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Our Precious Tickets

If you are any sort of tennis fan, or even a sports fan, you must have heard of Roland Garros. There are four great tennis matches each year: the opens. Two are simply named, the Australian Open which begins the year in January and the US Open which ends the open season in September. The other two are known by distinctive monikers: Wimbledon and Roland Garros. The first is named for the stadium site on the north of London and held in early July; the second is named — did you know this — for a French hero of World War I and held in late May.

To get seats to any of these matches is a struggle. They are almost always — strike that; always — sold out. As with any major sporting event these days, tickets go on sale by mail and internet long before the event. While in the USA we'd been to the Open several times, getting our tickets by mail. That was not possible for us in Paris because by the time we knew that we were coming the advance sale was over.

A month after we were in Paris we suddenly were reminded that Roland Garros was coming up. We made some inquiries and found that in-person tickets would go on sale a week before the matches. All we had to do was go to the grounds, wait in line, and, if we were lucky, there would be a few seats left.

Fine. Let's do it. But where is Roland Garros? Sounds like a simple question but it took us a long time to get an answer. We knew vaguely that it was in the Bois de Bologne, but that is a big park. A really big park. And we had only been on the periphery.

We solved the problem in the manner we usually do in foreign countries: A week before tickets went on sale we took a bus to as close as we could guess the grounds were. Alighting, we started asking. It is amazing, but you can be within blocks of a famous place — we've asked such questions in Moscow and New York and London — and people will not know. "I'm not from around here" (there ought to be a law requiring everybody on the streets to be "from around here.") or "Gee, I'm not into sports/nightlife/museums/etc." (there ought to be a law requiring everbody to be into everything).

The climax of this story is that we did find the stadium. There we got detailed instruction on hours and prices of ticket sales. A week later we were back, unfortunately at 8:00 a.m rather than our planned 7:30 a.m. By that time we were way back in the line. The first hour waiting for sales to start went by quickly. Then the time began to drag as the line centimetered forward. (If it had inched forward that would have been 2.54 times as fast.)

Victory: we got to the front of the line and there were tickets left. We happily bought tickets for the outer courts for the first two days of the tournament. That way we'd get to see a variety of players.

Roland Garros - French Open

Roland Garros - French Open

Roland Garros - French Open

A week later we were back. Getting there was easy. But to our surprise we still had lines to wait in. There were so few ticket takers and more importantly security guards to check people's backpacks that we needed more than an our after the gates opened to get in. We were both carrying backpacks with the essential bottles of water and picnic food for what we expected (and was) to be a long day.

But once in we had a great time. Jan is truly the tennis fan but Gerry enjoys it too. We saw a few familiar names and lots of new players.

For the next ten days we spent several hours a day at home watching the subsequent rounds. The men's final was quite an exciting match, with a young Spaniard named Nidal the winner. We were rather suprised to learn that months later the loser, the Argentinian Mariano Puerta, was disqualified for having failed a drugs test taken just after the match.