A Tennis Binge

My birthday present this year was a day of tennis. My first, ever, exposure to professional tennis up close and live, instead of on the tennis channel. Chris and I headed up to Toronto to see the quarter finals of the Rogers Cup. (Sort of like the US Open, only in Canada, eh?)

Chris purchased us gold level, fancy shmancy seats for the evening session matches, but at the last minute we decided we wanted to go up early and spend the day wandering the festivities to watch anything and everything. So, about twelve hours before we were going to leave we bought the cheap seats to the matinee session.

We arrived at the Rogers Cup at 10 am. It was like nirvana for a tennis player. All tennis, all the time. After seeing a few doubles matches and watching players warm up on courts, we headed to Centre Court to watch Nadal. Our economy level seats were one row up from the top. This picture gives you a good idea of where we sat.

The Nadal match had just started when a Rogers Cup official sat down next to us, smiled and asked us if we were enjoying ourselves. We smiled hesitantly and assured her we were. (I also convinced myself that we had someone offended someone, somewhere and we were about to get thrown out of the stadium. )

She smiled at us again and asked if we liked our seats. Huh. Sure, we said. The seats are fine. (Please don't kick us out. It's my birthday and all.)

She waited a beat and then asked with an even bigger grin, "Would you like even better seats?"

At our confused expressions, the official explained that she got to pick a few people out of the crowd, at random, to move up to the "Rogers Cup Fan Zone" in like the tenth row. Were we interested?

Hells yes, we were interested. And so we jogged down, down, and well, down to the sublime seats giggling all the way, feeling like that this could not possibly be happening to us. This is the sort of thing that happens to the people sitting in front of us, but us, never.

I could make out every expression on Nadal's sweet face. The seats were perfect. And I was, oh so happy.

After the Nadal match, we rushed over to the Grandstand, a smaller court at the Cup. There, we watched two doubles matches in the second row, so close I could hear the ball whizzing back and forth as it was hit at impossibly fast speeds.

The doubles was some of our favorite moments of the day. We saw the Bryan Brothers and Monfils (one of my personal favorites.) The ball and movement was so fast and the action so intense, it was just incredible.

After the two doubles matches, we hustled back to Centre Court for the Federer match. As we walked to our seats, a women dressed in a United Arab Emirates uniform stopped Chris, smiled and said, "Hi, I work for United Arab Emirates airline and I am randomly selecting ten people from the crowd to come out on Centre Court for a chance to win an all expenses paid trip to Dubai."

Yep. We really should have run out after the match and bought ourselves a lottery ticket. As it was, Chris looked at me aghast as I giggled uncontrollably.

And this is how my husband got himself the opportunity to walk through the players tunnel, see famous tennis players up close and stand next to Federer's wife. He also walked out onto Centre Court and had his handsome face up on the giant jumbotron.

It was a bit surreal.

(This is Chris lined up with the other contestants waiting to find out who won the trip to Dubai. I also took a picture of his face on the jumbotron, but unfortunately with the tricky night lighting, it didn't turn out.)

We didn't win the trip to Dubai, but we did take home a lovely parting gift, a nice duffel bag and a giant toy plane. And of course, one hell of a story.

At the end of the day, we saw almost all the top players play live. From Federer, Nadal, Murray, Djokovic, the Bryan Brothers, Monfils - it is all incredible and a perfect birthday present for the tennis fan.