Making It (and Not Making it) in New York

NEW YORK—Two days, everybody plays: That’s the recipe for the first round at Wimbledon and the Australian Open, and it’s one that the U.S. Open, after nearly four decades, finally followed on Monday and Tuesday. For years, the Open has spread the opening round over three days and six separate sessions. The idea was to keep as many big names in the tournament until CBS took over the TV coverage on Labor Day weekend. But what was good for the folks at home wasn’t always so good for the fans on the grounds. The entertainment could get pretty thin, and hard to find, by Wednesday afternoon.

But CBS departed this year, and so did the three-day first round. It was easy to see the difference, and the improvement, on Monday and Tuesday here. Everywhere you looked, it seemed, there was a player you recognized. And everywhere you looked, there was also a fan. The Open reported record opening-day attendance on Monday, while ESPN, its new TV partner, reported record ratings.

Of course, you still have to be careful what you wish for. Now that ESPN is in charge, they’ve decided to try out their own innovation for the folks at home. On Monday, Pam Shriver recorded the first-ever mid-match interview, with Coco Vandeweghe. We’ll see if it catches on, or becomes as dreaded as the chats the top players must endure before they walk on court.

But that’s a topic for another day. For this one, here’s a quick look around the still-crowded, and very hot, grounds as the first-round came to a close. Tuesday was survival-of-the-fittest tennis at Flushing Meadows.

But it does seem to increase the humidity inside Arthur Ashe Stadium. Or at least that’s how it felt during the Monday night match between Rafael Nadal and Borna Coric, when the air was very still and the sweat was pouring off both players. We’ll see what it’s like on a windy day, but it seems likely that it won’t swirl quite so freely through the arena anymore.

It’s also hard to tell what the atmosphere will be like when the roof is complete next year, but the signs on the first day were promising. Its brings more shade and less glare to the bleachers, and gives the place a new, sleek, indoor-outdoor vibe. Even when it’s not raining, the roof may be just what this much-unloved arena needed all along.

That would be Donald Young, of course, not Trump. And if DY has yet to take a full bite out of the Big Apple, the Chicago native has certainly put his stamp on Court 17 here. Three years after beating Stan Wawrinka in a fifth-set tiebreaker on that court, Young came back from two sets down for the first time in his career to stun 11th-seeded Gilles Simon, 2-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4.

This really was a case where the court made a difference, or at least the fans surrounding that court.

“You gave me so much fun, so much energy,” DY said afterward, “thanks for sticking around.”

For about an hour and a half, they didn’t have much reason to stay with him. Down two sets and 0-3 in the third, Young appeared to have checked out; the most entertaining thing he could come up with was yelling "Freak me!—rather than something worse—after his unforced errors. DY was going through the motions, just swinging and making contact until the inevitable happened. Except that this time the inevitable didn’t happen.

“I had nothing to lose and just started hitting out,” Young said. Soon he had broken back, taken the lead, and won the next two sets. By the time he returned from a bathroom break at the start of the fifth set, the crowd was chanting his name, “Don-ald! Don-ald!” It sounded a little like the “Reg-gie!” chants that once echoed through Yankee Stadium over in the Bronx. Maybe DY really has taken New York.

“Mental has been a struggle for me,” Young said of his wildly erratic career. If he could play in front of this crowd every day, it might not be.

Thanasi Kokkinakis, Alexandr Zverev, Andrei Rublev, and Jared Donaldson are four highly touted teens who were all in action on Tuesday. All four were wearing the same all-red Nike shorts and shirts; mixed, in a bizarre contrast, with bright green sneakers and socks. All four, as teenagers trying to do a man’s job on a hot day will tend to do, let their tempers flare. And all four went down to defeat.

Zverev dropped an F-bomb and harangued the umpire. Rublev, after nearly tripping over one of his big green shoes, tried to rip it off his foot in a fit of rage. But Kokkinakis had it worst of all. After playing well enough to go up two sets to one on Richard Gasquet, he hit a wall of cramps in the fourth. What had been a festively packed crowd on little Court 5 went deathly quiet as Kokkinakis staggered from one side of the court to the other—there were some scary moments as he reeled.

“I actually felt all right,” said Kokkinakis, who cramped once before in a Grand Slam match. “My energy levels were good, and then I went up to hit a swing volley or something, and both my calves—it was just disaster.”

“I was like, ‘This is torturous for everyone to watch as well.’ Yeah, I’m pretty shattered.”

“Your health is important,” chair umpire Mo Lahyani cautioned Kokkinakis at one point. But in the old Aussie tradition, the kid soldiered on for as long as he could. The end came at 0-2 in the fifth, when Kokkinakis finally trudged toward the net to shake hands. Before he got there, though, he mustered up the energy for one final racquet smash.

That’s the thought that came to mind as I watched Gasquet make his way around Court 5 in his match with Kokkinakis. He had warmer support from the New York crowd than I would have expected. Maybe, I thought, it was his emotional Wimbledon win over Stan Wawrinka in July that had resonated. Certainly it wasn’t the memory of him being defaulted as a teenage qualifier here for throwing his racquet and hitting a linesman in the face.

In the end, I thought it was because Gasquet, like Roger Federer, feels like a throwback now. He uses a one-handed backhand, he wears classic preppy tennis clothes, he doesn't stick his chest out or parade around the court or hit the ball 1,000 miles an hour, and he generally keeps himself to himself.

Just as I was thinking these pleasant thoughts about Reeshard, a played I've always liked and usually rooted for, he got angry with a ball kid and batted a ball into the back tarp, not too far from a line judge. Even throwbacks aren't what they used to be, I guess, but I'll take this one.