Those are machine guns those cops are toting

Yes, my friends, every day when I walk into the Tennis Center from the back entrance, where the practice courts are situated, I pass a few cops/militia standing outside with machine guns in their arms. I’ve never seen this before at the Open. Maybe it is a practice that started a couple of years ago because it’s been that long since I had a press pass and entered from the rear of the center. But it’s a little startling I have to say, passing these armed-and-ready gunslingers each day.

I watched two matches in the Grandstand courts yesterday: Richard Gasquet v. Nikolay Davydenko and Robin Soderling v. Taylor Dent. The first was a tight match for the first two sets. Davydenko, the No. 6-seed, who finished last season as probably the best player in the game, knocking off both Federer and Nadal in the year-ending tournaments, is still off his game after wrist surgery this year. He looks incredibly fit. I’d wager that he has the least body-fat of any player on tour. And he had reached the quarters at Cincy, but Gasquet, who is back to being a Top-10-like player, just simply knocked him off the court, which is incredibly hard to do against Davydenko, who is known for his early-strike tennis, like Andre Agassi. But Gasquet is a player to watch as this event marinates, and yes, I felt like I was marinating in the continued heat of the first week. He has a flair to him and backhand that is criminal. He moves extremely well and he’s strong. With new coaching, the ubiquitous Gabriel Markus of Argentina, who’s coached practically everyone in the game from Gonzalez to Spadea, Gasquet is looking confident (although he does look at his coaching box as much as anyone not named Andy Roddick).

After the match, in his small presser, Davydenko said he was going to throw away his Prince rackets and start using new strings and new Dunlop rackets. He said if he keeps playing the way he is now, it’s possible his ranking will drop into the 40′s by year end. Think of the plight of the pro tennis player, especially one in dire need of defending ranking points, Davy goes now to Kuala Lampur and then Moscow to play. I chased down Davy’s wife, Irina, after the match to try to interview her about the rumors, which Davy quashed, that Irina is now coaching her husband, but she barely looked at me when she said, NO.

The second match, Soderling-Dent, was an absolute flogging, the kind I rarely see on the pro tour. Dent, sweating so much that once he flopped to the court skidding off his own dropped sweat and had his bottoms soaked so far through that it looked like he’d wet his pants, had no answer for the big Swede. After the match, Soderling said Dent was a dangerous player and he was happy to have gone through, but every time Dent tried to venture into the net during the first two sets that went 2 and 2, Sody hit passing shots by him like Dent was a statue. It reminded me of when I played a Satellite event in Reims, just north of Paris in 1987, against a player who at the time was No. 15 in France, when Noah was 1, Leconte 2, Forget 3. Anyway, this guy, on Center Court of that event, flogged me so bad that when I finally won my only game in the second set of the match, I raised my arms in victory.

Dent said afterward, that he doesn’t think any player can serve and volley in today’s game unless he can continually paint the lines with his serves. He says the only two players in the game who s + v more than he does, are Llodra and Dustin Brown, and he doesn’t see that style working for him. But at 220 lbs, he just can’t compete with the Soderling’s of the tour who make him work and move too much around the baseline. It’s too bad because Taylor wants it so much and he’s the most affable guy I’ve met on Tour.

Soderling had a contingent of about six Swedish fans, all young men and probably nicely sudded-up, who sat all dressed in yellow shirts up high in the Grandstand, who cheered and sang songs in praise of the only Swede on the tour. Whenever Sody hit one of his big bomb serves for an ace, they would all stand up and sing and dance (the famous KC & The Sunshine Band tune), “That’s the way, Uh Huh, I like it. That’s the way, Uh Huh, I like it.” It was great fun and spectacle as mostly all-white and duffer American crowd could only manage a few half-hearted, “C’mon, Taylor’s,” and “USA, USA.” Maybe there could be a training event before the Open for American fans on how to cheer and really have fun at a tennis event because mostly the American tennis crowd is a dud. Or maybe the guys with the machine guns can come inside and start shooting at the American fans’ feet to get them up and moving and cheering in unison.

Gasquet and Soderling · quietly mowing down the competition.

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