Le tennis, Federer, Nadal, Sampras, Agassi et les autres...

Fred · 16/05/10/09/51/56

À Hambourg en 2007 ou à Madrid l'an passé, Nadal pouvait avoir des excuses : à bout de force après 4 tournois victorieux en 5 semaines... Aujourd'hui Nadal est en forme, il joue peut-être moins bien qu'il y a 3 semaines mais n'est pas loin de son meilleur tennis. Fed revient fort comme si il avait joué son fénéant pendant 3 mois mais sentant le deuxième chelem arrivé, le cannibale s'est réveillé.
Bien comme en 2007, si Rafa venait à perdre, cela ne serait pas pour autant synonyme de défaite en finale contre Rodg...
10 tournois du grand chelem d'écart entre les deux quand même !!! Dingue le suisse ! À combien il était Fed au même âge que Rafa ? En même temps ils n'ont pas le même jeu (usure), Rafa n'arrivera pas à gagner 20 chelem...
Si Fed gagne Roland cette année, il va vachement penser au grand chelem ! Ca va être tendu à Wimby et pire à l'uso si il gagne Wimb.
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"Il vaut mieux savoir tout chercher que chercher à tout savoir" (P. Mendelson)

Fred · 16/05/10/19/11/05

Match pas tres plaisant pour l'instant. Ca se cherche... Un break chacun, beaucoup de fautes directes surtout coté espagnol...
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"Il vaut mieux savoir tout chercher que chercher à tout savoir" (P. Mendelson)

ProfGast · 16/05/10/19/30/15

Federer est irrégulier, plutôt mauvais, comme hier. Nadal retrouve peu à peu son coup droit.

decoturf · 16/05/10/19/52/35

Rafa va gagner... Fed n'a pas trop envie de se sortir les tripes pour le coup même s'il joue assez bien...enfin mieux que ces derniers temps... ce qui n'est pas compliqué. Nadal, un set, un break... les jeux sont faits...
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Fred · 16/05/10/20/12/00

Pas top le match, ca joue hyper tactique (presque comme tjrs) mais beaucoup de fautes je le répète sauf quelques coups sortis de nulle part (le retour revers amorti de Fed holalalala)... Les 4 revers de Nadal dans le 5eme jeu du second set sont magistraux !!!
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"Il vaut mieux savoir tout chercher que chercher à tout savoir" (P. Mendelson)

Fred · 16/05/10/20/33/18

Ca y est : ils jouent ensemble et ca donne !!!!
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"Il vaut mieux savoir tout chercher que chercher à tout savoir" (P. Mendelson)

Fred · 16/05/10/20/58/22

Fed méritait cette seconde manche. La balle de match laisse un gout amère, un peu fade aussi comme le match. C'est dommage ça aurait pu s'emballer...
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"Il vaut mieux savoir tout chercher que chercher à tout savoir" (P. Mendelson)

persus argol · Yakuza des gradins Inscrit le: 07 Mar 2010 Messages: 76

Eh bein, quand tu vois que Nadal a déjà 18 masters 1000 à 24 ans à peine çà fait peur !!

Perso je vois l'Espagnol porter ce record à 25 sans aucun problème. Etant donner la marge qu'il a sur terre battue et sachant qu'il y a 3 MS 1000 sur cette surface, cela parait vraiment envisageable.

J'ai mis toutes les mises à jour sur mon site

www.tennisgrandchelem.blogspot.com : rubrique Masters 1000

Shocked

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L'essentiel n'étant pas de briller, mais de gagner !
www.tennisgrandchelem.com

BoraBora · 18/05/10/15/45/47

Je reviens de week end prolongé et que vois-je ?!!
Il y a un tournoi à Nice ! Shocked

C'est quoi ce tournoi ?! première fois que j'en entends parler !
Enfin bref !

