Paddle Tennis Sans Chemise/Got to Be Loving Gael Monfils

Managed to catch about a set's worth of the epic Gael Monfils-Daryl Lemon paddle tennis final at the Tennis Channel Open in Vegas, which was played a few weeks back.

Upshot: Monfils, a 19-year-old French kid who learned to play paddle tennis, like, two days before the tournament started, not only knocked off Scott Freeman—who bills himself (rightly, it would seem) as the greatest paddle tennis player in history—but ultimately got to the final and beat Lemon in straight sets.

Paddle tennis is an odd sport. It's played—natch—with a perforated wooden or wood-composite paddle, sort of like a big, thick, ping pong paddle. The ball looks like a regular tennis ball, but it's dead. The court is much smaller than the standard tennis court, the net is lower, the players serve underhanded, they rush the net constantly, and the whole scene tends to pretty raucous. The center of paddle tennis culture in America is Venice Beach. Makes sense as evidently many PT pros like to compete shirtless. I would wager that there's a thriving, er...wagering culture around the sport.

Anyway, either Monfils is the greatest paddle tennis prodigy to have ever emerged—he's now the Number One paddle tennis player in the country, more by common assent than by ranking—or paddle tennis just isn't that hard to get good at. This is encouraging, as when I lived in New York (the other place, besides Venice Beach, where paddle tennis is widely played), I thought about taking up the game. There were some courts near a place where I was thinking about living.

Never did, but maybe now...

Planning to drive over to Venice one of these days and check it all out. Stay tuned for reports.