Waiting

Sitting in the Qantas Club at the Melbourne airport, waiting for a flight that I should be boarding right now. The inbound plane was late, so instead of taking off at 7pm, we're boarding at 7.20. Naturally, there are flights every 30 minutes between Australia's two largest cities, but I'll be damned if I can get an earlier one; everyone else in here is trying to do the same. (Although they've got these new little sausages, like Vienna Sausages, out at the buffet. I've never seen them here before, but they're good.)

The worst part about it is that I won't get to see the Australian Open quarterfinals match between James Blake and Roger Federer. I came down last weekend to go to the Open, so I'm in full tennis mode, even if I haven't picked up my racket in two months. Last night, I watched Maria Sharapova obliterate Justine Henin in straight sets (6-4, 6-0), and the first set of Jo-Wilfried "Muhammed Ali" Tsonga's breakthrough upset of 14-seed Mikhail Youzhny before I fell asleep.

Consider me fully on the Tsonga bandwagon (vive la France!), but I always like to see Blake do well, too. I got to see him play, after multiple rain delays, at the Legg Mason Classic in Washington, D.C., back in 2006. Good times.

Saturday was a hell of a lot of fun, even if we didn't get to see any actual tennis. It rained all day, so the outdoor matches were cancelled—we had ground passes only, so we weren't allowed into Rod Laver or Vodafone arenas, the indoor venues, like the Kool Kids were. That's OK, we just drank at the beer garden. For fourteen hours.

Sunday, we actually watched tennis, mostly doubles. The last match of the day for us was an Australian-Indian mixed-doubles showdown, with home-siders Alicia Molik and Nathan Healey losing to Sania Mirza and Mahesh Bhupathi, 6-1, 6-4. Naturally, the crowd was an enthusiastically jingoistic bunch of Aussie supporters, but there were a great deal of Indian fans, too. We were cheering for the Indians, mostly because Sania Mirza is quite attractive, but also because chants of "Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!", a cheer I detest, rang throughout the stands, and sometimes at quite inappropriate times. (I realise that last phrase makes me sound like a WASP-y tennis twat. So be it.)

At one point—this was probably at about the second set, with Mirza and Bhupathi up by a long shot—this rabid, loud-mouthed Australian supporter, resplendent in his bogan hairdo and Aussie flag cape, who had been leading most of the chanting, got up to start again. This was after the umpire had warned the crowd about excessive noise. I decided then and there that he must be destroyed. After the last echo of "Oi" rang throughout the crowd, I waited a beat, then shouted, "Hey! Everybody look at me!"

Crowd laughter, Bogan Billy sits down in shame, Ed wins. I rule.

The icing on the cake was that this guy's little eight-year-old (ish) son was at his side to witness the humiliation. Let this be a lesson to you all. He'll definitely do something like that at the next sporting event he attends—people like this cannot be stopped—but at least he'll think twice before he does.