A showman on any stage

By Ron Kantowski

Thursday, June 4, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Unlike John McEnroe or Jimmy Connors, the Tennis Channel Open, which in 2006 marked the return of professional tennis to Las Vegas, went away quietly. Like an old wooden racket with a broken string, the majority of us hardly missed it.

Its legacy was high winds and a Gael force.

The Tennis Channel Open at the Darling Memorial Tennis Center was the first time I saw the wind pick up and blow away a manhole cover. It also was my introduction to Gael Monfils, a young pro from France. He didn’t look like a typical Frenchman. For starters, he wasn’t smoking a cigarette or watching old Jerry Lewis movies on a portable DVD player. He sported an Afro. He had a big upper body and big legs and moved like a panther. A very large panther.

Only he wasn’t playing championship tennis on center court. He was playing something called paddle tennis on one of the auxiliary courts. Like court 19 or something.

Paddle tennis is like Nerf tennis, without the Nerf. The court is smaller, the net is lower. The racket is solid, without strings. The ball is depressurized, so it doesn’t travel as far. But the game is lightning fast. It’s like pinball on a hard court.

Monfils had the quickest flipper in Las Vegas that week.

Although paddle tennis has been around for more than a century, I had never seen it played until that day.

Neither, I think, had Monfils. Somebody said he was walking by court 19, saw the paddle tennis guys paddling away and said to himself, “this looks like fun.”

They penciled him into the draw at the last minute. Monfils was matched against Scott Freedman, the 19-time paddle tennis world champion who had written a book called “Paddle Tennis and Tennis: Anyone Can Play.”

Gael Monfils sure could play. He beat Freedman, the best paddle tennis player in the world, in the first round.

As it turned out, Monfils won all the rounds.

It wasn’t so much that he won, but how he won. Monfils didn’t impress the crowd. He entertained it. He punctuated almost every winning point by pumping his fists in the air and dancing. After the few points he lost, he danced some more. I’m not sure what his opponents thought of his antics, but the crowd around court No. 19 loved it. You could tell from the laughter.

One such outburst drew me away from a riveting air hockey match I was watching behind center court. (I’m not exactly sure how air hockey fit into the “Tennispalooza” concept of the Tennis Channel Open, but darned if I didn’t check it out.)

“What just happened?” I asked upon arriving at Court 19, elbowing my way past a bunch of guys named Tad.

“See that Monfils guy over there? He just stood on his head.”

It wasn’t long before the racket tennis players were strolling over to Court 19 to catch a glimpse of that Monfils guy.

Lleyton Hewitt checked him out. So did James Blake, the eventual champion of the real tennis tournament. Blake told reporters he had never seen a kid have so much fun playing tennis, or at least this miniature version of it.

That was three years ago.

On Tuesday I was at the gym, where they were showing French Open highlights on the TV sets mounted above the treadmills. The sound was turned down but it appeared Andy Roddick was getting whipped by some muscular guy wearing a sleeveless yellow shirt, because every time the camera showed Roddick, he had this pained expression on his face, and every time the camera showed the guy in the yellow shirt, he was smiling and laughing and pumping his fists in the air much to the delight of Roland Garros crowd.

Gael Monfils won in straight sets.

I’m not sure if he stood on his head.