It's a blog's life for Tursunov, court jester

For someone who has won only three matches this year Dmitry Tursunov manages to look astonishingly cheerful, perched on a table outside the supervisor's office at Barcelona's Real Club de Tenis. He has just lost, again, to someone ranked more than 70 places below him but it seems you cannot help smiling if you are the most popular man on the tennis circuit when it comes to the world of the website.

Perhaps it's because Tursunov has an anniversary coming up this week in Estoril. It was at this tournament in Portugal exactly a year ago that the 24-year-old California-based Russian was asked to take his turn at the chore of providing a blog of his week for the ATP website and made such a riotous success of it that he was promptly recruited as the Tour's resident blogger.

From the tedious details of how many bananas some player ate or where to get Thai food in Cincinnati, Tursunov's input offered a hilarious insight into life on the tennis tour. Here is a sample of his debut blog from Estoril 2006...

"Tennis fans don't realise how much time tennis players spend online. Marat Safin downloads so many movies it feels like he is planning to open Blockbuster Video in Moscow. Gaël Monfils is nuts over MSN, talking on six windows at the same time. The guy is like Neo in Matrix. He has no idea what he is writing any more or who he is writing to. He just puts 'lol' [laughing out loud] and moves on to the next window. The girl is probably telling him that her kittens died and he says 'lol'. At the same time he is listening to Bow Wow and trying to sing along."

A whole year of this, particularly if you have been coping with a mystery wrist injury for most of the 2007 season, can become tiring for the author, as Tursunov agrees. "Sometimes I feel it gets quite a bit in the way of my tennis. I am expected to make funny comments, make fun of people and it can get a bit much... but you have to be understanding when you hear in the locker room 'Can you please write something about me?' "

Life as a blogger, or even as a tennis professional, would not have been on the radar of Tursunov when, as a 12-year-old, he was sent by his father Igor, a nuclear research engineer, to California from his Moscow home. "I'm not sure if it was because I was a promising prospect or because I was annoying my family," he smiled. "But it was cheaper to have me train in California and it made more sense because of the weather.

"I moved to an academy and was there nine years," he added. "My mom had some very big problems about it, and I still feel somewhat detached from the family because of it, but it was a compromise I had to make for tennis. It is very hard to say if I would have made it had I stayed in Russia because at that time it was very expensive and my father couldn't afford to pay for indoor courts."

Now he has a residence in Folsom, the town whose prison Johnny Cash sang about, but points out: "It is hard to say I live there because in reality I don't think any tennis players live anywhere. I also have a place in Moscow so I kind of bounce around between those two.

"I have been asked many times whether I would pick the United States or Russia as my home country. At this point I have two homes and I'm lucky to have that but I'm unlucky because I can't come up with the answer of which one is my home."

There is no question about his loyalty, though. He plays Davis Cup for Russia and his part in the capture of that trophy last December is, he says, "probably the highlight of my career at this point, though I hope it is not going to be the highlight for much longer".

That Davis Cup success was the culmination of Tursunov's best season, one in which he won his first tournament, Mumbai, moved into the top 20 and got to the fourth round of Wimbledon, where he is perhaps best known as the bane of Tim Henman's life, having beaten him four times. "But if I played Tim right now he would have a very good chance," he says. The reason is that wrist problem, which surfaced in January at the Hopman Cup mixed team event in Australia. After going on to win two rounds at the Australian, Tursunov took six weeks off.

"It is something to do with the tendons in the left wrist, and quite a few doctors were willing and eager to operate regardless of the problem. I decided to take time off instead but when I came back it started to hurt again, then all of a sudden it started getting better."

Not enough, though, to permit him to play at the 2006 level. With his first-round defeat in Barcelona last week Tursunov has now gone out in his opening match at four consecutive events. No wonder the ATP's resident blogger, back on the clay and the website at Estoril this week, is already looking forward to the grass of Britain and doing even better at Wimbledon this time.

DMITRY ON THE NET: Roger has asked me for lessons

Roger [Federer] has asked me for blogging lessons for his own website. He is trading three of his Grand Slam titles. He spent all his money on some pastures for his cow, so he just wants to trade instead of paying cash.

Tim Henman always has afternoon tea. Even during a match he will have tea and strawberries with cream. In fact he is given two injury time-outs plus a tea-time-out in case the match time interferes with his tea time."

The night I got bageled [lost a set 6-0] by Roger I found comfort at a hot-dog cart with a dietary rampage. There were hamburgers and sausages all waiting for their new owner. Patties of real beef were singing to me, I heard sausages rambling in Polish and German, hot dogs were oinking in unison. All willing to sacrifice themselves to bring me peace of mind.

Visit www.atptennis.com/TursunovTales

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