The current members of the Armada turned out in a tribute to an old boy of their own, Andreu Gimeno. Gimeno won the French Open back in 1972, but the purpose of the tribute today was because he's fallen a bit on hard times and the exho was by way of a testimonial.
The poor guy lost his daughter to cancer 3 years ago but equally, he's lost his money in failed real estate and is a victim of shares losses as the Spanish economy goes into free-fall ... tell me about it, I work with this every single day in my career.
I think the thing that touched me the most though today was finding out something I didn't know before. When Rafa sat on his chair after becoming the Australian Open champion back in 2009, and Federer did his embarrassing weep like a baby routine and told the world it was killing him ... you know, back in those days when Rafa was barely able to celebrate any of his Slam victories because he seemed always to be "taking something away from Federer" as he went on his megalomaniac pursuit of beating Sampras's Slam record. Well ... whilst all that drama was unfolding before him and Rafa sat quietly on his chair, Andreu Gimeno went to him, and cuddled him and held him like a kindly old Grandpa. Malmeda and serene from VB brought the story and the vid clip to us. Yep ... the vid clip is rather cheesy, but its still emotional.
The event was staged like some sort of round robin/team thing with Rafa and Daveed ending up as the two finalists. Feli, Tommy, Marcel Granollers were in attendance, but Fer was missing as his father was having an operation. Hope all is well there, Fer.
Although the crowd was small, it seemed like it was a lovely, smiley and enjoyable event. Here's a link to some of the video action from today.
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