“Because my mom is spoiled rotten, she’s going to want to try to fly first class home or something, so I got to keep winning.”

There is always something more with Stephens, who likes to talk and is good at it. And you get the feeling that, after some time spent learning the WTA ropes, there’s going to be more from her as a player. Stephens reached the third round at the U.S. Open last year, and is at a career-high ranking of No. 70 as of this week.

Admittedly, Stephens didn’t have to do too much against a wildly erratic Mattek-Sands, who was off from the start and kept going for, and missing, big shots throughout. But you could see that Stephens, who trains for this event in Spain and says clay is her favorite surface (Why? “I really don’t know”), can play on the foreign red stuff. She’s a smooth mover who covers the corners well. She wins free points with her serve. And she can change pace mid-rally, juicing up her backhand down the line or running around to finish points with inside-out forehands. Stephens also has a unique and deceptive style—it can appear lackadaisical, but it isn’t. She stands mostly straight up and down, keeps her footwork rhythmic rather than hyper, and whips over top of her two-handed backhand. Today Stephens kept the ball deep and let Mattek-Sands hit herself out of the match.

Stephens, who beat a quality opponent in Ekaterina Makarova in the first round, is nothing if not confident about her chances here. “In 10 years," she said with a smile on Monday, "I better have won this one time at least, otherwise I'll be one unhappy camper.” (Unfortunately, this also led her to darker thoughts about the future: “In 10 years I’m going to be 29. Oh my God!”) For now, one more win will put her a step closer to another dream, a trip to the Olympics. Her next opponent, Mathilde Johansson of Sweden, currently ranked 93rd, is certainly beatable.

Win or lose, though, Stephens will still be living the dream. She says she just keeps trying to have fun, and the irrepressibly fast-talking way that she says it lets you know that she's enjoying the tennis life at the moment. When Stephens was asked what it means for her to be in the third round, she didn’t hesitate to flash a smile and a superlative:

“It’s awesome,” she said.

*****

Fifteen years ago, another young Florida-based African-American woman came to Paris talking about future titles, and relishing a chance to slide on exotic red clay. That player was Venus Williams, and it was hard not to see the parallels between Williams and Stephens today. Even the Paris weather could have been a metaphor for their current situations. Stephens played in the early afternoon sun and won easily. By the time Williams took the court for her second-round match against Agnieszka Radwanska, clouds had rolled in, the temperature had dropped, and rain was threatening. One night after her sister had helped set Chatrier on fire, Venus walked out to a half-filled, mostly dead arena.

It was clear during the first changeover that Venus’s mood was just as melancholy. Between games, she leaned back, not touching her racquet, and closed her eyes in stone-faced resignation. Venus was a step—or two, or three, or four—slow from the start. She struggled, and often failed, just to catch up to Radwanska’s returns of serve, and Aga is hardly the biggest hitter on tour. The first set was over in 28 minutes, and Venus’s best moment was a stare that she flashed at Radwanska after the Pole passed her with a sharp running forehand. Aga was very good from start to finish. In the second set, she came up with a scrambling lob winner from the front of the court, and lofted another from the baseline to reach match point. She’ll play Svetlana Kuznetsova next, and perhaps Ana Ivanovic after that.

Venus signed autographs when it was over, prompting some to speculate that, 15 years after her celebrated debut here, we might not see her on this court again. But Williams said later, in a press conference that was strangely melancholy and upbeat at the same time—you might say Venus was laughing to keep from crying—that she’ll be back in Paris next year, and that this was all just “the start of a process” of learning to play with the auto-immune disease she has. Some days are better than others, she says, and she never knows how they’ll turn out when she wakes up in the morning.

“I don’t have the magic answer,” she said with a smile. “If I did, you know, I’d be in the third round.”

“I’m still playing a professional sport,” Venus continued philosophically, “so I have to be positive. I’m gonna have ups and downs. [But] I haven’t gotten to the ‘Why me?’ yet. I hope I never get to the ‘Why me?’ I’m not allowed to feel sorry for myself.”

