No rain this time

Two years ago we'd come to Toronto for the Rogers Cup to watch some good tennis and been welcomed by seemingly never ending rain and a rain policy administered by Tennis Canada that made no sense at all.  However as the men were back in Toronto this year, so were we.

We'd bought tickets for the Tuesday (1st and 2nd round) and Thursday through Sunday (3rd round through to the finals) and would be joined by friends again, most of whom would be staying with us.

Don and Margot helped us enjoy some Canadian flavored tennis

Typically the early rounds have mixed results as the top guys play the lower ranked players.  There's not much difference in the respective abilities.  What sets the top guys aside is their mental toughness and ability to win the big points.

An instructive statistic from Roger Federer's heyday shows that in his best year when his win record for the year was 85-4, looking at points only Federer won just 52% of the total points played.

Statistics, statistics and damned lies.

The welter of statistics quoted these days (courtesy of computing) often masks the important things.  With such a narrow margin, it is always possible that a lower ranked guy can cause an upset and so it was that the Frenchmen Jo-Wilfried Tsonga hammered #1 seed Novak Djokovic 6-2 6-2.

Tsonga on Centre Court -- we saw a lot of him in the week and it was good to track someone's progress throughout an event from start to finish.  He played in the day as both the Canadian Raonic and Federer always played at night for the TV… and as neither Nadal or Djokovic were around

Tsonga actually had a great week considering how bad a record he has against the top guys.  In my opinion he underwhelms much like a lot of talented players lacking mental toughness.  However Tsonga has a monster serve that gets him out of a lot of trouble and so it was this week.  It wasn't that he played much better than Djokovic, he didn't, but Djokovic chose this tournament to not turn up and play.

However the rest of the week had some fantastic matches.

Dmitrov versus Robredo was terrific.  Neither have huge serves, both have beautiful ground strokes.  Nearly 3 hours of wonderful tennis.

Dmitrov/Robredo on the Grandstand

Tsonga versus Murray was wonderful drama even though the tennis quality was poor.  Murray in particular led the race to the bottom in the 3rd set when Tsonga was ready to fold.

Dmitrov versus Anderson was fantastic. The battle behind classic tennis strokes and a bludgeoning serve followed up with a crushing forehand.  Thank goodness Dmitrov won!  But at 5-5 in the 3rd set tie break, it was still difficult to predict!

The crew: Keith, Viv, Judy, Martin and Gill with Nick in front

Tsonga played wonderfully well against a tired looking Dmitrov.  Gone were the fears, the lack of confidence and his general mental fragility.  He never missed.  Not even his ground strokes.  And his serve, well at 145 mph in the corner time after time I felt sorry for Dmitrov.

The Bulgarian cheering section: "Grigor, Grigor, Grigor…"

And then the final against the great man, Roger Federer himself.  Our friend Gill had bought a Fed hat for the occasion but that didn't prove to be good enough as he really didn't show up on the day.  Tsonga was nervy of course, having a 4-11 record against Feds so wasn't really expecting to win, but he served very well and hung on in all right places winning a tight 2nd set tie break on Feds' 50th ground stroke error.

Well done Jo!

And no rain.

But the food concessions were awful.  Invite a bunch of food trucks in for goodness sake.

And the transport is dopey.  No shuttles during the day until 5 pm and when they do come there's 20 minutes in between.  And 500 people waiting and waiting and waiting…

But hey, it was still a great week!

In praise of public transport

I'm a sceptic about many things and can easily rant about things that bug me but one thing I cannot complain about usually is public transport.

It gets a bad rap from many people I think largely because it doesn't run where and when they exactly want it to run.  They have to walk to where the bus, train or underground runs from which of course nobody wants to do these days.  We live in a time of personalized everything where we believe we are in charge of our lives totally with for example TV on demand, smartphones available with apps that do everything, and so on.  If we actually got up and walked the often short distance required, I think people would be pleasantly surprised how well public transport actually works.

Sadly it's a self fulfilling prophecy if people don't use it, then public transport becomes too costly to run as the costs of running grow which in turn prompts cuts to service which in turn prompts complaints that the service isn't good enough, and so on and so forth.  Personally I think that public transport is one of those things that governments should operate.  They at least don't have the 15% ROE targets that private enterprise is constantly striving for.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in England where public transport has been largely privatized and its cost to use as a result has gone through the roof.  Our experience in Miami by contrast was nothing short of sensational.

