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| Stadium 2 |
When I was young I was contemptuous of
comfort, but now that I've put on a few years I've become much
friendlier to it, and this has affected the way we approach our
annual pilgrimage to the tennis tournament at Indian Wells.
In the old days we used to hop from
court to court, striving to catch the matches we found most alluring.
Since all the courts had bleacher seating they were all equally
uncomfortable and we carried seat pads with us. But then, two years
ago, the insidious new Stadium 2 made its debut, a large concrete
affair with concessions, restrooms, real chairs, even restaurants, to
replace the old bleacher assembly that once served as stadium 2.
Compared to the old structure the new one is a luxurious
accommodation indeed that even boasts the very welcome boon of shade
part of the day over seats available to general admission ticket
holders, a wonderful blessing in this desert environment that is in
extremely short supply elsewhere at the venue. Consequently, we
have gotten into the pernicious habit of seizing seats there early
and holding onto them all day, because if you leave you will never
get them back or, indeed, find any seats at all in the shady area.
As a result, you can end up sitting through a lot of lousy matches,
or at least matches that don't particularly interest you. And that's
what happened to us on Sunday, our first day at the tournament this
year. (We skipped it last year because my oldest nephew was visiting
with his family.)
We saw Radwanska vs. Niculescu, Tsonga
vs. Millot, Simon vs. Pospisil, Jankovic vs. Vandeweghe, and,
finally, Isner vs. Seppi, but not one of these matches really caught
fire. Radwanska produced a blowout, as did Tsonga after a first set
that wasn't as close as the 7-5 score would suggest. The Simon-Pospisil match was an oddity in which Pospisil blew Simon out 6-1 in
the first set while Simon returned the favor 6-0, 6-1 in the next
two: a sort of double reverse blow out in which none of the sets was
actually interesting or fun. Then Jankovic totally blew out
Vandeweghe in another snoozer during which Frieda wandered over to
Stadium 3 for a while to catch a little of the Sock vs. Berrer match.
The Isner match had a fairly close score, 7-6, 6-4, but the outcome
was never really in doubt. Altogether a pretty dull day.
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Magdalena Rybarikova
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Of course, you can't always predict
which matches are going to be good. Sometimes a match looks good on
paper but doesn't pan out. Other times a match that appears likely
to be boring turns into a thrilling barn burner. That's what
happened in the first match on Monday when the Swiss Belinda Bencic,
the number 7 seed who has a victory over Serena Williams tucked into
her resumé, ran into a surprisingly feisty Magdalena Rybarikova from
Slovakia. What we had anticipated would be a routine dismissal
turned into a fiercely competitive knock-down-drag-out from which the
Slovak, surprisingly, emerged triumphant.
This was followed by Raonic and Tomic,
a match that looked potentially interesting on paper as they were
ranked only 5 positions apart at 12 and 17, respectively, but which
in the event turned out to be quite dull. At first it looked like
Tomic just didn't care enough to make an effort, which is the way
he's always looked whenever I've seen him live, but in time it became
apparent that he was nursing some sort of injury and he ended up
retiring in the middle of the second set after having won only 2
games.
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| Alexandr Dolgopolov |
Then Dolgopolov and Gasquet came on, a
match we were eagerly anticipating. Dolgopolov, who has a unique
game, is currently Frieda's favorite player, and we both like Gasquet
as well. Dolgopolov, known as “The Dog,” came out on fire and
got us thinking he was going to pull off an upset (Gasquet is ranked
almost 20 spots higher), as he did against Nadal in 2014, but after
taking the first set 6-2 his game began to fall apart, the unforced
errors mounting sharply. It was heartbreaking to watch, you could
see the frustration on his face. He suffers from some sort of
chronic autoimmune disease that can cause him to run out of gas. He
lost the last two sets 2 and 1.
Next up were Stosur and McHale, a match
in which neither of us had much interest, and as
it went on I started to doze off and Frieda got increasingly antsy.
She was tired of hanging out in Stadium 2 and wanted to go wander the lovely grounds. They don't call it a “tennis
garden” for nothing. But even more she wanted to see a
doubles match that was going on in Stadium 6 between Sock/Pospisil
and Bellucci/Pella. I have a soft spot for Jack Sock, an American
who was born in Omaha, where I grew up, and grew up in Kansas City,
where I was born, and to whom I am additionally connected by having
the same initials, and she has adopted him as well. I told her to go on over and call me if she found
seats, which she did a few minutes later, so I abandoned our precious
seats in Stadium 2 and hustled over there. I got there just after
they'd closed the gates so had to wait for the next changeover, and
when that came the time was used up by people exiting so there was
none left to let in new arrivals and, consequently, I had to wait
another 3 games in the bowels of the bleachers looking at other peoples' backs until I finally got in. Turning around and
looking toward the top of the stands I saw her waving frantically .
“What took you so long?” she asked when I reached her. I sat
down and immediately noticed the magnificent vista of the mountains
to the south over the far rim of the bleachers, which you can't see
at all from inside the massive concrete bowl of Stadium 2. It felt
thrilling to be exposed like this to the stark beauty of the natural environment, hanging
there in the dusky evening air above the lighted court; it reminded
me of the old days when we'd wandered the grounds at whim. And the
match was exciting as well, a close affair which Sock and his partner
the Canadian Pospisil pulled out in a final super-tiebreaker. (They made it to the final.) But I
had forgotten just how brutally uncomfortable it was to sit on a flat
metal plank.
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| Jack Sock |
When it was over we left and headed
back to Stadium 2 where the Frenchman Gael Monfils, another favorite
of Frieda's, was scheduled to play. But alas, the place was packed
and there were no seats to be had, except way up in the nosebleed
sections. It was getting dark anyway so we decided to call it a day
and bug out. We still had to get some dinner and drive 80 miles on
I-10 back to a La Quinta Inn near the Ontario airport so we could
catch our flight home in the morning.
If we return next year maybe we'll get
reserved seats in Stadium 2 so we can leave and return to them later. The down side of that is that they cost four times as much.
