An advantage to living in a small country? When celebrities visit you tend to get much closer to them than you would in a bigger, more impersonal place.

Like, say, a tennis tournament.

Going to Wimbledon or the U.S. Open might be fun, but your interaction with players will be minimal. Same as any other big tournament.

In Abu Dhabi, the single men’s tennis event here includes only six players, and has a significant social component because, actually, it’s not a “real” tournament. Not sanctioned by the ATP. But it features only elite players who come to get some warm weather and some games against other elite players barely two weeks ahead of the Australian Open.

Because it is not as intense as a sanctioned event, your kids could spend time at a clinic with Andy Murray or hit with Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.

When I covered the Mubadala World Tennis Championship, two years ago, I remember Roger Federer doing a Q&A with kids. Just sitting there, with kids around his feet. “What is your favorite ice cream?” “Do you have a dog?”

So, today, we went over to the final day of the tournament, down at Zayed Sports City, which is about a 10-minute drive, and we saw the three highest-ranked players in the world play, about 30 feet from us, in one afternoon/evening.

Leaving me to think that a person could get spoiled, watching tennis at a tournament so intimate that you know if the guys shaved before playing.

The third-place match pitted Rafael Nadal (above), ranked No. 1 in the world, against Tsonga, ranked No. 10.

A point of interest was to see if Nadal really has as many tics as a story in The National had suggested.

Why, yes. Yes, he does. The most noticeable is the shorts-tugging and the face-touching, before a point begins. Ear-nose-ear. I’m not a mental healthcare professional, but I’m thinking Nadal is somewhere on the OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) spectrum. But clearly not to the point where it hurts his game.

Tsonga gave him a good first set. Both guys held serve six times, and then won their first 10 points while serving on the tiebreaker. Tsonga lost the 11th point, on serve, and then Rafa served out to win the tiebreak 7-5. One service point not held, and that was that.

Nadal finally broke down Tsonga in the second set, and it ended 7-6, 6-2.

The championship pitted world No. 2 Djokovic versus No. 3 David Ferrer. With $250,000 going to the winner. (In addition to whatever the appearance fees are, for the six players here, No. 8 Stanilas Warinka being the other.)

I love David Ferrer. He doesn’t have elite talent, but he has a huge heart, and he’s supremely fit, and if you can’t hit winners against him he will run you into the ground and probably beat you. That’s why he is No. 3 in the world, at the age of 31.

Ferrer broke Djokovic early, and had a chance to go up 4-1, and was at 40-love, on serve. But Djokovic ran off five points to break back, won the next game at love, and for the next half hour was just overpowering. No one in the world would have been able to stand up to that.

Every ball he hit was deep and flat and in a corner somewhere, and even David Ferrer couldn’t run down all of them.

It ended 7-5, 6-2. Ferrer never gave up. He never does. But Djokovic was that good. He never gave Ferrer a chance to breathe.

So, what else did we learn from our sixth-row position?

–Nadal walks on the outside of his feet. He must wear out his shoes on the outside edges. And it makes sense he has knee problems. His feet are rolled over a bit. And he does do weird, OCD-like things with his water bottles during the changeovers.

–Djokovic is a human performance machine. He is whippet lean, all sinew and bone, made for those five-hour marathons in the finals of majors. TV adds 10 pounds? Maybe so, because Djokovic in person looks like he could run a marathon every day for a week.

–Tsonga is in better shape than usual; he was overcome, not out-worked. His afro is bigger than usual. A new look, or just behind a few weeks?

–David Ferrer is David Ferrer. Smaller, not as strong as the other guys. He always tells everyone that the elite players are just better than he is, and he is right. It’s not a defense mechanism ahead of choking in a loss. He just is not as good. He doesn’t serve like they do (and “they” is Rafa, Novak and Murray, when he isn’t just back from back surgery), he doesn’t hit as hard, and the only advantage he might have is doggedness. He is no worse than the fifth-best player on the planet, but he works in an era where the three guys just named, as well as Roger Federer, brought more to the court than Ferrer does.

The speed of the game, and how hard the players hit — always reinforced in person. Returning serve seems both a miracle and a mystery to me.

So, Nos 1-2-3 and 10 in four hours. Lunch in the VIP lounge beforehand. Not bad. And close enough to see the sweat drip off Ferrer’s face.

Not going to happen at the monster venues. But at Abu Dhabi’s 5,000-capacity tennis court … it can.