On the packed 7 train on the way to the Open on Tuesday, I was standing next to a mom with her two tennis-crazy boys, about 9 and 12 years old. Halfway out to Flushing, the mom realized that she didn’t have her tickets. (This meant that they’d have to go stand in the ticket line to get them reprinted, which of course would lose them quite a bit of time—and our train was inching along as it was.) The furious older child shouted, “Mom! Next time don’t put on eyeliner and make sure you have the tickets!”
Luckily for the fabled joys of motherhood, the younger boy turned to his brother and said, “Shut up!” Incidentally, the older child is a big Djokovic fan, and the younger child loves Donald Young. Make of that what you will.
After that terrible anecdote, here’s a picture of Rolo Tomassi’s cute butter-loving son, Declan, with Pete at qualies last week. Rolo, I am sure that your son will never shout at you like that. Partly because I am sure that a tennis addict like you will never forget the tickets.
I had a wonderful time at the Open, not least because I met several Tribe members: Rolo, Ray Stonada, Snoo Foo, and D-Wiz, and I also got to talk some more to our chieftain Pete. If you haven’t met these folks, I really hope you get a chance to someday, because they are all incredibly nice and fun to talk to. Pete looks exactly like his photos, except for the mug-shot-like one on his media credential, and is as genial and funny as you could hope.
This was my first trip to the Open, as you may have read, and I returned dirty, tired, and extremely happy. I could write a whole lot, but here’s a quick list:
The Best: Live tennis is completely different from TV. Likewise, the epic quality of Ashe is totally different from the outer courts, where you’re so close to the players you can see their sweat bead. There’s nothing as unnerving as making accidental eye contact with a player, either. I caught some glares from Florian Mayer as I was sitting in the second row with Snoo Foo, and he’d have drilled holes through David Ferrer if he could.
The Surprising: Bathrooms and water fountains are neither as hard to find nor as impossibly crowded as I feared. Lines are long, but they move fast.
The Ballboys: I saw one whose head was practically level with the back wall of Ashe. And one tiny one who looked like he was about eight years old.
The Most Annoying: The chatty fan. During Safin-Dancevic, my friend and I were sitting in front of a group of female friends. One of them didn’t shut up until the last two points of the third and final set tiebreak. I admire the lung power that could last that long -- I’m not kidding you, it was three hours of continuous talking. Topics included John and Sylvia’s marriage, the wonderful manicure that her daughter got recently, the dry cleaners’ receipt that gives you $2 off Coldstone Creamery, Sam Querrey (you would think this was a blessed relief, but she didn’t seem to know much about tennis)… you get the idea. Our glares were not as powerful as Mayer's. My friend had to leave her seat with a headache.
The Star-Spotting: I saw Richard Williams and Thomas Blake leaving the media center (separately). I saw Djokovic on the practice courts. Sadly, I did not see Federer, either playing or walking the grounds. It leaves me something to do next year.
The Truth: Blake’s footspeed really is astounding. Isner looks like a tennis player on stilts; I couldn’t get over it. You can see Jankovic's smile all the way from the top of the stadium.
The Matches: The most enjoyable match I saw was probably Henman-Tursunov, with all the brilliant net play and the question of whether this would be it for Henman (quite early on, I thought that wouldn’t be the case). The least enjoyable was Nadal-Jones, which I actually left to go see Henman. Nadal was hurting, but Jones looked totally outclassed opposite him. It bodes very ill for Nadal that the match wasn’t a blowout.
The Sunburn: I did my best with the sunblock, but I see the faint raccoon lines from my sunglasses.
Hope you all have a wonderful time watching the Open! Send photos!
-Heidi