Watching a blowout in an individual sport is a far different experience than when it’s a team sport.
I had never seen high-level tennis in person before. But when I went to see a night session at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, I was struck by the excitement, the speed, and the overwhelming discomfort of watching a blowout in an individual sport.
We got tickets well in advance for the final Monday of the Australian Open, long before we knew who was competing. That’s not announced until the evening of the night before, which means you’re rolling the dice as to which players you’ll see. Still, the stars come out at night, and that was the case for us.
We drew No. 2 seed Iga Swiatek. And facing her, we got the world’s No. 128 player, Eva Lys, who made it into the tournament as a “Lucky Loser,” which means she lost in the qualifiers but made it in when the No. 13 player withdrew minutes before her match. It was a Cinderella run for the young German, but that ended against Swiatek.
I’ve seen plenty of blowouts, as a longtime fan of Cal football, the San Francisco Giants, and the pre-Steph Curry Golden State Warriors. It’s rough to watch a team get their doors blown off by a much more talented opponent. But it’s much more uncomfortable to see that happen to an individual.
Swiatek won the first set, 6-0, in a non-battle that didn’t even last half an hour. People were still finding their seats when she broke Lys’ serve for the third time. By the second set, the crowd was urging on Lys like an overmatched Little Leaguer. When she actually won a game, the crowd gave her an ovation that almost embarrassed her. On a team, you can spread the responsibility for getting trounced, but in tennis, the beating is relentless.
Watching high-level tennis is like sitting close to the bullpen. You can see the radar gun numbers on a serve and watch rallies on TV, but seeing the speed, the ball spin, and the impossible shots that just barely touch the line really brings it home. If football is a game of inches, then tennis is a game of millimeters.
We saw that again when No. 8 Alex de Minaur, playing in front of his home Australian crowd, went up against unseeded 20-year-old American Alex Michelsen. He also lost his first set 6-0, but the experience was far rowdier.
When there’s an Australian playing in front of an Australian crowd, there’s lots of singing. They’re mostly about Australia. The chants of “Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy! Oy! Oy! Oy!” were constant and relentless, to the point where it periodically threw off de Minaur before he served. To avoid the confusion between two players named Alex, de Minaur was called “Demon.” (It was impossible to tell in the first match if fans were saying, “Go Iga” or “Go Eva.”)
It did make me think that Giants games could use more and rowdier songs. On the flip side, why hasn’t anyone taught Aussies, “Dah-dah-dah-DAH-dah-DAH, charge”? Ball boys and girls are far more disciplined than bat boys and bat girls, though it’s almost uncomfortably militaristic.
Michelsen rallied to force a second-set tiebreak, gaining the grudging support of some of the crowd, but he couldn’t bring it home. It was like watching a baseball game where half of at-bats were Shohei Ohtani hitting off Ross Stripling, and the other half were Ross Stripling hitting against Shohei Ohtani. It was brutal.
But at the same time, Lys made $250K for getting that far, which was more than 25% of her career earnings before 2025. It was easier to think of her as a small college who got a big payday to come to Alabama and lose by 40 points to the Crimson Tide. Sure, it’s emotionally devastating, but she made a lot of money and got to be on TV.
What else could baseball learn from tennis? There’s a serve clock that keeps things moving, much like a pitch clock. If the ball goes into the stands, fans don’t get to keep it, But at least at Grand Slams, they’ve automated line calls. No one argues calls, though sometimes people break rackets anyway. The most important part is there’s no Angel Hernandez of chair umpires who is making up their own “tennis court zone” for the purpose of calls.
As for other Australian sports, I did not manage to figure out the rules of rugby union, or how it differs from rugby league. It wasn’t Australian rules football season yet, but I guarantee that I wouldn’t understand those rules either.