2025 Australian Open: Who Needs an Offseason?

NOTE: Edited to add, well, words!

Before we go any further, I just want to say Madison Keys. She looks amazing right now and she's looked pretty good in the warmups. We gotta keep her encased in bubble wrap between matches. 

For the guys, I've never been a fan of Reilly Opelka but he better work that Brisbane magic. 

Men's Draw

I didn't see too many first-round matches that got me excited, but now that play has started, big props to Kei Nishikori. I've been rooting for him since back in the day and his career has been waylaid by injury. And also Thiago Montiero, it seemed for a second. Nishikori was down match point against an opponent who is kind of like Jelena Ostapenko -- lots of firepower, shots that make your mouth drop open, followed by errors that simply didn't need to be made. Heck of a treat for round one, that's for sure. 

And, yes, I picked Opelka against Djokovic. Now, I've watched too many true-crime documentaries to ever let Opelka into my car, but I do think he can beat Djokovic again -- that wasn't a fluke. But it's not just Opelka's game -- Djokovic does look a step slower. Did he ever, like, recover from his knee surgery?

Women's Draw

Now. Here are some good first-round matches. Note the starred matches. Minnen v. Aiava was a good one. I feel for Victoria Azarenka. Like, when did Lucia Bronzetti learn to serve like that? Did I miss something? Probably yes, but dang! I expect Emma Raducanu and Ekaterina Alexandrova to be another good one. I watched Laura Siegemund v. Hailey Baptiste, expecting exactly what I got -- the battle of the inconsistents. It was entertaining, as those matches tend to be. But yikeys. And Osaka/Garcia just finished about five minutes ago in my corner of the world. I think Osaka is right there, man. Right on the edge of another breakthrough. She's missing consistency and might need more match play for that. But she is riiiiight therrrrre.

And of course, if the seeds hold up, I am planning on putting everyone and everything on mute to watch Keys v. Danielle Collins. Keys just looks effortless right now. The power and accuracy is just flowing off the racquet. Danielle is just sheer willpower, so that should be fun!

League Watch: Just a Number

Sometimes you think you’re ready for something. Then you get it. 

I’ve been trying to get my USTA rating bumped to 4.0 for a couple of years now. Last year, I won almost all my singles matches, but didn’t do so great in doubles. Still, I was sure I was about to get the bump. I didn’t and so I came into this season with a chip on my shoulder and a promise: You want to keep me at 3.5? I’m going to make everyone sorry about it. And I did, mowing down (almost) all takers at that level. I’m still a little mad about one match and I will get my vengeance, in this life or the next. (I quote "Gladiator" a lot on this blog.)

But then that got boring. And someone told me that in addition to killing it at 3.5, I should also play 4.0. So I did that, too, and the matches got more challenging, but I was holding my own. I don’t want to brag (but why not?), but I even had a winning record in 4.0 play this year: 12-3. Notably, in singles, that record is 3-3.

I was feeling pretty good about myself and my play. And then fall season came. I was playing in all kinds of combo leagues at differing skill levels and I think it messed me up. I had one partner I would always win with, but everything else was a shot in the dark. I found myself overcompensating for partners, trying to play safely so I could win. Why? So I could be a 4.0. Except who the hell wins at 4.0 like that? Not me. So the last few months have been a doozy.  

Part of it could be playing too much and I did play in 10 leagues this year, which is probably a little too much in retrospect. The other problem I noticed was that I was not as dominant in singles as I had been. Yes, better players, but I was starting to wonder if I was getting Too Old for This. I’ve always been a slow starter, especially in singles, but in all my matches, I was just playing terribly. There were 2 or 3 matches where I had to chuckle at myself for having taken the match to tiebreaks, because I was stinking it up. Which meant I was maybe doing something right? But not very right, because the results.  

The last league match of the year for me was for a league I had joined with the intention of playing doubles with one of my favorite partners. The reality is that both of us ended mostly on singles duty, so there I was at first singles feeling like ... well, not first. Or even second. I realized shortly after arriving that I was playing against my old team. I realized that when I went up to speak to a few of them and they acted like I had the plague. (Guys, life is too short for that nonsense.) 

Anyway, then I realized my opponent was someone I had gone the distance against the previous year. Mostly what I remember about that match is that I was on my period and not in the best mood. I snapped at her for a line call for waiting a half-second too late, a call that was totally fine, and I had to tell her the next time I saw her why, and apologize. We had a good laugh. But I knew that this was going to be a pain in the ass, especially with my confidence in the basement as it was. 