In previous years Viv and I had used taxis or the official tournament shuttle to and from the tennis on Key Biscayne.  The taxi would cost $40 while the shuttle was $15 return daily per person.  The difficulty was that late in the day, taxis would become scarce for the way back and the shuttle only ran hourly and sometimes it was tricky to determine quite which vehicle was the correct shuttle as there are always loads of buses hanging around and none of them seemingly were the correct ones.

This year though Viv googled buses to Key Biscayne and after some mishaps we found that the B bus from Brickell Station stops outside the ground with the return bus stop on the other side of the road and operates between 5 am and 11.30 pm every half hour all for the cost of $2.25 per person per trip.

What a revelation!

Furthermore the buses always came on time and took no more than 20 minutes out and more likely 15 minutes back as evening traffic was much lighter.  The bus stopped right in the middle of Mary Brickell Village, a place that offers an endless supply of bars, restaurants and shops and was no more than a 10-minute walk away from our apartment.

As for the tennis, it was of course wonderful.  We saw some great matches including  Tsonga/Baghdatis, Dolgopolov/Lajovic -- a young Serb supported from the crowd by Novak Djokovic at least until the rains came -- Nishikori/Dmitrov and Bautista-Agut/Fognini.  These were all lengthy well contested close matches but there were of course some less well contested too but that is always the case.

From top: Tsonga, Baghdatis, Nishikori, Dmitrov, Dolgopolov and Fognini

Our final day in Miami was spent largely on and off the Miami trolleys, a free service we mistakenly took to be tourist buses but which turned out to be free shuttles for workers all around Miami.

We took the Biscayne trolley north and the Coral Way trolley to Coral Gables and if that wasn't enough did the full circle on the Coral Gables trolley too before finally giving up the ghost and retiring to the Mandarin Oriental on Biscayne Key, an 8 minute walk away from our apartment, for a restoring Martini.

Martinis at the Mandarin.  Viv's with olives, mine with a twist.

Our final dinner in Miami was at a nearby place called Truluck's where the waitress told us that last week Andy Murray had visited with his entourage and eaten 2 entrees.  The steak was lovely, by the way and all round the restaurant was very good.

Next stop on our tour is San Francisco!

The apartment Viv found on the 38th floor

Why don't you play with more topspin?

Finally, the first big post re-retirement trip for Viv and I!

Planning a lengthy trip is quite a task particularly when there's the wishes of more than one person to take into account and if you don't want to schedule every second of every day.  Strange that, the more you want it to be less of a package tour, the more tricky it becomes to organize things.  My approach was to place a few key things and leave blank spaces around it.  Our big round the world trip in 2010 was great but suffered a little I think by being too organized.  With time less of an issue, a bimble factor needs to be built in.

That said, none of the time we are due to spend in Florida is unplanned!  The overview was to attend the tennis tournament in Key Biscayne again and so I crammed things in around it.  This segment included 3 days in Saddlebrook Tennis Resort (30 minutes north of Tampa) and a recovery day in Naples (about 2 hours west of Miami) -- see website here.

Some of the tennis courts at Saddlebrook.  There's also hard courts where touring pro's come to train.  When we there John Isner came to practice on the hard courts ahead of the Miami tournament this week.

I'd organized a hire car from a smallish company called SIXT, a first for us and they turned out to be very efficient indeed down to upgrading us to a nice BMW X1 that could hold all of our luggage (we still haven't figured out how to travel light).  The GPS took us ultimately to the right road and in the goodness and fullness of time, we covered the 450 kilometers in around 5 hours to Saddlebrook.

And boy, has it changed.  Admittedly it has been since 1997 (by collective memory) since we'd been there and previously it was out in the boonies.  Now not so much.  The Waffle House that I remembered we'd enjoyed pretty much as the only local eatery is still there... and probably hasn't changed one iota.  It looks very small now.  It is in the midst of a shopping plaza, one of several that have sprung up all around and that is the thing I find odd.  There's still no industry of any sort near by nor any big city that could draw on the local population.  There's a couple of new hospitals for sure but mostly it seems to me like a field of dreams: build the shops and then developers build housing estates for people to live in.  So there's people living all around these days.  But what do they do?  In the 3 days we were at Saddlebrook we never found a town of any sort.  There were shopping plazas and housing estates for sure, but no town.  No reason for the people to be there.  I don't get it at all.