That’s Venus, the strong sister, head always up. Right now she’s finding the bright side in her Olympic hopes. She talked today about her love of the Games, how her father inspired her to aim for them, and how, “When I leave the Olympics, I go through withdrawal.” She said that’s why she was here playing today.

At the moment, Venus has a singles spot on the team by ranking, but she talked tonight about just playing doubles and mixed doubles—it’s all up in the air. Two players would need to pass Venus, who is ranked 57th, to keep her out of the team's four singles spots. One of those players is currently ranked 13 places below her, and is in the third round at Roland Garros. Her name is Sloane Stephens.

Mostly, though, you see them bunched up on top of one another near the long ramp that leads out of the player area below Court Suzanne Lenglen. Not only do you see the kids here, you have trouble getting around them. They form a sort of flying wedge that extends 50 meters beyond the entrance to the ramp, and slows traffic through the middle of the grounds. As each new body emerges from Lenglen and wanders upward, every face, every pair of eyes, every oversize tennis ball and pen and magazine, leans forward a few inches, ready to pounce.

It’s an odd sensation to visit both sides of this scene: the fans and kids massed outside, the people who make the tournament happen eating and lounging on the inside. To your left, when you walk down the ramp, you come to Lenglen’s press room, occupied mostly by photographers, and its outdoor dining area, where people linger over their lunches under canopies. (As a good overworked American, my own lunch is usually a pre-packaged club sandwich and a Pepsi at my desk.)

Walk through a couple of doors and you come to the player lounge and dining area. Instead of the desks and computers that fill the press room, the lounge has walls of TVs and couches. This morning Marion Bartoli did a few last stretches in preparation for her afternoon match on Lenglen. Judy and Jamie Murray talked about getting something to eat.

From there you take a turn and walk down a long hall lined with posters and abstractly designed mirrors. Dark-clothed security guards talk in pairs. The scene is casual; players in shorts and flip-flops, with perma-tans and wet hair, greet each other with up-grip handshakes and half-hugs. If you hadn’t see these smiling 20-somethings on TV, would you even consider trying to get their autographs?

When you turn the corner and begin to ascend the ramp, you realize that there are plenty of people who want the players' chicken scratch on a piece of felt, or who just want to get any kind of glimpse of them—to point and say, “That’s Nicolas Mahut, right there!” As you continue upward, dozens of faces, hats, and sunglasses along the railing stare down at you. The hunger for fame, and the paucity of celebrities who appear at any given time, is great enough that even when you’re identified as a nobody, the eyes stay on you for a split-second longer, just in case they’ve been mistaken.

Roland Garros has style and tradition and good ice cream, but it also creates that essential, and essentially weird, dynamic needed for modern show business: the scarcity of the star. Of course you couldn’t have the players walking around among the great French unwashed, but there’s a strange hierarchy around that ramp. The athletes, dressed for a pool party, watch the tube, play video games, and pick at pasta, while the press sits and writes about them across the hall, and fans gather above them for a sighting.

This is how pro sports—show-biz for sweaty people—functions and thrives. There’s excitement and fantasy and vicarious pleasure in the star system, and the French Open probably wouldn’t be desirable to attend if it were as relaxed and open and status-free as your local club tournament. The fans have status, too; they have tickets.

Still, the ramp is weird. I’ve never seen anyone famous walk up it.

Triguigneaux also said that the Babolats are used in the Nice, Brussels, and Strasbourg run-up events to Roland Garros, but getting them installed in Monte Carlo, Madrid, Rome, and other big events is difficult, because each of those tournaments negotiates its own ball deals.

There has been a ball change in Paris this year. It’s just that, not all that surprisingly, the players can’t agree exactly what its effect has been.

*****

Staying with Rafa for a minute, his presser yesterday upstaged his straight-set first-round win over Simone Bollelli. Most of the relevant Nadal bases were covered.

