NEW YORK—On Saturday evening the young Canadian fireballer Milos Raonic stepped up to the baseline in the Grandstand and belted his first practice serve. The ball made two sounds, one when it came off of his strings and the other when it collided, hard, with the tarp at the back of the court. Each was an explosion, stunning enough to draw gasps and laughs from the bleachers, and make heads in the front rows snap back. The announcement had been made; we were going to get some in-your-face tennis tonight.
And that’s why every one of the Grandstand’s 6,000 seats were taken for Raonic’s third-round match against James Blake. It’s true that Blake is a local favorite, but the prospect of seeing these two heavy hitters tee off against each other from close range made the match-up irresistible. Whatever the score or result, it wasn’t going to be as entertaining, as visceral and sensory and just plain loud, in the vast desert of Arthur Ashe Stadium, or even in the fairly intimate confines of Louis Armstrong or the new Court 17. Of the show courts, only the boxy Grandstand offers spectators, if they can get within 20 rows or so, the chance to feel a tennis match as well as look at it. The first sensation I have when I sit on that court and hear a 120-M.P.H. serve is that I’ve broken through a glass wall—I’m on the inside of the action.
As you’ve probably heard, the Grandstand, the third largest court at the Open, is going to be torn down soon. The USTA, as part of a long-term, $500 million renovation and expansion project, is planning to build a new, circular, 8,000-seat version on the other side of the National Tennis Center. They hope to start next year and have the project, which also includes constructing an entirely new Louis Armstrong Stadium, finished by 2016. Hopefully. The city and its various agencies still need to approve the proposal, which includes annexing nearby parkland. This year the tournament struggled to get its new Red Star Café finished in time—it was still being worked on less than 24 hours before the first round began. So the Grandstand might have a few more years in it.
Whenever it goes, though, the tournament will lose its last, largely unchanged link to the original National Tennis Center that debuted in 1978. The Grandstand’s big brother next door, Armstrong Stadium (the two were originally one arena, called the Singer Bowl), had its top tier removed in the late 1990s, and virtually everything else on the grounds has been revamped or added in recent years. Even Slew Hester, the USTA president who discovered the gritty, largely abandoned Flushing Meadows site while looking down from a plane that was landing at LaGuardia Airport in 1977, might not recognize the USTABJKNTC in all of its landscaped glory today.
Yet the Grandstand remains, like an historical site, as a reminder of the scale and feel of the old Open. It’s almost impossible to believe, as you cram yourself onto one of its backless benches, that for 20 years this was the Open’s second-largest court. The smoke from an incinerator fire drove Ivan Lendl off of it in 1981; a few days later, Queens boy Vitas Gerulaitis thrilled a packed house when he drove the Czech away again in a classic five setter. Brad Gilbert enraged Boris Becker when he pushed him to death in an epic upset here in 1987. And it has always been a home to big hitters, like Raonic, who have been snapping heads back for years. Taylor Dent and Fernando Gonzalez are two guys who come to mind who have frightened fans in the Grandstand. The high wall on one side of the court creates an echo that makes every well-struck ball sound like a gun shot. What could be more New York than that? And where else could you narrowly miss being hit by a half-pound of roast beef dropped by an overexcited fan leaning out from the walkway far above? That’s what happened to my friend Peter Bodo while he was minding his own business in the press seats one year.
There’s no question that the Open needs to be renovated, and more show-court space built. You can see that most clearly over Labor Day weekend. This past Saturday and Sunday, Ashe Stadium, with its nosebleed seats and generally uncompetitive matches, turned into a ghost town, while lines to get into Armstrong and the Grandstand, where the seats are closer and the matches better, stretched across the grounds. As one usher in the Grandstand put it yesterday, as he tried to avoid being mowed down by a wall of people rushing to get in, “1500 seats left, 40,000 people want them. That’s not going to work.” But it does work for the new bars, food stands, and clothing shops that have popped up over the last few years at Flushing Meadows. If you can’t get in to see the stars, and you aren’t especially interested in the junior matches on the outer courts, you can at least get a drink and a salmon salad.
The new Court 17 is a step in the right, realistic direction. The circular, mid-sized arena doesn’t have the intimacy of the Grandstand—you’re not close enough to break the glass wall—but it doesn’t send you into the boonies, either. Like the many mid-sized Australian Open stadiums that it resembles, the place creates a public, sporting atmosphere on a human scale. This year, my go-to spot when my work was done, and I wanted to watch some tennis for fun, were the seats at the top of the far end of Court 17. There you can hear the sounds of Corona Park behind you, and see the sun set over Ashe in front of you. If the new Grandstand is anything like 17, it will be a welcome addition and make attending the Open, on the whole, a more pleasant experience.
But it won’t be like the Grandstand we’ve known, and the Open won’t be like the Open we’ve known. Which is fine, as well as inevitable. The tournament outgrew Forest Hills, and it has outgrown the original Flushing Meadows. Still, is it necessary to eliminate the old Grandstand, and erase the history and aura, the upsets and sonic serves and rowdy scenes from the old Open, that it carries with it? That’s the New York way. The city is famous for stamping out its architectural past, as well as the flavor and resonance that goes with it, as it marches forward. That’s the way the man who had Armstrong and the Grandstand originally built, Robert Moses, always did it.
Whatever happens to it in the future, the court retains a unique vibe. Yesterday was the last day for singles matches on the Grandstand in 2012, and the last of those was the bizarre third-round roller-coaster run by Petra Kvitova and Marion Bartoli. As the match went to a third set, I made the long, familiar jog over from the press room. When I got there, the crowd was getting itself revved up for the third—is there anything better in tennis, when you’re watching it live and with other people, than the collective anticipation you feel at the start of a final, deciding set?
I could see from the outside that fans were doing a ragged version wave as they waited for Bartoli and Kvitova to walk back on. This was the same outside view I had in 1983, when I crouched down on a staircase to catch what I could of a 16-year-old Aaron Krickstein upsetting Gerulaitis. This crowd, almost 30 years later, sounded the same, ready to be entertained, and to be part of the entertainment. They even attempted a chant I never thought I would never hear in the U.S: “Let’s go, Bartoli!”
From the fourth row, I could see and hear in Kvitova what I had seen in so many other pros from this vantage point over the years: Just how amazing her swing and contact were, how pure and powerful it sounded. She lost the set 6-0, but to me the ferocious grace of Kvitova’s forehand was the highlight; you can’t appreciate it that way on TV, or from any other court at the Open. Like the other couple of thousand fans stretched out on the Grandstand bleachers—bleachers that may soon be no more—I was happy to be back inside the glass wall, seeing some in-your-face tennis, the way it should be in New York.
For all of Steve Tignor's reports from the U.S. Open, click here.