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IT'S all about the hotels. Really it's about the computer rankings, but where a professional tennis player rests their weary bones during a tournament says a lot more about their position in the game than any number on a website.
Take the place I'm staying in during the French Open for instance. It's three, maybe three and a half stars, on its best day.
Clean, 20 minutes away from Roland Garros and with a view of the expressway that will take you to where you can get a view of the Tour Eiffel if you can find a cab.
Rafael Nadal is one of the few with an excellent view of the Eiffel Tower. Source: AFP
Its best feature is that it's what is termed an "aparthotel", meaning that if you pull the double bed apart to form two singles and unfold the settee it can, with a very tight squeeze, accommodate four.
Slide the wall partition across between the bedroom and lounge and with a fair bit of imagination it could be considered a two-room apartment.
DAY ONE: FRENCH OPEN AT A GLANCE
Which is why, on the first morning of the tournament, the corridors, lobby, breakfast room and vestibule were filled with athletic looking people in tracksuits carrying tennis racquets.
From 8.30am the front driveway resembled the taxi rank at Central Station as Peugeot 500 courtesy cars lined up to ferry players to the stadium.
By the second morning, the numbers had noticeably thinned.
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That's the thing about this game. Golf commentators refer to Saturday, when the players position themselves for a run to the finish line on Sunday, as "Moving Day". In tennis, every day is moving day. Lose a match and you move out of your hotel, out of town and very likely, out of the country.
FEDERER LAVISHES PRAISE ON KYRGIOS
So this hotel of mine is a place where tennis players come to dream. Of staying a second night, and a third and hopefully enough nights to ensure they never have to stay anywhere like this again.
The type of player who bunks down in a room at this hotel, along with a couple of like-minded battlers or their coach or parents, is not a household name outside their own household and maybe the one next door.
Kyrgios's French Open was a lot shorter than he would have hoped. Source: AP
Aussie up-and-comer Nick Kyrgios who on Sunday played the tournament's first match on Court Suzanne-Lenglen against Canadian Milos Raonic, is a guest here along with his mother, brother and coach.
The likes of Nadal, Federer, Williams or Sharapova wouldn't venture this far from centre court for a photo shoot.
FEDERER INTO SECOND ROUND
Their management companies have booked them either into luxury apartments overlooking the Seine or five star hotels where doormen wear double breasted coats and the courtesy cars rolling up the drive are very much top of the range.
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There's nothing "aparthotel" about the George V, Four Seasons and Shangri-La (or, as the cab driver who pointed it out to me on my first night in the city described it, "Sangriller … tres expensive").
Living in a cocoon of luxury, being waited on hand and foot as if to the manor born and never having to ask for clean towels, is one of the perks of tennis success.
HEWITT HUNGRY FOR AN UPSET
In the 2004 movie Wimbledon as Peter Colt, a down-and-out English journeyman played by Paul Bettany, makes an unlikely ascent to the tournament final, he finds himself upgraded from a wardrobe-sized room at London's swanky Dorchester Hotel to a stunning suite. Although a work of fiction, it is close to the truth.
Roger Federer waves at the crowd as he leaves a training session. Source: AFP
Staying at my hotel this week are two types of players. Those, who like Colt are on their last legs and others, young and hungry like Kygrios, with their eyes on a suite at the "Sangriller".
His 6-3, 7-6, 6-3 loss to Roanic means it won't happen this tournament but at 19 years of age time in on his side. Still, one only has to see the way he plays the game — smashing each ball as if it has just insulted him and following a strict mantra of "you break my serve, I break my racquet" — to realise Kyrgios intends moving to fancier digs sooner rather than later.
Ask how he likes the aparthotel he shrugs, "I've got my own room. It's OK. It does the job".
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