Lots of Tennis

In February and March, we watched a lot of tennis! First, we watched the early rounds of the SAP Open in San Jose. Some of the big names we saw were Andy Roddick, Marat Safin, and Andy Murray. Here's a good shot of Roddick from our seats:


It turns out that both Roddick and Safin are terrible sports though. They both threw some awful temper tantrums, full of yelling and racket-chucking. We were definitely cheering for their opponents by the end. I mean, who does that, with a bunch of kids from local tennis clubs watching?

I was more impressed by Sam Querrey, who is Roddick's practice partner, and who came *so* close to beating him! He also gets extra points from me because his name showed up as "S. Querrey" on the board, which allowed me to make lots of bad jokes.

Nonetheless, the SAP Open is kind of a "tune-up" tournament. We were way more excited to see the Pacific Life Open at Indian Wells, CA, which is an ATP Masters tournament where all the stars play. Leading up to this tournament, there was a lot of hype about how Roger Federer (my hero, he's so graceful!) would break the all-time record for consecutive matches won if he was successful at Indian Wells. I'm thinking, this guy has won 41 consecutive matches, and he's won this tournament 3 years in a row -- of course he'll break the record, and I'll be there to watch!

Aside: If you haven't seen Roger Federer play before, you *must* watch this clip of him crushing Andy Roddick. I cheer every time I watch it (YESS!!).



Anyways, silly me. Federer lost in the first round to some guy I'd never heard of before, so we never got to watch him play. :-(

But we had a great time anyways. We got hassled a few times for wearing Red Sox hats to a tennis match (ironically by Yankees fans wearing Yankees hats), but it was HOT -- over a hundred degrees -- so we would have passed out without them. We had pretty good seats, but it was very very sunny:

We definitely had to take plenty of shade breaks. I think we ate (drank?) $50 worth of Fresher's Soft Frozen Lemonades.

The final match between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic was kind of one-sided, since it was Djokovic's first appearance at a final in a Masters event, and he was obviously jittery for the first set, but Nadal is just *amazing* to watch, and it was gratifying to see Djokovic break into the top ten for the first time. (He's like number 4 now and doing really well at Wimbledon.)

Here's me trying to be in the same picture as Nadal, after he won the final: