I want to begin by saying that the Madrid Open has, by far, the worst tennis website in the world.  From the annoying Flash intro which loads slowly and plays music, to its practically unusable webpage (www.madrid-open.com) where you can’t find anything of any value.  The menu choices light up, but don’t have submenus.  This is what happens when each tournament site wants to hire their own web folks and some prefer to be flashy (forgive the pun) over usable.

And why can’t these websites produce a draw that isn’t on PDF?  Is that so hard to do?

Recently, Tennis Channel showed the finals of Estoril.  If they had to do it all over again, I think they might have preferred showing the finals of Belgrade with Americans, Querrey and Isner, in the finals.  However, they had no idea that Querrey and Isner would make the finals of a clay event, and they can’t make deals the night before the telecast.  And given that Roger Federer was in Estoril, who could bet against him making the finals.

Except those that chose to skip the finals avoided a bit of a treat.  In the US, Andy Roddick has enjoyed a mini-resurgence of sorts.  We no longer have players like McEnroe and Connors that would routinely contend for number 1 and Slams.  We don’t have Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi.  What we have is Andy Roddick and lately we’ve begun to appreciate him more.

But, what about a country like Portugal.  Once upon a time, circa the days of the Spanish Armada, Portugal was a world power.  They were contenders with Spain as one of the most powerful European nations.  People are more familiar with Portuguese with countries like Brazil more than the originator of the language.  And along with this decline is a lack of notable players to come out of Portugal.  Spain and France are probably the top two tennis nations, producing scads of very good players.

Yet, Portugal does, at the very least, hold a tournament, one that Roger Federer has chosen to play in years past.  Their own players struggle to do well in their national tournament.  But there was a perfect storm of sorts.  In particular, Monfils and Ljubicic opted not to play Estoril and, horror of horrors, Federer lost to Montanes.  This gave 25 year old Frederico Gil a chance to win the tournament, and a boisterous audience who wanted to support their man.

For a while, it seemed Gil would lose to the superior player.  Montanes won the first set, 6-2, and was up a break, serving for the match, and had match points.  Yet, Gil would find ways to win points, sneaking into net, or playing a good rally, and not only break serve, but push it into a tiebreak.  After winning the tiebreak, Gil opened the third set in the best way possible.  He broke twice off the bat, and was up 3-0.  If he only had a big serve, he might have rolled his way to a 6-3 win, but instead Montanes broke back to 3-1 and eventually broke back to even the match, and then broke again to take the match 7-5.

Up til that point, the crowd was incredulous at Gil’s chance to win.  OK, he wasn’t playing Roger Federer, but if he had won the title, it would have been the first time a Portuguese man had won an ATP title.  This is how difficult it’s been for the Portuguese to win.  And Gil came oh-so-close.  Montanes isn’t like the 3rd or 4th best Spaniard.  He’s the 7th best.  To be fair, at 33 in the world, 7th best shows you the strength of Spanish tennis.  In particular, Nadal, Verdasco, Ferrer, Ferrero, Robredo, and Lopez are head of him, and he’s just barely ahead of Almagro.

Frederico Gil was 143 when the tournament started.  He’d be so totally off the radar in Spanish tennis, but is the best Portuguese player, and he nearly pulled the upset.  When most of us seem to only care about a player if his rankings are in the single digits, who complain there are too many tournaments, they fail to see small stories like this, where a guy becomes a hero in his own country.