Roland Garros Crisis Center, Day 1

[I am away from the office until Tues., May 29th, but will provide you with a Crisis Center each day; The Mod Squad may choose to kick off the CC discussions each day until I am back on duty, with full coverage starting Tuesday in New York and on Sunday, June 3, from Paris. Feel free to comment on the happenings in Paris below, but please post Off-Topic (non-French Open related) material at the most recent The Locker Room* post - PB]*

I want to return to a tradition I abandoned - and some of you may remember (Ruthie? TaiC? Ptenisnet?)  - from the early days of this weblog, which is publishing a passage I love from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt. I know we have a lot of fun with - and at the expense of - the pro players here at this site, but every one of them has gone to places that we - fans, pundits, armchair psychologists and KADs - will never experience or know. That we can be so glib about the struggles of, say, Nikolay Davydenko, or Elena Dementieva, and focus on what they haven't achieved, instead of how much great racquet work they have done, is both ironic and mortifying. So I just want to tip my hat to all the players entered at Roland Garros, for they all are, at some level, like Roosevelt's iconic Man in the Arena.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat

And don't worry, Kolya, Ptenisnet has your back. He's always got your back.