[I went with "SAKK-ar-ee", btw - when in doubt, go with the way the player herself pronounces the name. Also, the chair umpire said it the same way, which made me feel much better.]
As with many industries and sectors, much of getting commentary work is about being in the right place at the right time. Yesterday, I was walking around the DAZN facility in Leeds when I saw someone I recognized but couldn't quite place, and he looked at me and did the same before asking, "Darren?" After a few quizzical looks, we realized we'd both worked together on DAZN's NFL Game of the Week in 2018 and 2019; we had a nice chat, and I managed to ask if he knew who is responsible for DAZN's KHL coverage coming out of Miami. Turns out it's the same producer (Phil) who ran our NFL show in 2018, so I dropped him a note, and he said there's certainly at least a possibility that I might get a few games during the forthcoming KHL playoffs, which I think start on Saturday. So that would be fortuitous.
Meanwhile, today I arrived very early for my pair of matches and was put in a conference room between a couple of commentary booths while I waited. I've had to wait until the fourth match on court to get up and running during my ATP 1000 coverage in London, but there I'm usually staying in an Airbnb property within walking distance of the studio, so I can just chill out at "home" and wait until the match before mine has started before heading down. But when I'm staying 25 minutes' drive away, as I have been this past week, I have to be a bit more careful. So I was in at least three hours before my matches ultimately started, thanks in no small part to the Bencic-Kudermetova match before mine (which lasted 2:41 and went to a third-set tiebreak). But that worked out incredibly well, because while I was messing around on my computer, a man and a woman walked in and asked if they could share my room with me. "Sure," I said - "I'm just waiting for my tennis commentary to start." "So are we," came the response - it was Pete Odgers, a stalwart ATP and WTA commentator with a very good English-accented voice, and Sophie Amiach, a former fringe WTA player who is Pete's color commentator this week. We started talking, and Sophie said she recognized my voice: she had been watching my call of the Pera-Garcia match the other night and really liked a stat I'd dug up (which she didn't know), namely that Pera had previously been coached by Guillermo Cañas, who has the distinction of being one of only two players - alongside Rafa Nadal - who since 2003 has defeated Roger Federer at back-to-back tournaments, having somehow managed that at both Indian Wells and Miami when Federer was #1 in the world back in 2007. She said she really liked my commentary, and Pete said, "If Sophie says you're a good commentator, then you're good." Which after my crisis of confidence last night was so encouraging to me! I showed them one of my research pages, a printed PowerPoint slide covered with match stats and personal facts and the like, and Sophie was agog (and Pete also impressed), to the point she said she'd like to hire me to prepare all of her match notes. I said I'd be happy to send both of them my templates, and Sophie said I should be careful not to give anything like that away, lest others profit from my system! She's a bit of a French firecracker...anyway, I wound up having a really lovely chat for nearly an hour with Pete about everything from traveling the tour - he was on site in Dubai last week - to Tiger Woods to Alex Ferguson haranguing soccer referees, and at the end he advised me to keep doing what I'm doing: he said it doesn't help that I'm a white, straight man, which is par for the course and nothing I didn't already know, but that if I keep working hard and working as often as I can, I'll get noticed. Tennis is a niche sport, and there aren't many of us that can do the job (as opposed to, e.g., soccer commentators being a dime a dozen), so if have a good voice and keep trying to progress, I probably will. So that was pretty awesome.
Completely buzzing from that feedback and those assessments - particularly given how little feedback I ever get from anyone about my commentary (positive or negative) - I proceeded to call what I think was probably my best single match as a commentator:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MugGwZOJxYA
It only lasted 58 minutes (Muguruza winning 6-1 6-2 - and she served for the match at 5-0 in the 2nd as well), which meant that for once I actually left plenty of my research notes unused - but I think my flow was pretty much spot on, and for once I never felt anything I said was forced. It helped that Garbiñe Muguruza played a stunningly good match and gave me loads of good material, but still, this was a great match for me to get under my belt and convince me that I really can do this job.
I wasn't quite as perfect in my second match, but I still had plenty of good moments in what - very surprisingly - turned out to be by far my longer match of the evening. The #157-ranked Tereza Martincova (pronounced "Mar-TEENT-so-vah") was three points away from defeating #20 Maria Sakkari, at 4-4 in the second-set tiebreak, after Sakkari had demolished her racquet at the end of the first set and seemed to be at war with her British coach. Even though Martincova hadn't won back-to-back main draw matches on the WTA Tour for three years, I actually foreshadowed this surprisingly well, in part because I realized that when she had previously played the #20 in the world - Caroline Garcia, at Gstaad in 2017 - she'd actually won. The conditions were hideously windy, but Martincova kept hitting these forehands into the ad court corner, over and over again, and Sakkari literally couldn't believe what she was seeing. Then Martincova tensed up with the winning line in sight, Sakkari held her nerve to take the second set, and Martincova just couldn't handle herself thereafter and got bageled in like 20 minutes in the third. It wasn't a great match, but it was compelling, and in its own way fun to commentate on, even though it means I didn't get back home until after 12:30 a.m. In any event, I'm on to Acapulco on Thursday...where I see Venus Williams just lost after failing to convert any of the 7 match points she'd held against the Slovenian qualifier Kaja Juvan. There goes probably my best chance to commentate on a match involving a Williams sister - but still, onwards and upwards.