Thursday, February 11, 2021

Aussie Open: Go to Your Rooms! No, Seriously

Part of me thinks it's pretty noble, trying to play an international tennis event in a pandemic. If they can have the Super Bowl, right? 

Even if the event goes off without a hitch, there are players who aren't going to have fond memories. Several players had to lock themselves in their hotel rooms for two weeks of hard quarantine after a case arose on a flight to Melbourne. First, let me congratulate Australia for taking a pandemic seriously. Not everyone has. (In America, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just recently issued a mask mandate on public transportation and flights. We're almost a year into this thing and that would have been useful advice about a year ago.) A few players who flamed out early are blaming this hard quarantine -- they literally couldn't leave their rooms to practice -- and yeah, it's a tough situation. You can't bend the rules for one group and not the other, but on the other hand, these people came here just to play in a tennis tournament and they're not being allowed to practice? You can see both sides of it and there's no easy answer -- except to not play a Grand Slam right now. Obviously, no one is going that route.

This quandary has led to several early-round losses that are a surprise -- Angelique Kerber and Victoria Azarenka among them. Both directly cited the quarantine as a problem. Then again, so did Tennys Sandgren, but ... well, I don't know how else to say this, but when you don't exactly have a reputation for being very good, claiming that quarantine hampered your prep sounds more like an excuse than a real reason. 

But presuming no one gets sick, I am here for this version of the Australian Open. I just need to retrain my body for this tournament. You know, staying up until 3 a.m. in the early rounds to watch Novak Djokovic get pushed to the limit by Frances Tiafoe, then chugging copious amounts of coffee to achieve baseline usefulness at work. I just need, like, one more day to get adjusted. 

I never did get around to doing predictions for this tournament, but I realized that the first Slam of the year usually is a waste when it comes to forecasting. Usually, the one thing you can predict is early-round drama in a Stan Wawrinka match and that thing had more twists than fame achieved via TikTok. (I told you I've had no sleep.) I mean how do you come from the brink of defeat to force a tiebreak, gain a huge lead in the tiebreak and then just drop the tiebreak? Well, at least it was entertaining? 

It wasn't as entertaining watching Venus Williams last night. And everyone here knows Venus is my girl. But there is persistence and there is stubbornness. If you can barely walk on a tennis court, where's the nobility in saying, "Hey, at least I finished the match?" when you are not mounting a real challenge? Sure, her movement seemed to loosen up after rolling her ankle, but it was never enough to play the way she did in the first round. Where's the wisdom in risking further injury? I always wonder if she does things like this because she knows she's going to retire soon, but I've had this thought for three years, so I'm thinking sheer stubbornness. And also, like, where did Sara Errani come from again all of a sudden?  

Speaking of throwbacks, I just finished reading this Stephen King book called Revival. Pretty good book. The premise is that there's this guy, Jamie, who keeps running into this other guy throughout his life. Jamie refers to this person as his fifth business, as a person who isn't part of your everyday life, or even someone you randomly encounter in a coffee shop. No, this fifth business person's role is to simply bring drama to your doorstep. Kaia Kanepi is the fifth business for top-tier women's tennis. There you are, being Sonia Kenin, the Aussie Open defending champ, and you walk into your second-round match to encounter a very unseeded player. Sixty-four minutes later, you're done, having lost to the woman who has snatched the likes of Naomi Osaka, Petra Kvitova, Caroline Wozniacki, Angelique Kerber, Sam Stosur and Justine Henin out of tournaments at the height of their games. Kanepi is 35, so she's developed a bit of a reputation for this kind of drama, and no one knows what's happening at this tournament anyway, so it does feel like this is a good time and place for fifth business-y antics.


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