BroncoWorld

Howdy, folks. I'm sitting in my hotel room in Denver's Grand Hyatt, looking past the office buildings to the foot of the Rockies, where a freight train loosed a melancholy blast just as the sun was coming up this morning.

Denver may not be a great tennis town (the NFL Broncos rule here!), but it's a place with a laconic, no-frills vibe. It's emblematic of the American West, I think, in that it's about space and light and room-to-breathe.

Downtown Denver lacks pretense; it seems to be unashamed of being just an all-growed-up but still rough-and-tumble rail-and-stock town. I've always loved towns that grew up along railway sidings. It's amazing what a little dressing up can do for them. Restore a few cobbled streets, spiffy up a few granaries, string a few colored lights in front of Cantinas and - poof! - you've got something 10 times better the, say, Soho, where art meets fashion to define new-age bourgeoise culture.

Besides, the massive Colorado Convention Center, with his glass skin features one of the few massive outdoors sculptures that I really like. It's an enormous (100-plus feet)grizzly bear, standing with its front paws up against the glass, inquisitively peering inside (I'll try to find a picture). Added bonus: the bear is blue - a fine, whimsical touch.

The good news coming out of tennis this morning is that The Tennis Channel has suddenly vaulted into the big time, acquiring broadcast rights to Roland Garros (the French Open). So now we'll get to see what a bunch of presumed tennis nuts will do to improve the quality and depth of coverage at the World Championships of Clay, unfettered by any of the problems faced by the nets. As I understand it, the only matches that will be off-limits (and this includes doubles as well as juniors) is the stuff NBC will have first dibs on, by contract.

For most of you, this is a meaningless sacrafice, as your hunger seems to be for matches like, oh, Santoro vs. Safin in Round 3, rather than the marquee names beating up on helpless floaters.

The big question for me is not whether or not TTC will show the "right" matches for a tennis savvy audience, but whether or not it will have both the expertise, experience and technological capacities to make the most of its carte blanche.

In any event, just think: you could get 6, 8, 10 hours of coverage from the French Open next year. Daily.
This is great news for "real" fans.

That's it for now, I've got to go sign some books. I'm traveling tomorrow but I'll post from the U.S. Open on Sunday.

Meanwhile, anybody want to give TTC a wish-list?