Tennis Chatter

Heard that Kirsten Dunst’s grandmother wanted her famous petite granddaughter to be with the Swiss world number one Roger Federer. Kirsten once portrayed the character of a professional tennis player in the 2004 movie Wimbledon alongside Paul Bettany.

It has been a universal fact that Roger’s main asset is not really his superior play nor his sublime court artistry. It is Mirka! Why his opponents take the long road to figure him out is a puzzle. They only have to study Mirka if they want to beat Federer. She holds THE key! She is his Delilah, yes. Not even Kirsten’s Marie Antoinette can upstage Mirka in Federer’s life.

The young couple has become a comforting duo to gaze at over the years. They look so in sync and at home with each other, a rarity in the sports world as well as the current times.

The best Christmas gift that Lindsay Davenport must have received this year is her baby which is due in early summer. By the time she gives birth she will be 31 years old, a waning age for an athlete, sad to say. As the saying goes, hope for the best but expect the worst. If she ever decides to come back, although she earlier said that she “can’t imagine playing again,� she has to need a magic wand to play at a one hundred percent level to withstand the merciless tour.

Lindsay’s retirement has always been in between the lines of her interviews for some time now. I remember during this year’s U.S. Open where Andre Agassi’s farewell act was its marketing magnet, Lindsay was coy about a possible similar sendoff in case she decides to take the big “R�. After all, we are talking about one of the pillars of American women’s tennis.

Always under the radar, Lindsay was never known to lay her cards on the table (No definitions needed. Let others dig it themselves, God help them.) One can never picture her with an entourage fencing her from us mortals. She has always been the picture of grace, class, and earthiness. Now, a family with husband Jon Leach (they look kind of similar, don’t they?) is in the offing.

Having swung a tennis racket forever (she has one of the best ground strokes in the circuit), one can only imagine her excitement to embark on a new page in her young life. Yes, she is still young to have a long life ahead of her.

Not everyone can start life anew. As a wise saying goes, when a door shuts, a window is wide open.

We will miss Lindsay but we do wish her the best.

The holiday bug is generally characterized by generosity. For naturally generous people, giving is just their personality at work. For the tightwads, the holidays act like a dark force, a specter lurking over them egging their conscience to “give some love on Christmas day, man!�

Time is such a gift in this dog-eat-dog-and-master world. Capping his busy and bountiful year (he became the first tennis player in history to earn $8 million prize money in a single season), Roger Federer took an official trip to India recently in behalf of his work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. No, he was not busy doing his ambassadorial wave while donning his famous Wimbledon off-white jacket but sat down with the tsunami-affected children of Tamil Nadu, the hardest hit of the tsunami that rocked Asia in 2004. Gee, it seemed like yesterday. Time does fly, doesn’t it? Yet for the victims, it seems that the clock has not ticked at all.

It is refreshing to see an insanely successful young man give something to the suffering humanity. Yes, I wrote “humanity� as opposed to tennis fans, sponsors, tennis associations and federations. Part of Roger’s charm is his willingness to be exposed to the other side of glamour. From the pages of Vogue to facing the tsunami victims, he makes the transition smooth because one can sense that he is compassionate by nature. The man cried buckets when he won Wimbledon and held the Australian Open trophy, for crying out loud! Oh, and expect him to shed more tears of joy when his face will be reflected in the shiny French Open trophy in 2007.

Expectations are high from those who have far less to those who have it in plentiful. Roger Federer shared his precious time to inspire the children of the east this holiday season. In return, they subtly taught him the priceless meaning of appreciation. To state the obvious, The Champ aced 2006 even off the court.

It is that time of year when sports columns are devoted to its
annual wrap-ups…the best, the worst, the comebacks, the meltdowns, the funniest, the most memorable, the least memorable (alright, the last one was a stretch).

As this is my maiden post, I have nothing to wrap-up. I could actually produce one but it would be like doing the best research of your adult life only to be told the very next day that someone else had written and published exactly the same thing a month before.

I can, however, wrap myself warm during this cold season’s late nights. My tennis racket is not exactly comforting me in those moments but it brings out the sweat off my palms during early evening matches with court associates. The latter would mean people who work extremely hard during the day and who turn tennis court habitués after office hours. In my milieu, they are the ones who shout expletives when a forehand goes long or an attempted cross court shot goes anywhere but in the court; those who celebrate a winner with a yelling “Yes!�; those who I swear cannot sleep on nights they lose a friendly match; those who have an encyclopedic knowledge of tennis equipment (one almost seems to be the human Google); the loved ones who ad infinitum support the previous types, to name just a few.

The end depends upon the beginning. I heard it in a movie once. I choose a fiscal year so the end of 2006 is my beginning.

I think I just had my most memorable Christmas gift this year.