French Open Federer selfie-seeker exposes the fragile security at major tennis events
PARIS – Anything for a selfie, apparently.
It’s hard to assess exactly what a person is thinking when they jump onto centre court at a Grand Slam just to try to get a selfie with the great Roger Federer.
First of all, you KNOW it won’t end well, regardless. Secondly, you might not even get the selfie.
This kid decided this was the greatest idea he was going to have all week – and he was guaranteed to make it on TV and YouTube instantaneously. So he jumped onto Court Philippe Chatrier, coming up from behind and startling poor Federer (who had just won his first-round match).
It took far too long for the security to arrive; by that time, the kid was already ready to leave. And Federer – needless to say – was really PO’d.
“I'm not happy about it. Obviously not one second I'm happy about it. It happened yesterday in the practice, too. It's just a kid, but then three more kids came. And today on centre court where you would think this is a place where nobody can come on, just wanders on and nothing happens,” Federer said in his press conference.
“Normally I only speak on behalf of myself, but in this situation I think I can speak on behalf of all the players, that that's where you do your job, that's where you want to feel safe. And so clearly I'm not happy about it.
Tournament director Gilbert Ysern said he wouldn’t react to Federer’s comments about the incident, but about what happened.
“What he said makes sense; he had every reason to be unhappy,” Ysern said. “In some ways, it’s not the end of the world. We shouldn’t make too much out of it. But when you organize events like this, when it happens, it demonstrates that we, the organization, made a mistake. It’s up to us to correct it so it doesn’t happen again.”
The problem with that notion, of course, is that this isn’t the first time. And it has “happened again”.
Saturday, practicing on a smaller, outside court during Kids Day, Federer had a similar issue with one kid who did the same thing – and that quickly turned into three kids.
That was a little different; with so many kids and players on so many courts compared to the supposedly tightly controlled conditions on Court Philippe Chatrier.
But an even worse incident involving Federer occurred in 2009, early in his final against Robin Soderling.
This man got far too much solo time with the Swiss star, even tying to put a joker’s cap on his head, before the security finally took care of him. It really shook Federer up.
At the U.S. Open a few months later, a major Rafael Nadal fan got onto the court somehow, as Nadal was changing his shirt, and tried to kiss him.
All of this comes more than 20 years after the most famous on-court incident of all, the stabbing involving a deranged Steffi Graf fan and Monica Seles, who was taking over from Graf as the dominant player in the world – much to the distress of unemployed lathe operator Gunther Parsche.
“After that incident, the security in tennis stadiums was reviewed in all the tournaments around the world. Since then, we’ve been at a much higher level of security than before the Monica Seles affair,” Ysern said. “There’s no need for us to change the plan for the rest of the tournament because of what happened today, because the plan isn’t the issue; we have the personnel we need on the courts, in sufficient numbers. They are trained, briefed and prepared.
“We’re talking about an error in judgment of a person on the court, who got caught not being sufficiently vigilant,” Ysern added. “Again, there was no aggressive demeanour; this had nothing to do with that happened during the final in 2009, or the security personal would have been quicker to intervene.”
The bigger issue, of course, is that a Grand Slam tennis tournament, with so many thousands of people and so many tennis courts and nearly all of them allowing the wandering fans close-up access to their favourites, is just a bad incident waiting to happen.
So much can potentially go wrong, it’s amazing more hasn’t gone wrong.
“We live in a civilization gone crazy these days. We’re a sport that doesn’t have barbed wire around the courts, there’s no physical separation – which isn’t fun, visual or otherwise, around a tennis court,” Ysern said. “Obviously we have a duty to ensure total serenity for the players on the court, because they must know they are completely safe.”
Ysern, a chair umpire in a former life, said this easy access to the players was non-existent in his day, when the players were much more protected and you couldn’t approach them.
That seems ironic, because life certainly has changed. Fans don’t ask for autographs – or, the latest fan moment, the selfie – they demand them. For many, it’s almost like a game, a “get”. And because of social media, many somehow feel “close” to their favourite players even though they’ve never met them or even spoken to them.
"Well, they do ask a lot. Sometimes they are very close and very much into your face. Nowadays it's all about selfies. It's not even about autographs anymore," Ana Ivanovic said. "It's a nice way to interact with fans, but sometimes can be a little bit overwhelming."
On Saturday, some kids came up to ask for an autograph and a selfie with Canadian Vasek Pospisil and as he was signing, they … asked him who he was.
Later, their father came up to your Eh Game correspondent, asked if I spoke French, and when hearing a response in the affirmative, asked again for Pospisil’s name. Obviously it didn’t register when the Canadian told them himself, because they still had no idea who he was.
When I asked this man what was the point of getting an autograph from a player they didn’t even know, he seemed offended and said, “Maybe some day he’ll be famous. Did anyone know Nadal at the beginning?”
Well, yes, once Nadal arrived at Roland Garros most tennis fans probably did.
But the point was that little of this has anything to do with having that one dream-come-true moment with your favorite player. On Kids’ Day, there were dozens of kids sitting in seats beside the various courts, playing with their phones. They had no interest in watching the tennis; they were waiting for the players to finish so they could get a selfie with somebody – anybody.
If you stroll the courts in the late afternoon, especially when the doubles guys are practicing, you see very little security around the courts. These players don’t have big entourages around them; they set their gear down – racquets, cell phones, probably wallets – just a few feet away from the fence, and the fans.
And then they start playing, so their focus is elsewhere. It would be the easiest thing in the world to just grab one of those phones, or a racquet.
Last summer at Wimbledon, we spotted French player Gaël Monfils making his way down St. Mary’s Walk after winning his match on an outside court. He was surrounded by the Wimbledon security people – they have height and size minimums for these folks; they take it very seriously.
Still, more than one fan just ran up to Monfils, put their arm around him and took a selfie – or had a friend take a photo.
The security people either smiled indulgently, or didn’t do anything about it at all.
Perhaps they were harmless. It turned out they were. The kid who jumped onto centre court Sunday will catch more hell from his father than he will from anyone else, beyond being banned from the rest of the fortnight.
But you can see where this whole phenomenon is headed; one day, something WILL happen. And short of putting up that barbed wire around every single court – which is unlikely to ever happen – there’s not a whole lot anyone can do to stop it