Sinon, vous avez vu un peu la liste des forfaits pour RG ?
J'ai l'impression qu'elle s'allonge de jour en jour : Nalbide, DelPo, Gillou, Davy, Haas, Stepanek, Karlovic...
Et c'est probablement pas fini ! What a face

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Peu m'importent mes chances, peu m'importe le temps ou ma désespérance

Fred · 19/05/10/14/38/42

Fred · 22/05/10/21/47/35

Pas sur finalement que verdasco se soit rassurer... Même pas compris qu'il soit allé à Nice. Gasquet - Murray au premier tour de Roland, ca va donner...
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"Il vaut mieux savoir tout chercher que chercher à tout savoir" (P. Mendelson)

decoturf · 23/05/10/11/55/24

C'est parti pour Roland les cocos Geek

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James227 · petite frappe Inscrit le: 02 Déc 2025 Messages: 16

I manage a diner. Not one of those shiny, corporate places with a logo and a drive-thru and employees who have to wear visors. I mean a real diner, the kind that’s been in the same spot since 1972, with cracked vinyl booths and a grill that’s seasoned with forty years of bacon grease and a regular crowd that treats the place like an extension of their own living rooms. I’ve been there for eleven years, started as a dishwasher when I was nineteen, worked my way up to manager, and somewhere along the way I stopped being the kid who worked at the diner and became the guy who ran it. It’s not glamorous. I don’t make a ton of money. But I know every crack in the floor tiles, I know which coffee pot brews the strongest batch, and I know the names of every regular who walks through that door. That’s more than a lot of people have. That’s a community.

The thing about running a diner is that you see people at their most honest. Not their best, necessarily, but their most honest. You see the truck driver at 4 AM who hasn’t slept in twenty hours and just needs eggs and silence. You see the couple who’ve been married for fifty years and still hold hands over the table. You see the kid who just bombed a final exam and is trying to figure out how to tell his parents. And sometimes, on the late shift when it’s just me and the cook and the ghost of all the conversations that have happened in those booths, you see yourself. You see the version of you that exists when nobody’s watching, when the mask comes off and you’re just a person in a quiet room with a cup of coffee and a lot of thoughts you’d rather not have.

My daughter, she’s ten now, and she lives with her mom about three hours away. I get her every other weekend and for two weeks in the summer, and I spend the rest of my time trying to figure out how to be a good father from a distance. I send money I don’t really have, I call every night even when she doesn’t want to talk, and I drive down for school plays and parent-teacher conferences and anything else that makes me feel like I’m still part of her life. It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough. But it’s what I’ve got, and I’ve learned to make peace with that. Mostly. Some nights, after the last customer leaves and the cook goes home and it’s just me counting the register and wiping down the counters, the weight of it settles on my shoulders like a wet blanket. I miss her. I miss coming home to a house that wasn’t just me. I miss the version of my life where I didn’t have to schedule my daughter in two-week increments.

It was on one of those nights, a Tuesday in March when the rain was coming down so hard I could hear it pounding on the roof even over the exhaust fan, that I first opened my phone and started looking for something to do. I’d finished my closing duties, the register was balanced to the penny, and I was sitting in my usual booth—the corner one by the window, the one with the view of the street—waiting for the rain to let up before I walked to my car. I’d been scrolling through social media, looking at pictures of my daughter that her mom had posted, feeling that familiar ache in my chest, when I saw an ad that looked like a video game. It wasn’t the flashing, desperate kind of ad you usually see. It was clean, almost elegant, and something about it made me curious. I clicked on it without thinking, and then I sat there in the dim light of the diner, the rain streaking down the window, and I read through the site for a good twenty minutes before I did anything else.

I’d never gambled before. Not once. My dad had a problem when I was a kid, nothing catastrophic but enough that I remember my mom crying over the checkbook a few times, and I’d sworn off the whole thing as a matter of principle. But this didn’t feel like that. This felt like a game. A game with rules I could learn, with patterns I could recognize, with a pace that I could control. And maybe I was just tired of being careful. Tired of counting pennies and scheduling weekends and always, always doing the responsible thing. I went through the Vavada registration process with the same careful attention I’d use to fill out a supply order, double-checking everything, making sure I understood what I was agreeing to. I put in forty dollars, which was what I’d budgeted for a new pair of non-slip shoes that I didn’t strictly need yet, and I started playing.

I didn’t win that night. I played for about an hour, lost most of the forty, and walked to my car in the rain feeling lighter than I’d felt in weeks. Not because of the money, obviously, but because for that hour, I hadn’t been thinking about the distance between me and my daughter. I hadn’t been counting the days until her next visit. I’d just been playing a game, making small decisions, watching the reels spin and the numbers change. It was the first time in months that my brain had shut up for more than five minutes, and I almost cried in the car because I didn’t realize how loud the silence had gotten until I found something that could turn it off.

