What does a tennis reporter think as he is about to head over to the French Open after attending the event more than 30 times.
Being a fairly unaggressive guy (except on the tennis court), I can recall my first visit and trying to push toward the counter in the media cafe at Roland Garros to order a sandwich. Soon, I wound up farther back than when I started. People had shoved their way in front of me, or reached over me, to order their ham-and-cheese baguettes.
You quickly learn to act like the natives and do your own shoving - it's basically survival.
Two of my favourite French Open memories involve Gerard Du Peloux, an absent-minded professor type who wrote for Le Figaro and was also in charge of the press at Roland Garros.
In 1987 in Paris, I met a charming young woman from Germany who had a French mother and a German father.
By then, I'd been to the tournament enough times to know how to approach Du Peloux for a favour. I wanted to get the German woman in for the final between Ivan Lendl and Mats Wilander. After a quick think, I realized I would be wise - after all we were in France - to play the romance card. I went up to Du Peloux the day of the final and told him all about how I'd met this charming woman and really hoped she might be able to get in to see the match. There was a pause while I worried I might be dismissed out of hand, but soon he was instructing me to wait until the final was about 15 minutes old and then come and see him. Sure enough, I did that and he escorted us through the entrance to the press seats and told us to sit near the top. It was really fun watching such a great match-up - both players had won the French Open twice - despite rather overcast and drizzly conditions. Lendl won in four long sets, which was a good thing. That was the closest, in all my years of going to the French Open, that a final came to having to be postponed. Luckily, Lendl finished it off in dreary conditions and encroaching darkness. I recall a few bold swing volley winners at crucial moments that helped put away Wilander, and insure that we didn't have to come back the next day.
The other story also involves Du Peloux. A good friend at the International Herald Tribune was covering Roland Garros in the early 1980s and was pressured by a higher up at his office to get highly-coveted tickets for a semi-final or final match. He went up to Du Peloux with great trepidation and described his dilemma. Again, good old Gerard came through - assuring the reporter he'd get him the tickets and casually saying to him in French, "je suis là pour ça (that's why I'm here)." What a sigh of relief for my friend, and a reminder of how accommodating the French can be if approached in the right manner.
A final memory involves an old - at least he was then - British journalist named Frank Rostron. When I recently googled his name, the only Frank Rostron that came up was a shirt-maker.
Frank Rostron, the journalist, was persistent, scoop-orientated London reporter. One of the best stories about him was that he once got into the ring with Primo Carnera, the Italian boxer who became the unlikely heavyweight champion of the world in 1933.
Rostron, according to legend, got a little too aggressive with Carnera and the big Italian let him have a few solid punches.
I recall one night, more than 30 years ago when Rostron was getting quite creaky, I carried his rather heavy typewriter to his hotel for him along the avenue de la Porte d'Auteuil, which along runs past the tennis grounds.
A final story about Rostron will strike a familiar chord with any reporter trying to follow the busy day-long action at a tennis tournament while still managing to get his or her copy in before deadline. He once famously declared, probably when he was questioned about why he wasn't in Centre Court at Wimbledon following a particular match, "I'm not paid to watch tennis, I'm paid to write about it."