—First, the all-important question of the color of his shirt. What was this mysterious tint called, exactly? Nadal had no idea.

“I will check,” he said. “I let you know next time. I let you know exactly the name . . . That's a good question.”

—Did he have any idea whether Bjorn Borg would come to see him play the final? (Borg has said that he has no plans to make the trip)

“You know,” the practical Nadal said, “we are in the second round. That’s the thing. I have enough work to do thinking about the next round, and not think about if Bjorn will be here or if I gonna play the final.”

—The next reporter mentioned that a French player claimed that Chatrier was a difficult court to play on. Did he agree?

Nadal smiled and said, quite correctly, “I’m not the right player to say I don’t like that court.” What was he supposed to say, if only the match had been played somewhere else, I would have beaten Soderling in 2009? Nadal’s conclusion: “It’s one of the most charismatic courts in the history of tennis.”

—Blue clay: Would he go back on it if it were improved and wasn’t slippery?

“In my opinion, I already know was a bad decision," Nadal retorted, "and I didn’t change my mind two weeks later. We cannot accept in the middle of the clay-court season a tournament with completely different conditions.”

—His public injury talk: Did he see an advantage or disadvantage to mentioning his ailments, rather than not mentioning them?

“I don’t see an advantage or disadvantage,” Nadal said. “Because at the end the result is the same. You are injured, you are injured, even if you say or you don’t say. So all the thing we can talk about is if you prefer to come here and say the true, or you prefer to come here and lie. That’s the only point.”

—Finally, we went a little off topic:

Q: I read that your favorite place in Roland Garros is the locker room. Is this true?

Nadal: “You know, I spend a lot of hours there. That’s the true, no?...You can see all the matches, you have a nice lounge for the players. It’s one of the best locker rooms in the world.”

Roland Garros, owner of the GLROAT—greatest locker room of all time.

*****

In the Herald Tribune, Christopher Clarey has a look behind a remarkable statistic: In 2002, there were 11 men at the French Open who were 30 and over; this year 37 over-30s started the tournament. The French already have a name for them: the "trentenaires." There’s no clear-cut answer as to why there are more of them these days, though one of the old-timers, Jarkko Nieminen, hazards a guess. “There’s more depth in the game every year, more good players, so the competition is tougher,” Nieminen says. “Over all, players are in very good shape, and obviously for a young junior, it takes a few years to build up the fitness.”

The leader of the senior set is clearly 34-year-old Tommy Haas, who qualified for the event and won his first-round match yesterday. Haas says he still relishes the opportunity to play, and wants to give his 1-year-old daughter a chance to see and remember him out there. He's not sure he's going to make it that long.

*****

Favorite line from Virginie Razzano’s presser: “I always believe everything is possible, even if things are tough.”

Favorite line from Serena Williams’ presser, about Eva Asderaki: “Was that the one who did my U.S. Open last match last year? I just really had a flashback there.”

*****

Wednesday’s play is set to begin as I write this, but here are a few things to look for:

—Top seed Novak Djokovic goes out to the second court, Lenglen, and he does it right away, at 11 A.M. sharp, against Blaz Kavcic

—Juan Martin del Potro is also out early; he faces Edouard Roger-Vasselin, a man who lives five minutes from Roland Garros. He shouldn't be late.

—Melanie Oudin gets a sterner test today, from Italy’s Sara Errani

—Folk hero Brian Baker returns, this time to Chatrier, to face Gilles Simon

—Roger Federer vs. Adrian Ungur, second on Chatrier

—Sloane Stephens vs. Bethanie Mattek-Sands in an American girl battle; Stephens is looking to be on the proverbial verge of . . . we'll see

—Juan Carlos Ferrero vs. Marin Cilic, a nice one for little Court 6

—Pablo Andujar in a possible upset of Stan Wawrinka

—Another Williams returns late on Chatrier, when Venus takes on Aga Radwanska in the women’s match of the day

*****

I should have a report on that last one this afternoon, along with a little local color. See you then.