After 12 hours at the Miami Open on Saturday I needed a break, so Sunday I went to a polo match. Our friend Don is a fan – not just of the sport, but the quiet pageantry that surrounds it – so we drove up to the International Polo Club in Wellington to watch Colorado play Audi. The second name made me wonder if sponsors of the sport had taken the advertising on players’ shirts – as one sees with Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona – to a new level by simply renaming the team.
After buying our tickets we walked across the field to see the people having a pre-game lunch on the patio of a low-slung building bearing the name of Veuve Clicquot. The females especially, many in sunhats, reminded me of the society women one sees shots of at the Kentucky Derby. There must be something about horses and hats. Yes, the horses run outdoors, but so do football players.
Then we walked down the sideline and looked at the horses. There were dozens of them, not just the requisite eight, because, as Don explained, substitutes are sent in regularly. I was reminded that the Derby is often called “the most exciting two minutes in sports,” and those thoroughbreds aren’t stopping and starting and constantly changing direction.
We passed a canopy under which a dozen mallets had been laid. They made me think of the Peter de Vries novel in which one of the characters, a polo writer, discovers late in his career that the players hit the ball with the whole mallet, not the end.
A woman came over and asked if we would like our picture taken. She raised horses, she told us, that she brought down for the season from Aiken, South Carolina. “How many horses do you have up there?” someone asked. “Eighty,” she said.
On the way back to the stands, we passed parked pick-up trucks and SUVs. Next to one truck a Great Dane reclined, its back to the field. I wondered if it was out of resentment that there were four-legged creatures bigger than it.
We found our seats and the game began, after the singing of the national anthem. (Ours only, not also that of Argentina.) When the action was far away, we would talk like at a baseball game, but when the ball rolled over in our vicinity the sound of pounding hooves and the shouts of riders, the smack of mallet on ball, sent our hearts racing.
At halftime all the spectators left their seats and walked onto the field, where plastic glasses were provided and champagne was poured by handsome young men in polo shirts.
On Key Biscayne Saturday morning, sitting in the long line of cars waiting to turn into the parking lot, I thought: I won’t miss this. The line continued as we inched our way past fields and scrubland. The Miami Open is the only sporting event I’m aware of where the earlier you arrive, the farther away from the stadium you park.
I had not experienced this parking injustice (one that Hard Rock Stadium should eliminate) for a few years, as I had used the media lot. Last week I was told that I would not be able to receive a media pass this year for the first Saturday because Roger Federer was scheduled to play, and the demand was too high. I tried not to hold it against him.
As is my custom, I wandered the outside courts – found Petra Kvitova practicing on a court next to Juan del Potro – but then headed into the stadium for the Agnieszka Radwanska and Simona Halep match. Earlier, climbing the stairs to check the location of my seat, I had peered down at Halep sitting on a couch next to her coach Darren Cahill in the outdoor players’ lounge, which is now visible only from above as a wall was built a few years ago, Trump-style, to block the views of gawking fans.
My seat was two rows from the top. The players far below were still quite visible, as well as the Miami skyline and sailboats out in Biscayne Bay. Here’s where Hard Rock is going to fall far short.
A group of Polish fans one section below were loudly rooting for their countrywoman, so I moved down in their vicinity. Perhaps their cheering helped, as Radwanska won in an upset.
I had to vacate my new seat for the Federer-Kokkinakis match; by the second set the stadium was standing room only. The people who had paid nearly $100 – in some cases more – to watch the number one player in the world witnessed him scatter forehands and lose his number one ranking. And just like that, the Miami Open, in its swan song on the island, lost its marquee draw.
In the evening, there was a tribute to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, with the school’s tennis players gathered on the court. I thought they looked unusually tall until I realized that standing among them were a number of professionals. One of them, Nick Kyrgios, won the first of the night matches. I watched it from a corporate suite a friend had invited me to, directly across the court from the media room. Seeing it reminded me of balmy afternoons sitting there with Bud Collins, the man who had gotten me my first media pass, and his lovely wife Anita. It pleased me to think that Bud would have approved of what I had written in a preview to this year’s Open in City & Shore:
“There is something beautifully apt about a tennis tournament on a subtropical island. Flying balls, swaying palms. A summer game played within a lob of the beach. (Topspin and undertow.) Everyone – players, ball kids, fans – getting good leg tans.”
Except of course for Bud, in his always colorful trousers.
A few days before meeting Caroline Wozniacki I attended an event with Monica Puig. It was an assignment – to write a profile of the tennis player – but I wasn’t allowed to interview her. This was not Puig’s decision but the WTA’s. I was told that I could email my questions to the WTA (through the PR firm hosting the event) and that they would be passed on to Puig.
Luckily for me, the evening included a Q&A with the player. And I got to chat with her briefly, mostly about her dog. I came away from the meeting, as after that with Wozniacki, impressed by the young woman’s poise, friendliness, and dedication. The next day I emailed my inquiries, thinking of Vladimir Nabokov, who always insisted that would-be interviewers submit their questions in writing.
Today, Wozniacki plays her first match at the Miami Open – against Monica Puig. Having met – and liked – both of them, I am understandably torn as to who to root for. Though the journalist in me realizes that if Puig loses, she’ll have more time to answer my questions.
Memories of the Miami Open – which started as The Lipton more than three decades ago – as it begins its final year on Key Biscayne:
“Checking the electronic schedule in the middle of Crandon Park that first Saturday, I realized that it resembled a departures board at an international airport that, for some strange reason, was displaying surnames instead of destinations: Van Roost. Likhovtseva. Dragomir. Li. Enqvist. Costa. Philippoussis. Campbell. Prieto. Vinck. Appelmans. Halard-Decugis. Sawamatsu. Brandi. In that septet of singles matches (only a small sampling of the long day’s duels) you had, I figured, the representation of at least a dozen countries and possibly five continents. The world was spread out on hardcourt before me.”
….
“Tennis globalism was beautifully captured a little while later when Jonas Bjorkman of Sweden met Leander Paes of India. It would be difficult to think of two more diverse countries, yet there on the same court, in vaguely similar outfits (Bjorkman’s decidedly baggier) and with almost identical weaponry, the two men stood separated only by a net. During one of the changeovers – as if underscoring the benign exoticism of the meeting – a giant iguana scurried across the court.”
from “Love on the Key” from A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler.
Yesterday I went to see the Marlins play the Nationals at the Nationals’ spring training facility in West Palm Beach. It was a low-scoring game and at one point, watching a Marlin trudge back to the dugout after striking out, I wondered how I would feel if, after receiving a rejection, my office filled with the sounds of “Hit the Road Jack.”
I’ve become a fan of the Olympic News Channel, which covers all sports – not just those involving Americans with a chance to medal – and, in the same spirit, interviews athletes from various countries. It’s impressive (and humbling) to see how many of them speak English, and how well they do it. Though all of them, even the Americans, struggle with the inevitable question: What does this mean to you? I’m waiting for a gold medalist to say: “It means I’m the best in the world at this.”