America's Court: Much has been gained, and a little lost, in the new Grandstand

NEW YORK—“Let’s go, Frances!” a woman in the 10th row cries. She doesn’t say it loudly enough for her player of choice, 18-year-old Frances Tiafoe, to hear her, but it’s the thought that counts, right? “He’s improved so much,” she gushes, mostly to herself.

As she speaks, she also whips a small, yellow fan back and forth in front of her face. The air on this late-August afternoon at Flushing Meadows is stingingly humid, and her yellow fan is just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of others that buzz back and forth around the bleachers. If nothing else, the U.S. Open’s new arena—the freshly constructed, 10,000-seat Grandstand—is off to a hot start on its first day.

A hot start, and a complicated one. In the afternoon’s featured match, the U.S. crowd is faced with a choice: Do they back Tiafoe, a Maryland native, or his opponent from North Carolina, John Isner?

The match-up is all contrasts: 18-year-old baseliner vs. 31-year-old ace machine, 6'2" vs. 6’10", white vs. African-American. By the second set, there’s a split among the fans, not just in their loyalties, but in the way they express them. The Tiafoe supporters, who are in the majority, band together to chant “Fran-ces!”; they’re rooting for the new face. Isner’s backers, who are fewer and farther between, do their best to make up for it by bellowing, “Let’s go, Johhhhnnnn!” from the far reaches of the stadium. In its mix of unity and division, America’s newest tennis court feels a little like America itself in this hotly contested summer of 2016. And while the Grandstand is only a few hours old, it already feels right at home at the Open.

After 10 days of watching tennis in the Grandstand, that initial impression hasn’t changed. It’s already hard to imagine the National Tennis Center without this court. It’s close enough to Arthur Ashe Stadium to sit in its shadows in the morning, but striking and substantial enough to create its own atmosphere. Even the famously hard-to-please, tradition-loving tennis pros seem to have been won over.

“I used to love the old Grandstand,” Caroline Wozniacki said after winning her first-round match in the new one. “But I walked in there today and just thought, ‘This court is really awesome.’ It’s a beautiful court. It’s going to be a court with a lot of special matches on it in the future.”

“It was an absolute pleasure to play out here,” Tiafoe said after his eventual loss to Isner. “It’s the best atmosphere I’ve ever played in in my life.”

As of last year, or even last month, this level of acceptance would have come as a surprise to most veteran players and Open-goers. As Wozniacki said, the old Grandstand was a beloved venue. In fact, the 6,000-seat show court was supposed to have hosted its final match in 2015, but it was called back into duty over the first week in 2016.

When it is finally demolished, something of the old, original Open at Flushing Meadows will go with it. The new Grandstand is a more beautiful arena, it seats more people, it allows people to circulate more easily, it has a sleeker design, and its location just to the west of Ashe makes it much more accessible. The benches have backs on them now, and there are no pillars obstructing your view.

The old Grandstand wasn’t meant for tennis; it was built as a performance space for the 1964 World’s Fair. But because of that, it was a quintessentially New York and authentically democratic arena. There were no reserved seats, and the best of them put you within a few feet of the players. It was the only court at the Open where fans lined up early to get a prime spot, and happily stayed in that spot all day.

That could prove to be true of the new Grandstand as well; the seats on its west side, which are partially shaded, are already prime real estate. Otherwise the new arena couldn’t be more different from the old. With its circular shape, futuristic mesh covering and west-to-east slope, the arena looks like a UFO—or, if you happen to be hungry, a giant cookie—that has just crashed into Corona Park. In that sense, it fits with the retro-futuristic style of the Unisphere, and the other World’s Fair relics nearby. From the Grand Central Parkway next door, it’s the Grandstand you see first, rather than Arthur Ashe Stadium, and that’s an improvement. Let’s just hope the new court remains at its current slope. Like the rest of the Tennis Center, it’s built on landfill, and slowly sinking.

Inside, rather than putting you on top of the players, the sides of the Grandstand fan out quickly. There are also, unfortunately but not surprisingly, 2,000 reserved seats at the bottom. So far, this shift from  democracy to capitalism has been noticeable mostly in the evenings. When a match went late in the old Grandstand, fans jammed the benches; it was the perfect last stop before you had to make the long trek across the boardwalk to the subway. This isn’t the case at the new Grandstand, which is on the other side of the grounds, far from the exits.

Even when fans do stay into the evening, though, most of them can’t get close to the court. On the Open's first Tuesday, the U.S. No. 1, Steve Johnson, staged an epic late-day comeback, but even in the decisive fifth set the lower section remained empty—on TV, it looked like virtually no one was there. Johnson’s win should have generated an electric atmosphere, but no match in the Grandstand has had that “U.S. Open at night" vibe yet.

The new stadium is at its best during the heat of the day, when the sun is out and the players are doing hard battle. The tournament scheduled quality, American-heavy matches there in the early afternoons, and the bleachers were full, especially those on the shaded side. While you’re not on top of the players anymore, you don’t feel too far from them, either. Unlike the colossal, multi-tiered Ashe, the Grandstand is compact enough that all 10,000 people can feel like they’re part of one crowd. Watching from the west, you also feel as if you’re part of a bigger crowd; the stadium rises on that side, allowing spectators to look down on the masses milling around the grounds. The Open, with this latest expansion, has pulled off the neat trick of making the Tennis Center feel less spread out, and more energized at its core.

While the grounds-pass holder is pushed upward, there is some consolation in the freedom that’s offered there. To get to the general admission seats, you walk up a set of steps and around an outer walkway. When I went up the first time, I asked myself, “Where are the lines? Where are the ushers?” The answer is: There aren’t any. You don’t have to wait for a changeover to take your seat; you don’t have to ask anyone permission to go anywhere. And unlike in Ashe, if you walk down far enough, you can find a decent seat. That’s a refreshing, relaxing change for an event that has, out of necessity, become more regimented and security-heavy over the last 15 years.

Whatever the Grandstand’s strengths and weaknesses, the Open’s fans have wasted no time making  it feel like home. They head up to the top benches and lie down for naps, the way they did in the old Grandstand. They get behind old standbys like the Bryan brothers and new stars like Dominic Thiem, who was serenaded with “Happy Birthday” on Saturday. And, as always, they offer unsolicited advice to any player who will listen. “Approach down the line, Milos!” one frustrated fan called to Raonic from the top row (I was thinking the same thing after Milos Raonic went crosscourt for the third straight time). “Don’t go for too much, Nick!” another volunteer coach advised Kyrgios. The Aussie, who is highly attuned to everything around him, seemed to take his advice when he won the next point with a safe forehand down the line.

Even some of the old, strange New York-tennis rituals continue. When the former Grandstand was filled to capacity, we used to walk up the staircases outside the arena, bend down or lie on the concrete, and watch what we could—half the court, if we were lucky—from any opening we could find. That’s how I saw Aaron Krickstein beat Vitas Geruliaitis in a five-set epic in 1983. I had a hard imagining anyone being desperate enough to do that in the new, more casual Grandstand, but I was wrong. The back of the stadium looks out on a set of side courts, but you have to contort yourself to get a view of them. That’s what I caught a group of fans doing this week. You can never get enough tennis at the Open.

Once a match is over, the New York fans also bridge their divides. My favorite moment of the first week came at the end of the Tiafoe-Isner match. The two players ended up in an embrace at the net, and the crowd put aside personal rooting interests and cheered for both—they were both good guys, after all, and this was only a sport. Unified is not the word most people would use to describe America in the summer of 2016, but that’s how we felt for a moment on America’s newest tennis court.