David Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

There are old people who sit on red Stade Jarry park benches all day without moving.

At just about every gate and important door on the Stade Jarry grounds there are attendants, young Quebeckers paid by the tournament — whether their function is security or what remains somewhat unclear — who sit all day with walkie-talkies and red and black du Maurier visors and the catatonically bored expressions of attendants everywhere.

There are four separate booths that sell good old U.S. soft drinks, you’ll be glad to know, although the booths’ promo-signs for “Soft Drinks” translate literally into “Gaseous Beverages,” which might explain why most Canadian Open spectators opt for Evian instead of soft drinks.

Or you can stand in front of the Canadian Open Stringer’s Tent and watch the Official ATP Tour Stringer work through a small mountain of racquets, using pliers and shears and what looks like a combination blacksmith’s anvil and dentist’s chair. Or you can join the battalion of kids outside the Players’ Tent all trying to get their Official ATP Player Trading Cards 55autographed by players entering or exiting, and you can witness a kind of near-riot when the passing player turns out to be Sampras or Courier or Agassi, and you can even get stiff-armed by a bodyguard in wraparound shades when Brooke Shields passes too close in her own wraparounds and floppy hat.

If the mood for more serious consumption strikes, you can walk due east of the Stadium complex to the Promenade du Sportif, a kind of canvas strip mall selling every product even remotely associated with the Canadian Open: Prince, Wilson, Nike, Head, Boost ®Vitamin/Energy Drink (free samples available), Swatch, Nature Valley Granola Bars, 56Sony, and DecoTurf Inc.

And at this tournament you can (U.S. readers may want to sit down for this part) actually buy du Maurier-brand cigarettes — by the carton or broad flat Europack — from a special red and black booth right outside the main entrance to the Stadium Court. 57People in Quebec smoke — heavily — and this booth does serious business. No part of Stade Jarry is nonsmoking, and at matches so many spectators are chain-smoking du Maurier cigarettes that at times a slight breeze will carry the crowd’s exhaled cloud of smoke out over the court, transforming the players into nacreous silhouettes for a moment before the cloud ascends. And, in truth, accredited media don’t even have to buy the du Mauriers; Press Box employees will give packs out free to journalists, though they don’t announce this or make a big big deal of it.

It’s the little things like public smoking that remind you that Canada’s not home. Or e.g. Francophone ads, and these ads’ lack of even a pretense of coy subtlety — someplace between the Radisson des Gouverneurs and Stade Jarry is a huge billboard for some kind of Quebecois ice cream. It’s a huge photo of an ice cream cone poised at a phallic 45°, jutting, the dome of ice cream unabashedly glansular, and underneath is the pitch: “Donnez-moi ta bouche.” 58The brand’s own trademark slogan, at the bottom, is that it’s “La glace du lait plus lechée.” One of the nice things Michael Joyce and his coach do is usually let me ride with them in their courtesy car 59between the hotel and Jarry, to sort of lurk and soak up atmosphere, etc. We pass this billboard several times a day. Finally one time I point up at the glistening phallic ad and ask Joyce whether the ad strikes him as a little heavy, overt, uncoy. Joyce looks up at the billboard — maybe for the first time, because in the car he’s usually staring commuterishly straight ahead, either gathering himself into a prematch focus or exiting gradually from same — and turns to me and says in all earnestness that he’s tried this particular brand of Canadian ice cream and it’s not all that good.

Plus, of course, once the main draw starts, you get to look up close and live at name tennis players you’re used to seeing only as arrays of pixels. One of the highlights of Tuesday’s second round of the main draw is getting to watch Agassi play MaliVai Washington. Washington, the most successful black American on the Tour since Ashe, is unseeded at the Canadian Open but has been ranked as high as #11 in the world, and is dangerous, and since I loathe Agassi with a passion it’s an exciting match. Agassi looks scrawny and faggy and, with his shaved skull and beretish hat and black shoes and socks and patchy goatee, like somebody just released from reform school (a look you can tell he’s carefully decided on with the help of various paid image-consultants, and now cultivates). Washington, who’s in dark-green shorts and a red shirt with dark-green sleeves, was a couple of years ago voted by People one of the 50 Prettiest Human Beings or something, and on TV is indeed real pretty but in person is awesome. From twenty yards away he looks less like a human being than like a Michelangelo anatomy sketch: his upper body the V of serious weight lifting, his leg-muscles standing out even in repose, his biceps little cannonballs of fierce-looking veins. He’s beautiful but doomed, because the slowness of the Stadium Court makes it impractical for anybody except a world-class net man to rush the net against Agassi, and Washington is not a net man but a power-baseliner. He stays back and trades groundstrokes with Agassi, and even though the first set goes to a tiebreaker you can tell it’s a mismatch. Agassi has less mass and flat-out speed than Washington, but he has vision and timing that give his groundstrokes way more pace. He can stay back and hit nuclear groundstrokes and force Washington until Washington eventually makes a fatal error. There are two ways to make a fatal error against Agassi: the first is the standard way, hitting it out or into the net or something; the second is to hit anything shorter than a couple feet inside the baseline, because anything that Agassi can move up on he can hit for a winner. Agassi’s facial expression is the slightly smug self-aware one of somebody who’s used to being looked at and automatically assumes the minute he shows up anywhere that everybody’s looking at him. He’s incredible to see play in person, but his domination of Washington doesn’t make me like him any better; it’s more like it chills me, as if I’m watching the devil play.

Television tends to level everybody out and make them seem kind of blandly handsome, but at Montreal it turns out that a lot of the pros and stars are interesting- or even downright funny-looking. Jim Courier, former #1 but now waning and seeded tenth here, 60looks like Howdy Doody in a hat on TV, but here he turns out to be a very big boy — the “Guide Média” lists him at 175 pounds but he’s way more than that, with large smooth muscles and the gait and expression of a Mafia enforcer. Michael Chang, 23 and #5 in the world, sort of looks like two different people stitched crudely together: a normal upper body perched atop hugely muscular and totally hairless legs. He has a mushroom-shaped head, ink-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I’ve ever seen outside a Graduate Writing Program. 61P. Sampras, in person, is mostly teeth and eyebrows, and he’s got unbelievably hairy legs and forearms, hair in the sort of abundance that allows me confidently to bet that he has hair on his back and is thus at least not 100 % blessed and graced by the universe. Goran Ivanisevic is large and tan and surprisingly good-looking — at least for a Croat; I always imagine Croats looking ravaged and katexic and like somebody out of a Munch lithograph — except for an incongruous and wholly absurd bowl haircut that makes him look like somebody in a Beatles tribute band. It is Ivanisevic who will beat Joyce in three sets in the main draw’s second round. Czech former top-ten Petr Korda is another clastic-looking mismatch: at 6′3″ and 160, he has the body of an upright greyhound and the face of — eerily, uncannily —a fresh-hatched chicken (plus soulless eyes that reflect no light and seem to “see” only in the way that fish’s and birds’ eyes “see”).