I felt it way up on the roof of my mouth on Wednesday and knew I was doomed. It was an unpleasantly familiar sensation, a scratchy irritation that compelled me to stick my tongue up there and rub as hard as I could, as if that were going to relieve anything. There was no hope; a cold was on the way, and I knew that spending 10 hours a day in the press room at the U.S. Open, the least functional of all the Grand Slam press rooms, where the bathroom is tiny, the coffee machine is empty, and the water bottles are always disappearing, was not going to help. Short of a transatlantic flight, I couldn’t imagine a worse place to nurse a cold.
I moved sluggishly around the grounds until yesterday, hoping it would vanish as quickly and mysteriously as it had . But yesterday it struck full force and put me on the couch, which is where I stayed on Sunday. This is bad timing, obviously, but it’s not the disaster it might have been in previous years, when there was a good deal less coverage of the Open on TV. Between ESPN, CBS, and Tennis Channel, I’ve gotten to see as much, if not more, of the most relevant matches from this weekend. If I’d been at my desk typing, I almost certainly wouldn’t have made it out to the Dent-Navarro thriller on the Grandstand on Friday, and I would likely have been in transit back to Brooklyn right about the time that John Isner and Andy Roddick were beginning their fifth-set tiebreaker on Saturday. As It is, I caught them both, and I'm glad I did.
Of course, there’s the small matter of not being on-site, which has definite advantages for a blog. So I’ll mix it up today, with a salvage-job notebook that’s a little bit live and a little bit tube.
—Most improved on-air presence: Lindsay Davenport is in the studio on the Tennis Channel this year, and she appears more sure of herself than she has when I’ve seen her in the past. On Sunday, she brought her own experience in losing a tight, overtime Wimbledon final—to Venus Williams in 2005—to the table when talking about Andy Roddick. She said that no matter how well you feel, or how well you’re hitting the ball, it takes some time before a match like the one he lost to Roger Federer gets out of your system and stops affecting your outlook on the court.
—Best observations: He’s not the smoothest interviewer by any stretch, and he's too chatty during matches, but for detailed knowledge of today’s players, and the pros and cons of their games, Tennis Channel’s Justin Gimelstob is the go-to guy, more so than Brad Gilbert and Darren Cahill on ESPN. In the first-set tiebreaker between Isner and Roddick, Gimel started by saying that Isner has an outstanding record in breakers—I think he’s now won 17 of his last 19—because he gets so many free points on his serve while at the same time getting so many returns in play because of his long wing span. This proved prescient a few minutes later, when Isner steamrolled Roddick in the first breaker, and again when he won a fifth-set tiebreaker a few hours later by winning six points on his serve and sneaking a passing shot past Andy for the lone mini-break. It's a simple matter of math that favors Isner in these situations, Gimelstob said—more free points for him means less margin for error for his opponent. It makes me think Isner’s run at the Open isn’t over.
—Jimmy Connors on Tennis Channel: Who would have thought the once-bloodthirsty Jimbo would be so deferential to Martina Navratilova?
—What are the perks of being a reporter at the U.S. Open? You get hit up for tickets you can’t possibly provide, and you get to eat $12 corned beef sandwiches for nothing. More fun, though, is receiving an invitation to the USTA’s President’s Box for one session each year. This is located directly in front of the TV broadcast booths on the south end of Ashe Stadium. I could get used to a civilized evening of tennis there. You eat dinner and dessert in the dining room, with a waiter brining wine, you talk tennis with the international cast of muckety-mucks at your table—last year a woman from France who is involved with the ITF cheerfully referred to herself as a “frog”—and then you walk down to the best seats in the house. The cast of characters on any given night can seem like a future edition of a reality game show: Last Wednesday, when I was there, New York politician Sheldon Silver was a rows ahead of me, Rihanna was behind me and to my right, rooting vociferously for Serena Williams, and Star Jones was by herself for a long stretch on the other side. I ask you: Is a celebrity sitting alone in public still a celebrity? After years of being in the nosebleeds or in the press seats to the side of the court, I always get the feeling when I’m here that the entire event has been orchestrated for the pleasure of the people in this box.
