It is a record-breaking 149 degrees Fahrenheit at court level. So imagine my surprise, in a foggy dehydration-induced haze, when I saw a ball-kid line up opposite James Blake for tonight's main event.
Of course, as the sun settled, the stadium cooled to a brisk 124 degrees, and I realized that the squirrelly red-shirted Asian exchanging warm-up volleys with Blake was in fact Woong-Sun Jun (of course!), the 293rd ranked player in the world. His climb to the top is seemingly hopeless, but if tennis ever adopts a 30 team, 11 man roster format as I've been campaigning for, my long division skills tell me that he will be a valuable bench player for the office Tennis Fantasy League.
Four of the tourney's top 8 seeds earned themselves a long weekend by choking on applesauce in round one. Rajeev Ram, Fabrice Santoro, Robby Ginepri, and Thomaz Bellucci all lost to miscellaneous contenders, apparently eager to free up their schedules for tonight's midnight showing of The Dark Knight.
And they will all see Blake there-- as he sent Sun Jun back to Korea in straight sets.
Tomorrow's sessions are at 12 pm and 7 pm-- with top seeded Blake competing in the latter. Last year's champion Dmitry Turnsunov is still looming in the quarter-final, and on the other end of the bracket, the second seed Frenchman Gilles Simon is undoubtedly up to no good, twiddling his fingers and waxing his dirty French mustache, plotting his anti-American chicanery against Blake and the rest of our freedom-loving contestants. Come to the Tennis Championships to cheer against Gilles Simon or else you hate freedom. There, I said it.