I started playing regularly after that. Always at the diner, after closing, sitting in the corner booth with a cup of coffee and the rain on the window. There was something about that space, that time of night, that made it feel like a different world. The diner was mine, in those hours. Not the chaos of the lunch rush, not the endless questions from customers and staff, just me and the hum of the refrigerators and the soft glow of my phone. I’d do my Vavada registration login—by then it was just muscle memory, the same way I knew how to fire up the espresso machine without thinking—and I’d play for an hour, sometimes two, until I was tired enough to go home and actually sleep. I wasn’t chasing big wins. I was chasing quiet. And the quiet came, night after night, in a way it never did when I went straight home to my empty apartment and sat on my couch with the TV on for background noise.

The first win came about a month in. I’d been playing a game with a space theme, something about galaxies and warp drives, and I hit a bonus round that I didn’t even realize was a bonus round until the numbers started climbing. I watched my balance go from sixty dollars to two hundred, then to eight hundred, then to forty-seven hundred dollars. I set my phone down on the table, face down, and I sat there in the booth with my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. The diner was dark except for the light over the grill and the streetlights outside, and I was completely alone, and I had no idea what to do with what had just happened. I picked the phone back up, cashed out, and then I just sat there for a long time, watching the rain, thinking about my daughter, thinking about the forty-seven hundred dollars that I hadn’t earned and hadn’t expected and didn’t know what to do with.

I used part of it to buy my daughter a new bed. She’d been sleeping on the same twin mattress since she was five, and her mom couldn’t afford to replace it, and I couldn’t either, not with everything else I was paying for. I called her mom the next morning and told her I wanted to send some money for a bedroom set, and she was quiet for a long time before she said okay. I drove down that weekend and put the bed together while my daughter sat on the floor and handed me screws and told me about her friends and her teacher and the book she was reading. I watched her climb into that new bed that night, watched her pull the covers up to her chin, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I felt like I’d given her something that mattered. Not just the bed, but the feeling that her dad could still show up, could still provide, could still be someone she could count on.

I kept playing, but I made rules. The same rules I use to run the diner, really. I set a budget, I stuck to it, and I never played when I was tired or stressed or emotional. I played because I enjoyed it, because it gave me something that was mine, because the corner booth at 2 AM had become a sacred space, a place where I could be someone other than the manager, the ex-husband, the father who lived three hours away. I’d go through my Vavada registration process—or rather, just the login part, since the registration was long behind me—and I’d settle into the booth with my coffee and my phone and the sound of the rain, and I’d let the rest of the world fall away.

The second big win came on a night when I almost didn’t play. I was tired, my feet hurt, and I had to be up early to open the next day because the morning cook had called in sick. But I was already in the booth, already had the coffee, and something told me to just play for a few minutes. I put in fifty dollars, played a game I’d never tried before, and hit a progressive jackpot on my fourth spin. Twelve thousand dollars. I stared at the screen for so long that my phone dimmed and then went dark, and I had to unlock it and stare at it again to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. I didn’t cash out immediately that time. I sat with it for a while, letting it be real, letting myself feel something other than tired and sore and lonely. I cashed out eventually, and then I drove home through streets that were finally dry, and I slept better than I’d slept in years.

I used that money to do something I’d been wanting to do since my daughter was born. I started a college fund. Not a huge one, not enough to pay for four years at a private school, but a real account with her name on it, something that would grow, something that would be there when she needed it. I put the whole twelve thousand in, and then I added a little every month from my regular paychecks, and I told her mom about it on the phone one night, and she cried. Not the bad kind of crying. The kind where you realize that the person you used to love is still in there somewhere, still trying, still showing up even when it’s hard.

I still manage the diner. I still sit in the corner booth after closing, sometimes with my phone, sometimes just with my coffee and my thoughts. I still do my Vavada registration login on nights when the quiet is too loud and I need something to focus on that isn’t the distance between me and my daughter. I don’t win big anymore, not really, but I don’t need to. I’ve got a college fund with her name on it. I’ve got a new bed in her room that I put together with my own hands. I’ve got a corner booth that knows all my secrets and a daughter who knows that no matter how far away I am, I’m still showing up. The rain still falls on that window some nights, and I still sit there with my coffee and my phone, and I think about how sometimes the things you find when you’re not looking are the things you needed all along.