lively in Rome
TENNIS: Jon Swift
THERE is, provided you are not a tennis player, something remarkably special about Rome. The city lives. This vibrancy in the very air you breathe in the Italian capital is in sharp contrast to the stadium where the nation plays its tennis.
The Foro Italico is as dead as any of the species we are told incessantly that just being alive on this planet is helping to wipe out.
But, in truly perverse Italian style, the local tennis fans celebrate the long-ago passing of the venue’s clay surface as they do everything, endowing the proceedings with the very flavour of zestful life itself.
Playing at the Foro Italico — or, indeed, even viewing the proceedings — is a long way from the structured Englishness of Beckenham and Wimbledon, where unaccustomed sunburn and oddly coloured club ties rule. It is not even distantly related to the Gallic indifference of Roland Garros, where the crowds suddenly thin if the match is not to their liking, regardless of what has been shelled out in francs for a centre court seat.
The Italian tennis fan has more of an affinity with the men on the soccer terraces than those who crowd the baselines in the rest of the world. Perhaps this is the last vestige of the frenzy which greeted the unfortunates who starred in the Circus Maximus. But then again, perhaps it has more to do with in-bred Latin effervescence than a latent longing for the days when the scoreline read: “Lions 10, Christians 0.”
It is into this atmosphere the South African Davis Cup team venture over the coming Easter weekend in their quest to go beyond the Italians and the world group second round of one of the sporting world’s premier team competitions.
Wayne Ferreira, Gary Muller, Marcos Ondruska, John-Laffnie de Jager and new boy Ellis Ferreira — at present tuning up in the laid-back heat of Miami — have something coming in the way of a culture shock.
Especially with the memory of the low-key support of South African crowds in the tie against Austria, at first on grass courts of the Wanderers and then moving to the muted mumble from the bleachers in the Standard Bank Arena after the hasty switch of venues necessitated by the in-clemency of the weather.
It will be a massive change. Even for the veterans of Rome like Wayne Ferreira and Gary Muller. For this time there will be the fervour of nationalism added to the vocal and partisan Italian crowd.
It is an almost physical surge off the stands that Italy’s non-playing captain Adriano Panatta will remember and no doubt encourage his team to use to their advantage in exactly the way Panatta himself did in his heyday.
The Italian team — Renzo Furlan, Andrea Gaudenzi, Stefano Pesconsolido and Diego Nargiso — are hardly household names in world tennis.
But then the Italians were good enough to beat Russia in the opening world group round, something the South Africans could not manage in Moscow during the last Davis Cup.
Given the lifeless clay surface and the super- heated partisanship of the Italian crowd, this is not an easy tie, no matter how you carve up the singles and doubles or weight the ATP points of the individual players.
Rome is always a very different proposition. And among Davis Cup players, only the ill- considered go out of their way to throw the traditional coins in the Trevi fountain. For most, a return to the Eternal City is the last thing on their minds.