The resort itself is owned and operated by a man named Tom Dempsey, after whom the new steak restaurant is named.  He's now 88 but works every day and his family are now more involved in running things.  That does mean there's no deep corporate pockets behind them which probably accounts for the fact that the units themselves are pretty tired.  We joked that they'd probably not changed anything since we were last there in 1997, actually not true as the last major reno was back in 2006/7.

The view from our room.  Not too shabby really... unlike the room!

However the tennis was as remembered: 5 hours of intense drilling and activity.  The day starts at 7.50 am for stretching and then its tennis solidly until 11 am.  After a 2 hour break, tennis restarts at 1 pm and continues to 3 pm.  From memory this worked well in the summer months as thunderstorms came in daily around 3.30 pm.  That was the theory anyway but in practice it didn't work in the first 2 days because of the enormous storm that came slamming through at 11 am and which lasted for the next 15 hours.

Talk about deluge but to be fair to Saddlebrook they managed to get the courts ready for play by 9 am the following day.  Given the amount of rain that came down, I'd half expected for there to be no play for the whole day at least.  Very impressive.

That meant we had the afternoon free so we went to a shopping mall 30 minutes away near Tampa airport.  It was a hideous drive in torrential rain. Poor Viv who drove but she then rallied and came up with the great idea to have a restoring Martini at the Capital Grille there before embarking on some retail therapy.  We'd had a more than respectable Martini the previous evening in Saddlebrook's sports bar so were prepared to embark on a 7-week taste test across the USA.

Capital Grille is an up market steak and cocktail chain and I for one am a supporter if they produce Martini's like that.  The vodka used makes an important difference and Viv and I had become fans of Tito's which is smoother than some but less bland than, say, Grey Goose which I think is massively over rated.  Viv stayed with olives whilst I'd recently made a change to a twist of lemon.

This proved to be a nice restorative enabling us to face the malling prospect in better humor.  As it turned out we didn't buy anything, nor did many others by the look of it as the mall was relatively empty.  Mind you the Apple store of course had a solid coterie of people inside whilst I did note that Microsoft has given up on its notion of branding stores and is now calling them X-Box stands.  The game side was busy but the computer side totally empty.  That must say something about Microsoft in the future.  I see they are planning a new version of Office for the iPad.  I call that surrender.

Back to tennis though, the format is 1 pro per court with 4 players.  Viv and I shared the court with another husband and wife, from Toronto of all places, who hadn't played for quite a few years and wanted a crash course in muscle memory.  They were very sporty so by the 3rd day, their progress was pretty impressive.  But this did mean that Viv and I weren't taxed that hard competing with them and the coach, a Russian guy named Alex, was actually very good at ensuring we all worked at our respective skill levels.

By the 2nd day though the main coach, an English guy named Howard, moved me to another group of harder hitters run by a young coach who committed in my mind the indignity of asking me why I didn't play with more topspin.

"All the current guys do this and so should you."

To underscore his words he showed us all a video on his phone of Djokovic playing his forehand which of course is just ridiculous in both its severity of grip and the amount of topspin he therefore can play.

"You should try to do it like that."

Now I understand that this is the current norm, but then again I learned with a wooden racquet when nobody hit topspin at all so I thought I'd done pretty well at least playing with a little topspin.  Bloody cheek!  And I wasn't impressed that when we were all picking up tennis balls after a drill, he immediately went onto his phone to text.  Bloody young kids!!

Howard invited the guests to cocktails by the pool at 3.30 pm that day which was nice and of course we attended prior to lounging by the pool as the sun had returned in force.  I tried out the pool and immediately regretted it.... it was really cold!

The final day was back to the usual schedule and our afternoon was with another husband and wife from New Jersey who were good, the wife particularly so.  Because Alex had 15 racquets to string, we had a new coach, John, who was 62 and an ex-touring pro and was great fun.  He loved to talk too and had some great stories but still found time to work us thoroughly as well as critique my stroke dynamics -- forehand lazy, backhand structured well but I have to hit both harder... and with more topspin.  Aaagh!!!

We even managed to get filmed in action using an iPad and some really neat editing tools.  Somehow they'd managed to put my head onto some really dumpy chap's body.  But his forehand was quite lazy and he certainly didn't hit much topspin either.

The backhand was nice though!