I made my first trip to the U.S. Open was in 1983, and I don’t think I’ve missed one since. I was 14 that year and came to Flushing with my parents and my sister, dressed in my full shiny blue Rossignol warm-up suit. It was new, as I remember. I’d wanted it because all the serious juniors had a warm-up with a dark sheen; it meant you were a player, though we didn’t use that word back then. We had a hellacious time parking at the National Tennis Center, winding around and around the stadium without getting any closer to it for what seemed like hours. I still get a tiny shiver of fear and aggravation when I see those impossibly convoluted roads and the parking lots they lead to, which are bounded by high fences like prison yards. Still, despite the delay, we got to the NTC gates way too early and I had to sit in the sun in my warm-up. Chris Evert, the defending champion that year, walked past us on her way into the grounds, shielded by what appeared to be a phalanx of bodyguards. She looked startlingly small, a tiny movie star in her sunglasses.
The Open, as we know, was smaller and rawer then, with less space and much less landscaping. It would be 14 years before the place would be expanded and renovated. Courts were jammed together at seemingly random angles. One, which particularly irritated the players, was directly behind Armstrong Stadium, which I seem to remember had escalators going up its sides in those days. When a player would toss the ball to serve from one end of the court, he or she would have to block out those glinting, moving machines and the hundreds of people they held. But it was a goldmine for fans, who jammed it to see Top 10 players up close. That first year, I couldn’t believe it was really Andres Gomez right in front of me. That court, needless to say, is long gone now.
A few years later, a three-day bus trip to the Open began to be organized among tennis fans in our town. We made the four-hour trip each Labor Day weekend, staying in Manhattan and marveling at the incredible—really, not believable—skyline of the city as we drove over the East River and out to Queens. Everything was super-scaled compared to where I lived, but somehow the sight of Manhattan made me feel bigger, not smaller, part of something mythic. It also made me feel energized—I can remember the ugly thrill of watching two guys in suits on a Manhattan avenue in a knock-down, drag-out fistfight. It was that kind of town then.
While the Open itself was smaller, it also wasn’t kinder of gentler. On the outer courts, small-town bus-trippers like my family felt a sense of urban menace in the sound of drums from the surrounding park. And Louis Armstrong Stadium was a little like the famously sinister Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia. Both were figures of pure concrete, where the roar of the crowd swelled up into an evil howl in the air above it. Ilie Nastase loved to whip up that howl and create an overwhelming sense of chaos that seemed to rise all the way the sky; Jimmy Connors loved to control it for his own purposes. You had to see those guys in Armstrong to fully understand them. This was tennis stripped of all its genteel protections, made as raw as New York concrete.
The best match I ever saw there, though, involved two nice guys, who used the audience for good rather than evil. Sometime in the late 80s, Yannick Noah and Tim Wilkison played a five-setter in Louis. Noah was a joy to watch as he floated all over the court an guided the ball anywhere he wanted, though he was never what you would call a winner. Wilkison was an utterly blue-collar Southerner, a consummate journeyman lefty who dove on cement and went by the nickname Dr. Dirt. He was an All-American Cold War hero in New York as well. One year he intentionally wore a red hat when he beat a Russian player on the Grandstand. Not too surprisingly, the deft and insouciant Frenchman and the lunchbucket American put on a great show for a full house on a late afternoon in the big court. The spirit of it can be summed up in one moment. Wilkison, customarily trying too hard, chased a ball around the net post, hit a winner, and ended up on Noah’s side of the court. Noah, without missing a beat, jumped onto Wilkison’s side and the two slapped hands at the net. Dr. Dirt ended up with an upset win in the fifth.
The vast majority of matches I’ve seen at the Open have not risen to anywhere near this level of entertainment—even Agassi-Sampras was kind of stiff by comparison. But just being at the event, just seeing the Andres Gomezes of the universe a few feet away, was always enough. That day, we got back on the bus right after Noah-Wilkison ended, still feeling the rush of the tennis and the crowd's friendly howl. I sat next to the window, looking at the draw—who did Dr. Dirt have next?—and at the skyline, which seemed to have taken on a warmer glow after the match we’d just seen. The man in front of me, a friend of my family’s, snapped a photo of Manhattan and asked if I’d had a good time that day. “Yeah," I said, thinking about, "Noah and Wilkison are my two favorite players.” I hadn’t known that before, but I knew it now. Their sporting, friendly spirit had made the Open, and New York, feel a little more like home.