My First U.S. Open
I went to the U.S. Open for the first time on Wednesday afternoon and wanted to take the time to pass on the highlights. I’m a former high school tennis players that’s taken up the game again this summer, so I’m a reasonably big fan of the sport, but I’d only been to smaller tournaments in New Haven, Conn., never one like a major.
The trip, which costs $90 and is put on annually by the Lee Community Tennis Association, includes a $52 ticket good for all courts and bus fare, which is a pretty reasonable price considering you’d have to pay for parking, gas, and drive home after sitting out in the sun all day if you went on your own.
I guess the thing that stood out the most was simply how close you can get to the athletes. While watching a second-round match between China’s Li Na and Italy’s Sara Errani on one of the outer courts, we sat in the front row. Now, front row is always a good seat, but this one was unreal. We could literally smell the aftershave of the baseline judge. The only thing separating us from the man was a chain-link fence. He sat directly in front of us, and diagonally to the right. Imagine peering at pitches over the shoulder of a baseball umpire and that was our viewpoint. And this for a match that featured a Chinese player who, just a short time earlier, had beaten Venus Williams and lost in the bronze medal match of the Summer Olympics.
Errani, who is 5-foot-4, 132 pounds, won’t be compared with Venus or Serena Williams very often. But yesterday, to casual fans from my vantage point, she was a reminder of just how well trained tennis athletes are. While serving in traditional tennis attire, a tank top and a skirt, Errani’s stretching serve lifted her shirt to reveal a chiseled set of abs. Sometimes, while watching tennis players play, I forget the type of conditioning it takes to run sprints for a solid 90 minutes or put enough torque on a first serve.
The only negatives where the typical combination of New York and stadium prices. A sausage as $7.50, a basket of chicken tenders and fries $9.50 and the official cocktail of the Open, a honey deuce, made with Grey Goose vodka, was selling for $13.
Over the course of the day I ventured into each of the areas you read about. Arthur Ashe Stadium was huge, but didn’t house a bad seat. I missed the most dramatic moment of the day there – second-seeded Jelena Jankovic’s survival in a third-set tiebreak – but did catch some of Novak Djokovic’s dismantling of Arnaud Clement. Clement is a very solid player and seemed, to me, to be playing quite nicely. Yet, Djokovic sent him home with a stress-free straight-set victory and wasn’t broken at all.
I also caught portions of matches from Janko Tipsarevic, a personal favorite who battle Roger Federer to five sets in Wimbledon and showed nicely in Wimbledon. He also reads the work of famous authors while on tour (Fyodor Doystoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). Any athlete that does that type of thinking is an inspiration to me, but unfortunately, Tipsarevic couldn’t think his way out of an ankle injury and lost to Sam Warburg.by forfeiting after one game in the second set.
We also saw a terrific bit of doubles from the 12th-seeded mens team of Pablo Cuevas and Luis Horna, and the return from injury of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the Muhammad Ali look-alike who, not so long ago this year, advanced to an Australian Open final.
While he hasn’t been heard of since, prompting many to think of that run as a fluke, it’s been an injury, rather than poor play, that’s kept him quiet. He had surgery in May for a torn right meniscus and was playing his first match since then against Santiago Ventura.
Ventura played well early, but tired late, losing in four sets. Despite the rather routine win, Tsonga played to the crowd after a big fourth-set point and pumped his fists afterward, declaring this was not just any other day for him at the U.S. Open.
You could say the same for me, so a big thank you to Ed and Clare Lahey, who helped put the event together for the CTA, as well as the folks that made my first visit such an enjoyable one.