Indian Wells 2016

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.

Magdalena Rybarikova

 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. 

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.

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.