We got started. Well, she got started. I just stood around watching winners whiz past me. It was nice. Good breeze. The crazy part was that I didn’t feel as if I was playing badly – she was hitting a clean ball and playing smart. Even with that, I held game points and couldn’t convert them.  

You know what I said about a slow start. 0-6 is a pretty slow start. All I could do was dig in my heels and keep going. But in the back of my head? Yeah, I was thinking I was too old for this maybe. I was able to win the first game of the second set and get on the board. But every game was a struggle and it felt like every positive step I took was erased by an error or a great shot from my opponent. In the middle of the set, I began to (sort of emptily) repeat my mantra to myself: “Inhale confidence. Exhale execution.” Which got me thinking about a conversation I’d just had with my boyfriend about confidence and what it really means. Debbie Millman has a definition that just stuck with me. I reminded myself of it on the baseline: Confidence is the successful repetition of an endeavor, a task. (You should listen to this whole interview if you’re a late bloomer in anything. It’s just *chef’s kiss.*) I told myself: You’ve won points before. You’ve won games before. You’ve won matches before. You have earned confidence. 

Sometimes my self-talk game can be counterproductive, but something happened when I reminded myself that I knew how to play tennis. I began hitting my spots on the court. I began serving better. I bricked my volleys, which wasn’t a surprise, but after I did, I reset myself and kept going. I ran almost everything down, keeping points alive until my opponent missed. I realized that there was this one thing I could do that would always pull an error out of her, and I did it until I was serving at 5-3. Then I coughed up four errors quickly, and then we were at 5-all! Sigh. One second, I was killing it. The next, I was shooting myself in the foot and bleeding out on court. The problem, I think, was that it had been a minute since I had felt confident of my ability to close a match out. So I was getting to the precipice and then just standing there.  

Bizarrely, I won the set tiebreak pretty fast. But now, there was a 10-point tiebreak for the match. And again, I built a lead. And again, I watched it disappear mostly due to bad decisions or straight-up errors. Then, at 9-all, I double-faulted. Which, my goodness. I stood at the line to now face a match point and I was angry and nervous and pissed and then my second serve landed in the box, and then I just played. I thought a lot about not making a stupid mistake but I left a ball sort of short. When she hit it out, I just took a long pause, and dug my heels in again.  

I don’t remember much after that, not that there was much more to remember. We played only two more points after that and I won them both.  

The next morning, my doubles partner sent me a note of congratulations and in glancing at it, thought it was about the match. No. The early-start ratings for USTA had come out and I was officially a 4.0. The timing made me chuckle.

You know I like a visual. Here's one I'm really digging on right now:

  

Oh, a low 4.0? Let's see what we can do about that.  

            

U.S. Open: When You Don't Fill Out a Draw

            I fill out a draw for just about every major, even if I don’t publish it (which is almost never). This time, I didn’t -- believe it or not, I forgot to do it even though I have my two weeks worth of excuses about why I can’t possibly be at work at all these next fourteen days.  

I wasn’t prepared for how freeing it is to watch tennis when you haven’t tried to predict the future. Oh, Carlos Alcaraz lost in the second round? Didn’t see that coming! Oh well. 

I don’t think anyone’s winning money off their original men’s draw this year. 

Seriously, I don’t know if it’s time to worry about Alcaraz yet. That seems silly even to write – he just won Wimbledon. He’s got four majors and he’s what, 21? These flameouts happen to everyone and it’s probably nothing to worry about, given that he’s still so young and that losing to Van De Camps will teach him something. That said, watching him lose last night was perplexing. Not only was he making bad decisions against a guy who was obviously dedicated to attacking the net the whole night, but his concentration seemed very inconsistent. I can’t think of the last time I saw someone down two sets and a break making a great shot and celebrating like he had just brought up match point. If he was going to win, he still had so much work to do. And then he was following that up with making wild errors. It was just odd to see. Sometimes I think he is dangerously close to upsetting the fine balance he has displayed so far of showmanship and tennis guile. I mean, I love the shots and that he is often giving the crowd a match that is worth every dime in watching.  

Orrrr, maybe it’s too much tennis. The day after Alcaraz lost early, it was Novak Djokovic’s turn to lose a four-set match to Alexei Popyrin. Both Djokovic and Alcaraz medalled at the Olympics. Which in the grand scheme might be worth it for them, but the real gift they’ve left is this wide-open men’s draw – a world where Frances Tiafoe has as good a chance as Brandon Nakashima to make the final.  

