The United States and Colombia played three days of tennis against each other this weekend as part of the World Group playoffs for the Davis Cup. It was Colombia's first bid for the highest-level World Group and the US was attempting to retain its World Group spot. I don't really know what any of that means; I just looked it up on the Davis Cup website (www.daviscup.com if you need to study it more.)
We bought tickets for yesterday's matches, of which there were supposed to be two but the second was rained out. It doesn't really matter because we saw an amazing match between Mardy Fish and Santiago Giraldo. As you can imagine, Santiago was the crowd favorite in the very unusual but very cool tennis setting of a bullfighting ring.
Normally I would have researched a little who we were going to see play but I was otherwise preoccupied with my sea shipment's arrival (more on that in another post), so I knew nothing. I'm embarrassed to admit that when I heard Mardy Fish's name when we got there, I had no idea who that was. Turns out he lost about 30 pounds over the last year, his game improved, and his ranking rose from over 100 to #19 in the world in 12 months. So he's made marked strides in his tennis game. And he showed it yesterday. It was a long match - over 4 hours (which to our accompanying 7 year-old apparently seemed like 4 days) - and at 8600 feet and with a fairly hostile crowd, it had to seem like 4 days to Mardy Fish as well.
Speaking of the crowd, the Colombians that I've met are all very polite, very reserved people. These people were not at the Davis Cup yesterday. Imagine you're watching a professional US football game at the most hostile-to-outsiders stadium in America. Say you're in Pittsburgh or Green Bay. So you're surrounded by what seems like a million people pulling for Pittsburgh and you're in the very small minority of people who traveled a LONG way for the away game. You wave your flag proudly but these people around you are just so rude and mean and jeering that you decide you might have to get rude and mean and jeering back. They displayed no tennis etiquette whatsoever. I may not know a lot about tennis but I know that you do not cheer and clap and hoot and holler when the opponent faults on his first serve. I know you don't whistle every time the opponent has to serve. And I can assure you there were no air horns at the Family Circle Tennis Cup matches I went to earlier in the year.
Jimmy thought we were at a Berkeley County football game, but it was worse than that. Somebody threw their seat cushion at poor Mardy Fish. Can you imagine?
But when all was said and done, Mardy Fish pulled out all the stops and won in a 5-set marathon match. And to be fair to all those crazy Colombians in the bullring, they were very gracious losers.
All I know is that I wouldn't want to go to a sport they're really nuts about if they act like this at a so-called gentleman's sporting event!
Some photos follow to commemorate the event.
No comments:
Post a Comment