Bud Collins -- whose name, when it appears in print, is almost always preceded by ''tennis commentator'' or ''tennis icon'' -- was back in Key Biscayne for the Sony Ericsson Open.
b He wore a lavender Izod polo, blue-and-white trousers cut from Maori fabric by his Cambridge tailor, red leather buckles from a shoemaker in Santa Fe and yellow-and-red striped socks to a second-round match between Serb veteran Novak Djokovic and Kevin Anderson, a six-foot, seven-inch South African just out of college.
Collins did the tennis commentary for NBC for 35 years -- they parted ways last summer, and he is now with ESPN -- and sometimes sounds as if he's on television even when he's not.
''We'll see if he can push it into the tiebreaker,'' he whispered, with Anderson serving to stay in the first set. ``This is a big pressure point for him.''
Part of the difficulty of television sports commentary, and of sportswriting, is finding new words to talk about something that has happened before and keeps happening again and again.
Thus, in the Collins version, an ill-executed drop shot ''plops'' into the net; service winners are never merely hit but ''banged'' or ''zipped.'' Somebody does not lose badly but is ''run out of town'' -- alternatively, if he wins on, say, grass, he ''has a taste for chlorophyll.'' And about that grass, on a bad day: ``swampy, capricious turf . . . skidding bounces [and nonbounces] spraying like shrapnel.''
''Boy!'' he said now, as Anderson banged -- or was it zipped? -- a second serve in at 115 mph. His motion was ''like a man drawing a gun'' and it carried him into the breaker. ''Well, Mr. Unknown, you should take this set,'' Collins whispered. Mr. Unknown did as commanded and soon Collins was hustled off for an appearance in one of the luxury tents with the Brazilian Gustavo Kuerten, who was running late.
Very late, as it turned out. This didn't much bother Collins. Everybody runs late these days.
In the 1960's and '70s, Collins would conduct interviews over beers. There were fewer players then and he knew everybody. He had Rod Laver, the Australian great, as a houseguest. He played with Billie Jean King, who told him that, had he been raised in Florida or California instead of Ohio and had a good coach and had devoted his life to the game, he could have been ``fair.''
This kind of intimacy -- friendship, even -- is rare or impossible today. A player's time is too valuable: there's always marketing to be done, appearances to be made, practice and workouts. They have less in common, anyway. He is 78 and getting older every day; they stay young, always in early to mid-20s, and never age, only get replaced.
So Collins passed the time by listing South African tennis greats of the past and watching the match in progress on a flat-screen television at the center of the room.
``So, can the kid hold twice?''
The kid did -- ''One of the greatest upsets in the history of this tournament!'' and around that time Kuerten walked in, only an hour late, beaming and trailed by his entourage.
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