I am, by many measures, a creature of habit. When I was 4 or 5 years old, and my dad first took me onto a tennis court, I developed an obsession. To me, tennis has always been the most extraordinary of sports: a dance, a chess game, a meditation, a testing of wills. Played by the very best, it is a great work of art, each finely crafted rally an expression of creative genius.

When I am on the road, as I am lucky to be much of the time these days, I can follow the live tennis scores at big championships such as Wimbledon simply by clicking onto the BBC or ESPN app and looking at the tracker that updates every few minutes. More often than not, I can also find, if I look hard enough, a sports bar that has tennis on one or other of its big screen TVs.

It wasn’t always like this. I recall that as a young man I desperately tried to find a television in India’s lower Himalayas to watch one of the many Wimbledon finals in which Pete Sampras appeared — and eventually had to settle for a hotel with a black and white TV and a dubious antenna that, despite the manager swearing up and down would show Wimbledon if I wanted it to, in fact aired nothing but crackle. When I protested to the management, I was rewarded by an optimistic, if entirely useless, display of energetic antenna-twisting by the manager that didn’t generate any tennis but did at least make me laugh.

I had more luck a few years ago in a small town in Croatia, hunkering down in 2018 in a small cafe for about five hours to watch the semifinals, only to be devastated when Roger Federer ended up losing a five-set marathon to the entirely charmless, but lethally fast-serving, game wielded by the South African Kevin Anderson.

All by way of saying that I was ready for battle this July, when my wife, Marissa, and I traveled to Thailand for a 10-day jaunt from Bangkok to the River Kwai, onto the ruined royal city of Ayutthaya, and then the island of Koh Samui, where we had a room booked at an oceanside resort on the outskirts of the little town of Lamai Beach.

Marissa isn’t a tennis fan. And I knew that I’d be pushing my luck suggesting that at 8 p.m. local time every evening we cease our regular sightseeing and dinner activities and instead decamp to some dive or other to watch Wimbledon. But, I was damned if I wasn’t going to at least make a decent effort to catch the finals. 

I had a plan. We had, earlier in the weekend, stumbled upon a little Italian cafe, run by an expat named Cesar. Cesar spoke enough English for me to ask about my Wimbledon-watching prospects, and he suggested that, if we kept walking about half a kilometer along the main road, turned right and continued down the stretch of tourist restaurants, massage shops, cannabis stores and bars, we would eventually find one with tennis on the big screen.

So on the Sunday night of the men’s final, Marissa and I set off. In one seedy bar after another, I poked my head in to ask whether they had SPOTV, the channel that carried tennis in Southeast Asia; and in each place I was rebuffed. 

Finally, just as we were about to turn around, we came upon Harry’s Sports Bar and Grill, a hard-nosed place run by an expat Englishman, with a pool table, customers who seemed like don’t-mess-with-me characters in a spy novel potboiler, a bar with passing-grade food and drink, but, most importantly, about a dozen huge TVs tuned to the Tour de France, the Euros soccer tournament, and — blessed miracle — Wimbledon. Carlos Alcaraz v. Novak Djokovic. The new king of the hill versus the 24-time grand slam winner. 

I was a pig in clover.

It didn’t even matter that the match itself was anticlimactic. Unlike last year’s epic five-set thriller, this time around an ascendant Alcaraz rushed out to a 6-2, 6-2 lead, his extraordinary speed around the court, and the pace he can generate off of his groundstrokes, simply too much for the 37-year-old Djokovic. 

The third set was more of a real fight; and, when Alcaraz frittered away three championship points on his own serve, he gave Djokovic a brief opening to perform yet another Houdini-like escape act on tennis’s greatest stage. But it was just a hiccup. A few minutes later Alcaraz won the tie break, and tennis’s new alpha male was readying himself for the second time in two years to lift his sport’s most revered trophy.

Our evening was done. Now, to Marissa’s great joy, it was time for us to walk back to our hotel and pack our bags for the return journey to California.  

Stay up to date on business in the Capital Region: Subscribe to the Comstock’s newsletter today.