AO: The Point of Melbourne

 

So, we went to the tennis. The Australian Open, the AO. It’s in Melbourne you know.

The rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne is fierce on the East Coast of Australia. For the rest of the world however the image of Australia is of Sydney; the bay, the bridge and the House. Melbourne, they might wonder, what’s the point?

Well in the last few days we have discovered what the point of Melbourne is. And it’s tennis. A tennis point! For two weeks in a year the city comes alive, basking in a brief period of global significance. A kind of collective madness descends on the place and perfectly sane looking people decide that $200 for an AO branded Polo shirt is a good value purchase.

Tennis has always been of peripheral interest in my admittedly over-crowded field of sports interest. The last time I went to a professional tennis tournament it was in a leafy suburb of South West London and bad boy John McEnroe played, followed by the somewhat more appealing (to a teenage boy!) Hana Mandlikova. But Tracy had never been to a professional tennis tournament, so this year we decided to give the AO a go.

Regular readers of my long form FB posts will know that last year our sporting crusade took us to five major sports events in the UK. I can report that none of them were as exciting and rewarding as what we experienced in Melbourne.

The first positive to report is that we were able to buy tickets for the finals without having to a) enter a ballot, or b) take out a second mortgage for corporate hospitality tickets. The trick is to simply find out when the tickets go on sale, log on to a Ticketmaster account (or two in our case) and be ready at the allotted time. The on-line queue is randomised at the point that the tickets are released, and you wait your turn. With mine and Tracy’s accounts both ready and waiting we bought tickets for both the men’s and women’s finals and made a weekend of it.

Rod Laver is both an old man that sits and watches the tennis and a fabulous sporting arena. How cool is that? The man gets his own arena because he is such a loved icon of Australian sport. Margaret Court gets one too. In the Rod Laver there are male toilets, female toilets and ‘all gender’ toilets. We didn’t go into the Margaret Court but I’m wondering if they have the same there. And if you don’t know why I’m wondering that you could Google her name and the word ‘homophobia’.

The size of a tennis court makes the arena compact, compared to a full size (ie football) stadium. It feels really intense. Rod’s retractable roof keeps the atmosphere well contained even when open. The action feels gladiatorial, comprising bursts of action of various lengths, often short points but sometimes long rallies. As a rally gets longer the tension ramps up tangibly until a winning shot, or unforced error, releases the energy of 15,000 people. This repeated cycle of tension and release over hours is both exhilarating and exhausting.

With no particular affinity to individual players the decision of who to support becomes a geo-political minefield. The women’s final in particular was a challenge with the Belarusian pitted against the Chinese. Two great bastions of democracy and Western values! As you might imagine there were a lot more Chinese in attendance than Belarusians. We sided with the latter and were rewarded with a comfortable victory. The men’s final was easier to pick with the Italian against the Russian. Easier still was the men’s doubles final which included an Aussie playing alongside an Indian, against an Italian pair.

The Australian-Indian combo came out on top and here’s the most incredible thing, our Indian friend Rohan Bopanna won his first major tournament at the age of 43. He was tremendous.

So, there we have it. Tennis, a sport played all around the world by people of all ages, nationalities, political and religious persuasions which, for two weeks a year, turns the eyes of the world to a little place about 900km South West of Sydney. Rest assured after this experience, I’ll be lining up the laptops again in October this year to get tickets for a return in 2025.