"OK, come in," the duty officer tells us at Wimbledon.
And the man opens the door of interview room 5, in the center of the Center Court, and a squad of chroniclers, exactly ten of us, enter the place, and Marcel Granollers (37) does with us, the tennis player who is going to be interviewed.
And Granollers, surprised and admired by so many attentions, looks at us and says:
-So many journalists have come to see me? If it's just a doubles final, man! If I'm not Alcaraz!
Ya, ya.
This is the doubles draw.
But it is the final of a Grand Slam.
So the occasion is worth it.
(...)
It is the fifth time that Granollers has tried his luck in the final of a major, his second final at Wimbledon (in 2021, Granollers and the Argentine Horacio Zeballos had to surrender to the duo Nikola Mektic and Mate Pavic).
The man is a Stakhanovite tennis player: in the individual draw he has four ATP titles. In 2012 he had become the 12th racket in the world.
But already then he had realized that he was reaching his peak in the singles draw, so he had turned the sock inside out and entered the world of doubles, a world that demands a new perspective:
-For everything to flow, we have to respect each other. We are both interested in everything going well, she says now.
And he talks about his relationship with Zeballos, a relationship that these days extends to 24/7, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, since they both live in a house one step away from the All England Lawn Tennis Club , and jokes are played.
"This is good," says Granollers. On Wednesday, when I walked into the locker room, I saw that someone had grabbed my bag and had taped it to the leg of the bench. I understood that it had been Horacio, but I decided to return it to him.
So he looked for the physio and asked him to splint two fingers on his right hand, as if he had broken them.
And in this way, Marcel Granollers went home and there he met Zeballos, who looked scared when he saw him, and asked him:
-And that hand?
"Well, I don't know," Granollers had answered. Someone had stuck my bag to the leg of the bench, and when I pulled it free, I hurt myself and strained my ligaments and the physio had to splint two fingers.
And now, between laughs, he continues telling us:
-The fact is that I intended to put up with the joke a while longer. I didn't plan to arrive until nightfall, because Horacio was not going to be able to sleep and we had to play the semifinal (this Thursday they beat the Germans Tim Puetz and Kevin Krawietz 6-4, 6-3), but I did plan to continue for a while . But when I saw Horacio's face, I had to confess quickly, in case he got really bad or something.
-And Zeballos confessed that he was the one who touched your bag? -we asked him.
He confessed, he confessed.
This Saturday, Granollers and Zeballos will seek their long-awaited first Grand Slam title against the doubles made up of Wesley Koolhof and Neal Skupski, the couple that leads the ATP circuit, a duo that has won eight titles in the last year and a half, including their last appearance on grass, in Hertogenbosch.
