NEW YORK—Each year, it feels like the heat and humidity in New York gradually, painfully, escalate through the qualifying week at the U.S. Open. This 90-degree tradition held true today at Flushing Meadows. It was, for the most part, a scorcher. The tournament has installed a set of giant, cool-air-blowing fans in the middle of the grounds. They were a popular destination today.
Brutal weather is appropriate for the qualies, where the tension rises with each day. It peaks on Friday, when every match is literally show—as in make it to the Show—or go home. The sport doesn’t get any more stark than it does today. Winners get to play in the U.S. Open, and, just as important, make the money that comes with playing in the U.S. Open. With this year’s pay raise for the game’s rank-and-file, there’s more of that money than ever—roughly $30,000 just for reaching the main draw, enough to pay quite a few of a journeyman’s or journeywoman’s expenses over the course of a season.
All around Flushing Meadows today players were having their own mini-Grand Slam moments. What would that kind of pressure do to these men and women, who presumably don’t fare as well under it as the players we see on TV? How would they react to victory and defeat? I spent the day popping from court to court to find out. From Court 4 on one side of the grounds to Court 17 on the other, emotion was the main theme of this afternoon: joy, relief, bitterness, disappointment. The other theme, played out after every match, was the stone-faced handshake. Today there were no hugs, no air kisses, no friendly taps on the shoulder, no smiles, and no words exchanged between the competitors after any of the matches that I watched. The gulf between winner and loser was too great for the pretense of camaraderie.
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A good crowd has turned out early to get a first-hand look at tennis’s latest giant killer, and future trivia question, Lukas Rosol. He brings the same upright energy and supersized swings that he brought to his match with Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon, but they’re having the opposite effect against Guido Pella of Argentina—everything worked that day; nothing does today. Rosol looked upbeat and aggressive against Nadal. Today he looks antic and agitated. In truth, though, there isn’t much difference in his demeanor. He’s just not executing today. New York fans being who they are, they treat Rosol like a member of the family—“Let’s do this, Luke!—and try to rouse him, but his shots never start falling.
At 3-5 in the second set, Rosol double faults for 15-40. After the ball hits the net, he starts walking slowly backwards, staring straight ahead, realizing that this is it, the Open is closing up before his eyes. On the next point, the first match point, you can hear Pella breathing a little harder than normal—this is when you just want the other guy to miss. Rosol obliges by hitting a forehand 10 feet over the baseline. Pella throws out his fists, and a group of his friends in the first row throw theirs back toward him. They yell at each other for a few seconds in an explosion of relief. On the other side of the net, Rosol, with slow and careful deliberation, slams his racquet into the court.
Kristen Flipkens is up a set on Catalina Castano, and she leads her 5-4 in a second-set tiebreaker. The two players begin a long rally, sliding each other corner to corner in exhausting fashion. Flipkens, like Pella, is breathing more heavily than normal. You can feel her doing what so many of us do when we’re just a point or two from victory: she’s trying so hard that it’s counterproductive. She doesn’t get much pace on her shots, but she eventually wins the point anyway. She bends down low and clenches her fists—one more point to go. Flipkens wins it when Castano double faults for the match. The scene is exactly like the end of the French Open men’s final this year. Castano, in the role of Novak Djokovic, slumps forward after missing her second serve; Flipkens, in the role of Rafael Nadal, drops to her knees in prayerful joy.
Flipkens, a Belgian, was the No. 1 junior in the world many years ago, and it was thought by some that she would follow in the footsteps of her countrywomen Clijsters and Henin. Clijsters herself had been skeptical, and she was proven right. But Flipkens doesn’t care about any of that right now.
When you generally have no idea who the players are at a tournament, it’s the little things that set them apart and make you like them. Such as the way Jana Cepelova of the Czech Republic wears her visor. Whether it’s intentional or not, there’s a sort of hip-hop style to the way she turns the brim to the side of her head a bit and flattens it out. It makes her look a little frazzled, like she’s working hard out there.
Cepelova, the third seed in the women’s qualies, has frazzled her way through two matches, but she can’t make it through a third. She and her opponent, Nastassja Burnett of Italy, lash forehands at each other through a desperate second set. Neither woman hits hard enough to put the ball away immediately; their rallies look like two punch-drunk fighters throwing round-houses at each other that never quite connect. As her misses mount, Cepelova begins to stare at her coach. Anger and resignation are mixed in her face.
The set is decided on a Burnett backhand at 5-3, 30-30 that may have been in and may have been out. It’s called in, and Cepelova takes a very long look at it before finally, grudgingly moving on. When Burnett wins the match a few minutes later, she raises her left arm and brings it down wildly, in an unrehearsed gesture of relief. The two players look past each other at the handshake. Their palms make a quick, flat whap when they meet.
Jimmy Wang and Marius Copil have been out on Court 8, the deepest side court, long enough to draw a crowd. Asian fans joust with Romanians in their support, and people stand on the bleachers of the next court over to get a view. The sun is dropping, but it’s more painfully humid than it has been all day. After three hours of long rallies, Wang and Copil—the tennis match, not the law firm—are both exhausted. When they change sides in the third-set tiebreaker, each can barely make it to the sideline. They spend far longer than would normally be allowed drinking and toweling off and catching their breaths. When they finally get to the other side, Copil ends three rallies with shanked ground strokes long. When the last one lands beyond the baseline, Wang drops his racquet and raises his fists skyward. He looks a little like Roger Federer did after winning the 2010 Australian Open.
The two players slowly make their way to the net as the crowd applauds, and it appears that, for the first time all day, the players will congratulate each other when they shake hands. After that battle, how could they not? Wang and Copil extend their arms and lock palms, but they stay silent. There’s nothing to say. Just three points have separated them over the course of three hours. But one’s in the show, and the other’s going home.