On Wednesday we were watching this week's $75,000 Australian Protour Canberra Challenger. Some of our globe's best 100 players were involved. Big Sam (ranked 181) was out there on court playing plucky Austrian Gerald Melzer (ranked 68) in the terrible but character-building Canberra heat. The blustery wind might have come off a baking Simpson Desert.

Back to the centre court at the Canberra Tennis Centre in just a moment. But is not a story about mere tennis but an observation about how our beloved city is getting better and more city-like all the time.

Last week's Challenger event, whether or not you care for tennis (perhaps the game they play in heaven although theologians think badminton more likely) is another of those little proofs of what I will call Canberra's "metropolis creep". Bit by bit we creep away from being far too much like Barnaby Joyce's Armidale. Instead we are creeping towards being a true, Melbourney city rich with many-splendoured attractions.

Until recent times tennis events as grand as this Challenger were unknown in Canberra. This columnist, a tennis tragic, has been watching and playing tennis at windswept Lyneham for 40 years. But now, with the redevelopment of the tennis facilities the Canberra year has a sprinkling of these big pro events, a part of the increasingly excellent mixture of Canberra big-city delights.

As entertainment events like this Challenger are almost Shakespearean in their drama. Here you see battling, dreaming players striving, often in vain, to clamber up into the glamorous company of the celebrity greats of tennis.

Meanwhile these strugglers have to lead unglamorous tennis lives, giving everything they've got in unglamorous events at unglamorous venues (where at one of this week's matches I was one of only eight windswept spectators there to appreciate the two gasping gladiators' efforts). They play for frugal prizemoney that barely enables them to afford the energy-giving bananas they eat between games.

Although the Lyneham venue is so spruced up now there has always been and still is something ancient about the area. Of all of developed Canberra this is still the place that most feels as it must have before a city was imagined here by the Molonglo.

In our decades of playing there tennis players have never felt comfortable. The wind-walloped plain on which the courts feel so temporarily placed is vast and inhospitable. The sky above it is immense, implacable. Tennis players don't feel they belong. It has a prehistoric feel. When, this week, one heard wild roars of exertion from the toiling players (the noblest roarer was courageous Argentine Carlos Alberto Berlocq the world's number 95) they might have been the roars of the prehistoric Australian megafauna (perhaps the 2000 kilogram Diprotodon, a giant wombat) that once roamed this plain. Talking of giants, we return to Wednesday's centre court and to perspiration-soaked Sam Groth. He is a towering 193 cms and is famous for bludgeoning down the fastest serve (263 km/h) ever recorded. On Wednesday (egged on by fans giving him the occasional "Ozzie! Ozzie! Ozzie!") he bazookaed down lots of serves like that one. And but for that hair-raising weapon (for like Goliath of the Bible he relies far more on brute strength than on poetry and finesse) he would never have squeaked past the more gifted and subtle Austrian and into the next round.Sam's tennis is ugly, but, hey, it is an Australian ugliness, and his moody win (did Goliath abuse his spear? Sam gave his racquet quite a monstering) sent patriotic courtside Canberrans into ecstasies.