Growing up, Wimbledon was always my favorite, so I didn't like the French, because the French was Wimbledon's opposite. Wimbledon was fast, the announcers explained to me; the French was slow. Not that I could actually see that difference, mind you--to my seven- or eight-year-old eyes, it all just looked like tennis. For all the talk of grass being "fast" and clay being "slow," what I really could see, watching as a kid, was that my favorite players, John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova, swashbuckling serve-and-volleyers both, tended to do less well at the French, which struck young me as outrageous.
I remember that when the French rolled around, it seemed like I was watching a bunch of players I'd otherwise never heard of. "Clay-court specialists," the announcers called them, and I scoffed at the idea. If you weren't competitive at Wimbledon, how seriously was I supposed to take you?
Back then, I had no concept that nearly half the season was played on clay. (I doubt I really understood that there was even such a thing as a "professional tour.") There wasn't a lot of tennis on TV back then. We didn't have cable, and so whatever tennis I saw would have been whatever they showed on weekends on one of the three commercial broadcast channels. I'd surely never heard of tournaments in Monte Carlo or Madrid or Rome. "Tennis courts," to me, were like the courts I saw at the swim-and-tennis club my parents got a pool-only membership to: hard courts. Grass courts and clay courts were specified as such on TV because they were exotic and rare. It never occurred to me that clay would have been (and is) the preferred surface for two whole continents of people, and for them, the hard courts of North America would seem a world apart.
Grass was cool. How was it possible to even play tennis on grass? And yet they did it. But clay? Are you kidding? I thought it was fairly ridiculous to play tennis on fucking dirt.