Travel Blog

John Isner towered over the crowd, made up of many high-heeled young women, in the Lacoste store at The Webster on Collins Avenue last night. He wore a white Lacoste tennis shirt, just as he does on the court, but below it were jeans instead of shorts. He looked more handsome than he does on TV, though that was partly because one's so used to seeing him struggling through yet another interminable tiebreaker.

"Is this the worst part of the tournament for you?" I asked him.

"No, the worst part is playing in the heat," he said. He spoke of the last tournament, at Indian Wells, where the heat was so dry you hardly sweated.

I asked if he'd watched the Federer-Djokovic final, and expressed my view that Federer tired in the third set. He said he hadn't seen it, and that Djokovic had beaten him. "He's good," he said with amusing understatement.

I wished him good luck in Miami (at the tournament) and then shook his hand, which was like a hard, muscular mitt.

I hopped in the car and drove over to the New World Center for the Wallcast of a documentary on Miami Beach on the occasion of the city's 100th birthday.

"It's been cancelled," a man told me as I crossed the lawn in front of the center. "They only had 100 years to get it ready," his friend said. They told me I could go to the free concert that was taking place inside.

It was my first time inside the New World Center, which was like a Marlins Park for music - modern, small-scale, intimate. A clarinetist, a pianist and a cellist (who was described in the program as a "first year cello fellow") played Brahms Trio in A minor for Clarinet, Cello and Piano, Op. 114.

Leaving the hall I chatted with an old newspaper colleague and then, in the lobby, I ran into the pianist. I told her how much I'd enjoyed the concert and asked her where she was from. "Marietta, Georgia," she said. I told her I had just met a tennis player from Georgia. She had never heard of Isner, which was fitting, as he probably never heard of Aya Yamamoto. She asked me my name and offered her hand. It was a lot more delicate than Isner's.