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#SWEATY GIRL SORTY PLUS#
By week's end, Alex will go through five 1.4 gallon bleach bottles and two 28-pound tubs of powdered detergent, plus numerous cans of air freshener (too numerous to count, he says).Īlex drags a hip-high blue plastic bag across the room. Against the opposite wall sit a large commercial washer and two dryers, all three running nonstop. Hanging from a wall are smashed rackets: one from Marat Safin, two from Roddick, a stick from Gael Monfils that appears to have perished in a fistfight with a Grizzly bear. (Matches produce 30-40 more towels per session). to midnight, cleaning, drying and folding about 400 towels a day. So I came to the Legg Mason, where Alex works from 8 a.m.
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Only sitting in a sauna seemed inauthentic. I wanted first-hand - first- face - experience. Nick Laham/Getty ImagesYou probably don't want to touch Andy Murray's towel after a match of sweat-wiping. You know, when you want to make it faster, obviously you have to pop it with the wrist really fast, and then I just dropped the racket. "And then I just didn't squeeze the racket. "I get the sweat a lot," Djokovic told reporters afterward. Between smacking an ace and sending your racket into the opposing service box, as a perspiration-palmed Novak Djokovic embarrassingly did during his third-round Open victory over Jesse Witten. Between winning and losing one's lunch in the courtside flower pots. Never mind the abnormally cool temperatures in New York this year - on tour and in the Grand Slams, sweat can be the difference between winning and losing. Sweating is incredibly healthy for a normal human, but for an elite athlete it's a liability." "There's no athlete on the planet who sweats more than I did.
#SWEATY GIRL SORTY PRO#
"Sweat cost me cash and victories," says former pro Justin Gimelstob. You think you have a clue? Trust me: You don't.
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The utterly unfathomable, borderline obscene amount of sweating done by pro tennis players, a veritable exudation monsoon, even by the waterlogged standards of pro sports. "You sure you want to see this?" asks Alex, the tournament laundry guy. 1A? Cincinnati.) All around me are soggy towels - crumpled on the floor, draped across wooden benches in the adjacent locker room, piled high in white plastic hampers.Īnd, of course, the Hewitt/Roddick towel, plucked from a hamper, held between my thumb and forefinger, limp and disturbingly weighty. FitzGerald Tennis Center, home to the Legg Mason Tennis Classic, almost certainly the wettest event of tennis' perspiration-drenched summer season. I'm standing in the walk-in, closet-sized laundry room at the William H.G. Perhaps it belongs to Juan Martin del Potro, who in a few days will capture this tournament on the hottest, steamiest day of the year behind a flurry of one-shot, one-kill winners, later explaining his heat-beating, go-for-broke tactics with a succinct, "If you run, you die." Cameron Spencer/Getty ImagesHow much do tennis players sweat? Let's just point out that isn't rain flying from Andy Roddick's cap.Īctually, it could be Andy Roddick's towel.
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