But my favorite part of the Prez Box experience is seeing the vintage framed photographs that line its walls. These black and white shots, many owned by the Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, display the sport at its most historically elegant. There are shots of Maurice McLoughlin, the California Comet, raring back for his famous serve, and the aristocratic, white-sweatered Sidney Wood extending his body halfway across the court after a backhand volley. My favorite photo, though, is from the 1930 ATA Championships in Georgia. The ATA was the African-American version of the USTA, when that organization was whites-only (the color barrier was broken by Althea Gibson in 1950). In the photo, four black men—two doubles teams—pose handsomely at the end of a day of tennis. They each carry two uncovered wooden racquets and are dressed even more elegantly, in cardigans, overcoats, cream slacks, and Jack Purcell-style sneakers, than their white counterparts of that era. I always ask myself: Who were these impressive-looking men who have been lost to tennis history? This time I’m going to try to find out.
—The first week offered reporters two must-see press conferences: Andre Agassi’s, after his brief return, and Marat Safin’s, after his farewell first-round loss. To see and hear Agassi from close range talk about all the thought that went into his foundation over the years and expound on his life philosophy with such keen and infectious energy is to realize what a powerful intelligence Agassi owns. Andre’s father says he’s the smartest person he’s ever met, and John McEnroe has said something similar.
What did Safin’s presser reveal to us about this seemingly tortured man? His voice a little higher than I remember it, he was resigned but upbeat, happy about his career and the timing of his exit, but unsure about what the future held—“I think good times are ahead,” he said with something that sounded like optimism. Safin, it’s clear now, wasn’t made for the spotlight. He didn’t grow and flourish under it, the way Agassi did; he never even learned to tolerate it the way Pete Sampras did. The attention seemed unnatural to him. He wondered what the fuss was about, he was just another person, after all. In this way, Safin seems less like a self-destructive wild man than he does a typical person. He was just more honest than most jocks about his own relative unimportance in the world. He had too little ego for a champion. Maybe this explains so much of his appeal: More than with most star athletes, we could see our own flaws and shortcomings in Marat.
—We’ve talked about Federer’s friendly intimidation of potential challengers, the way his presence can make other players shy away from giving their fiercest effort. I felt like the same was true of Nicolas Almagro against Rafael Nadal today. Almagro controlled most of the rallies but still played just well enough to lose three close sets. When he got a break, he couldn’t handle it. Watching him double-fault on a break point in the third set, I thought that sometimes it’s not the things you do on a tennis court that win you matches, but the things you don’t do. Serving for the match, one thing was virtually guaranteed: Nadal wouldn’t double fault to throw the game away.
—It seems like old times watching the Open on TV on Labor Day weekend. As a kid, I would have it on in the living room while a friend and I would go out and throw a football back and forth down the street. We’d come back in and watch a no-name like Eric Korita challenge a seed and thrill the crowd before falling in four sets, just like Jesse Witten did this weekend. If Wimbledon appeared historic on TV, the Open always radiated tension—it was kill or be killed, with no niceties about it. Over the last decade, that’s been especially true on the women’s side; the Williams sisters have been a polarizing force among tennis fans, even U.S. tennis fans, and their matches elicit strong emotions. So it felt like déjà vu today to sit in the living room, see the late afternoon sun at Flushing Meadows, and feel the tension in the stadium as Kim Clijsters tried to finish off the third set against Venus. I enjoyed seeing Kim today. Her reactions are always very human and transparent, without being histrionic. I also got the sense that the old mom has been influenced by the new generation. That “come on!” she brought out after key points didn't sound anything like her old fiance Lleyton Hewitt's; it sounded suspiciously like Melanie Oudin's.
Speaking of old meeting new, I’m typing this as Taylor Dent is getting set to continue his throwback run against Andy Murray. Can the serve and volley survive a state-of-the-art return like Murray’s in the future? We'll know a little more after tonight.
Have a good Labor Day. I should be back at work myself.