Cheryl Murray

• The Monfils motif

  2009-08-13 21:34:10
  

  One of the things I love about tournaments is watching the fans.  This continues to be a great source of entertainment to me.  It is encouraging as well, because there seem to be a horde of people out there willing to pay their hard-earned money to attend a live sporting event about which they know the very barest of essentials.  Take, for example, the following story.

   

  Yesterday, I was walking to the Banque Nationale stadium to watch Juan Martin Del Potro, when I happened upon Gael Monfils being escorted around the grounds in a golf cart.  This is a customary practice.  Players will tend to get overrun by fans carrying those volleyball-sized tennis balls and waving Sharpie markers in the air if they just walked around like us normal folks.  Even if it is a player like Michael Llodra that is not instantly recognizable, people still figure it out.  Mostly because of the large racket bags those guys are always carrying, but also because tennis players tend to be somewhat taller, tanner and leaner than your average person.  Trust me.  You can just….tell.

   

  Anyway, Monfils was zipping by with his “chauffeur” when out of nowhere, I was literally knocked out of the way.  I saw the oversized tennis ball first and expected it’s carrier to be a 14 year old boy.  It was not.  The perpetrator of the human crash-up derby was a woman in her mid-forties RUNNING full-out and yelling “MonTIFF!  MonTIFF!”  I feel pretty confident that she meant to call “Monfils”.  Either way, it was (except the bruise on my arm) quite entertaining.  Whether the look on “MonTIFF”’s face was horror or amusement, I’m not sure.  I hope it was amusement.  I scarcely need add that the woman was not fast enough to catch the golf cart. 

   

  I also took note of the ball kids yesterday.  This has become something of a tradition for me.  Quite frankly, they fascinate me.  Those poor children stand in the baking sun and take sweaty towels from often ungrateful athletes.  I figure they could use a little “face” time on my blog.  Anyway, the ballkids in Montreal don’t roll the balls to each other like at most other tournament – they bounce them.

   

  I suppose I can sort of understand why they went with this approach.  In theory, it is faster than the ball-rolling method.  The problem is that tennis balls are, for lack of a better term, rather springy.  Hypothetically speaking, if a person with, say, smallish hands were already holding three tennis balls and then attempted to catch a fourth, the result would invariably be an escaped ball.  Or two.  On Tuesday, I saw a line judge pick up a ball that had been dropped and put it in his own pocket until the next point.  Might be time to rethink that particular strategy….

   

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