
approximately 430,000, about the same as the French Open last year, so this
tournament continues to grow.
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