This past weekend we got some fresh (and quite cool, well... for us) air heading out to Surprise, Arizona for Fed Cup tennis between the USA and Argentina. With professional tennis pretty much gone from th Phoenix metro area, Todd got me tix for Christmas... and first row no less! Though we didn't know it until they arrived in the mail a few weeks ago.
For my non-tennis fan readers, Fed Cup is an international competition were countries compete in teams in a best 3 of 5 matches (4 singles, 1 doubles) over the course of 3 weekends throughout the year. This past weekend was Round 1, but actually the quarterfinals of the "World Group" which includes the countries that typically have the greatest depth of talent.
Again, to my non-tennis fan readers it may come as a surprise that the US, after Serena and Venus Williams, do not have much depth when it comes to women's tennis. As is often the case in the early rounds of Fed Cup (and also it's "brother" Davis Cup), the very top players tend to play only the later rounds of the competition. So after an injury knocked out the next highest American women's player -- ranked #35 in the world, the next highest American was 34-year old (which is ancient in tennis world) Jill Craybas, who is ranked #93 on this week's rankings.
So what really should (or could) have been a slam dunk ended up being an extremely competitive weekend of tennis... with the Americans winning the final "must win" matches to pull out the 3-2 victory. Most surprising was hopefully a young up-and-comer, 17-year old Melanie Oudin. After dropping the first set pretty easily on Day 2, I was pretty sure most everyone (including first time team captain Mary Joe Fernandez) thought the US would be out of the competition. But the youngster stormed back -- and while still pretty green -- won the match against a similarly ranked opponent (we're talking 130/140s). But it was still impressive and everyone breathed a bit easier knowing we had the #1 ranked doubles player in the world, Liezel Huber, who quite conveniently and nicely for us became a US citizen in 2007.
Here is a picture of the team introductions on Day 2:
You can check out all (don't worry there are only 15 pix!) my Fed Cup pictures over on Flickr. If you are reading this around February 10th go to this link (my "home" Flickr page)... if you are reading this at some later time, probably best to go to this Fed Cup Flickr set.
As you can see, it was all quite colorful! I was a bit thrown off by all the predominance of pink all around the court. I am probably over-thinking it, but it just seemed to be unnecessarily "girlie" ... or and I'll cross the politically incorrect line here... and say it otherwise felt like I was in the middle of a breast cancer awareness event (though indirect kudos to Susan G Komen folks -- when I see pink I do think of... am aware of... breast cancer!)
It was great to get out and see some live tennis... and also support our country at the same time!
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