Roland Garros 2013: The Middle Sunday

Roland Garros tends to be my weekends only Slam, meaning I'm generally only able to watch on the weekends.  France is 6 hours ahead of the US east coast so I'm at work when most of the tennis is played.  Wimbledon would present a similar problem except that it's during the summer.  Ah, summer...

You've gotta love the Internet, though.  I can still follow the tournament online.  I do miss DirecTV for the fact that one can choose between five different matches during the first week.  Relying on streaming, I can only watch whatever match NBC feels I should be watching.  Given my limited opportunities, it's not such a huge deal - yet.  If I can't get a reliable connection for next Sunday's men's final, we may need to rethink things.

Photo via TennisWorld

The biggest tournament surprise so far?  Four American women in the fourth round.  That doesn't happen very often at Majors any more, especially not on clay.  The star of the first week, by my reckoning, was Jamie Hampton, an Alabama native.  Hampton took out two seeds - Petra Kvitova (7th seed, Czech Republic) and Lucie Safarova (25th, Czech Republic) - en route to her first fourth round in a Major.