Mikhail Youzhny writes message in clay to disappointed French Open fans
They say love means never having to say you're sorry. They apparently didn't mean "being held at love."
Russian tennis player Mikhail Youzhny was in the first Saturday match on the French Open's second-biggest court. He was the considerable underdog to No. 6 seed David Ferrer, but figured to give the Spaniard enough of a match to please the weekend crowd in Paris. Unless there were huge fans of Ferrer and/or masochism at Court Suzanne Lenglen, that didn't happen.
Youzhny dropped the first eight games of the match. When he finally got on the board at 1-1 on the second set, Youzhny left the changeover early and scrawled a message on clay with his foot.
"Sorri," it read.
"People in the stands may not have noticed, but I think I had to do this," Youzhny said after the match. "There was a lot of people. That's why I write 'sorry' — because I can't show them a nice game. The way we played in the beginning, it was not really interesting for people."
Youzhny went on to lose the match 6-0, 6-2, 6-2 in just over 100 minutes. It's weird that writing a conciliatory message of defeat to fans early in the second set didn't bode well for his chances the rest of the way, right?