On to the women. Here’s another “is it time to pull the emergency cord yet” question: What is up with Elena Rybakina? I couldn’t help but notice that she barely made it through her first-round match against someone she shouldn’t have had much issue with. In fact, I’m just going to say it: That was the ugliest pro match I have seen in some time (no offense to Australia’s Destanee Aiava – I mean, sometimes you have a bad day). But whoa, it was bad. It was like reverse tennis – both of them trying to see who could make a mistake first. But then Rybakina withdrew from the tournament. By my count, that’s six tournaments she’s withdrawn from this season.      

Other than Rybakina, the higher seeds of the women’s draw are holding up well for now. But that probably won’t be the case by the end of today. I look at this draw as it is and feel as if Jessica Pegula has a really good chance to make her first Slam final. I’ll be watching Coco Gauff’s match against Emma Navarro pretty closely too. Also, a quick shout-out to Paula Badosa, who has been injury-ridden lately, but is now in the fourth round. By the way, it took me a good year to figure out why, when I watched a Badosa match, I’d find myself chanting “Fair is fair!” after one of her winners. Then it dawned on me.

    

            You might call her match today a “do-or-die" situation. IYKYK  

TWA and Notions: How to Make a Pattern

Cocktail optional, but I think we all could use a drink.

Our tennis courts are open again in my corner of Florida, which is great. But I don't really feel ready to test the facility yet. Honestly, there are too many people walking around without masks and trying to crowd me in grocery stores, and I don't want to test public waters yet. League play allegedly resumes next month. Let's say that's true. That gives me about four weeks to finish my Martina knockoff dress. How's that going? Glad you asked.

I said in my previous post that I had attempted to recreate this dress before. I dug out my sewing box with the fabric I had left and a book I'd bought about the basics of sewing. I'd forgotten that I had also gotten a pattern-making book from the library and made copies of all the relevant chapters so I could return the book. When I looked all of this over, I realized why I had stopped. 

First, these books might as well have been written in Sanskrit. They couldn't have made the text bigger, or included some white space? This is like reading an economics textbook. 

Oh, and the thing that probably sent me screaming from the machine the first time were all these numbers. It's just like Tom Hanks said, "There's no math in sewing!"

Unlike the 1970s, when I'm sure these books were written, there is now YouTube, where I felt sure I could learn how to make a pattern without math-ing. 

But it turns out I was wrong. There is no way around calculations to make your pattern, just as there is no way to go without measuring your dimensions. There's been a lot of stress-eating of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches around here and also popcorn and cookie thins. So wrapping a measuring tape around my waist is, yeah, fraught.

Anyway, I went to YouTube University and found two fine instructors who gave me some tips before I busted out the scissors. The first one is from The Last Stitch, where I learned that you can digitize your patterns? One great idea she offered was using your best-fitting clothes when drafting patterns in addition to your dimensions. That is probably going to be very important here because while I love the look of Martina's dress, I do not think that playing in a dress that narrow and short will be very comfortable for me. My thighs are a little bigger than hers (and not all muscle), so some length adjustments will be needed there.  

Unfortunately, Johanna also recommended using a textbook to learn more about the basics. Which might be a good idea because one of Johanna's other tips was that "Ease matters," and I had no idea what she meant. Cart before the horse much? 

Still, I really wanted to get started, just to get something down on paper -- the lovely pattern paper I purchased online. So I cut out a piece and got started with the next video.
And I learned yet another lesson right off the top: supplies needed include a "set square" and "pattern master?!??" What are those? Looks like another online visit to Joann Fabrics is in order.
More math here, unfortunately, but Kim's video helps explain the whys behind the pattern calculations although I'm not going to pretend I'd be able to explain it to anyone else at this time.
I also learned the importance of ease, which is basically making sure that when you put on your dress, you can move around in it. Helpful thing to know. Even without those supplies, I was able to get something down on paper, although it wasn't much.

Like I said, not much. This is far from complete, but I needed a break from all those numerals. But I have officially gone much further than ever in this process, which makes me think I might actually swing this! (Pun discovered in editing process, and it stays.) I also have the material I'm going to use for my first pass at this project, too! No, it's not the original material. Not only have I been unable to find it, but I'm pretty convinced I'm going to need a second pass at this dress and would hate to do it on hard-to-find material. I like what I did pick out, which you'll hopefully see in my next post.
It might even be cut.
It might even be cut correctly.