By Thomas Swick
swickt@bellsouth.net
At 9:45 the atrium lobby of Le Parker Meridien was sporty with people in shorts and sneakers. The 10 o’clock shuttle was even more so. A young woman in uniform sat next to me, a doubles specialist, I learned, and the anti-Petkovic, answering my questions with only a few words. Sample: “Do you like all the travel?” “It’s part of the job.” “But do you enjoy it?” “Yes.” I went back to my Times.
At the entrance to the tennis center, her coach had his bag checked in front of me.
“Great,” the security man said, “a tennis player. You gonna win today, sir?”
“Only if I play the lotto. SHE’S gotta win,” he said, looking at my seatmate.
In the media center I picked up the day’s schedule and took a seat at El Expresso. Not given a work station, I have been laptop squatting. The first day I sat at the Trenton Times’ station, which I felt vaguely entitled to, having begun my journalism career at the paper. And I liked the sign – Times of Trenton – which gave my old paper an uncommon cachet.
Today I had a vague hope that El Expresso would help me write faster.
I was in the middle of a sentence when a tour group came through.
“We’re like animals in a zoo,” the woman next to me complained. But I rather liked it; after days of watching others, we now had people watching us.
Finished with my story, I headed out to become one of the watchers again. Though with notebook in hand. At a doubles match with a Romanian pair I talked to a journalist for a Romanian paper. There are quite a few Romanian players, the woman said, but as soon as they go, she will too.
I grabbed a quesadilla and sat with a man who’s been coming to the U.S. Open every first Friday since ’92. “It was much more crowded last year,” he said. “I think it’s because of the hurricane. People who got water are still cleaning up.”
Then over to the Grandstand, which is fast becoming my home away from home. What memories will rush in when, in years to come, watching on TV, I hear Cliff Drysdale say, “Let’s check what’s happening on the Grandstand court.”
The media box for the Peng Shuai-Julia Goerges match was unusually crowded, and I plopped down between two Chinese photographers. The one to my left aimed his enormous zoom sheepishly, and asked very kindly: “Is OK?” (Unlike the AP photographer the day before, who came and sat next to me and then blocked my view without a word.)
Peng Shuai won in straight sets. She started to leave after the handshake at the net, but the losing German insisted on giving her two kisses.
The next match pitted another German, Sabine Lisicki, against the young American Irina Falconi.
A couple sat down next to me. “We train her,” the woman said.
Falconi lost the first set 6-love, then walked to the wrong end of the court to start the second.
“My bad,” she said with an abashed smile as she passed the chair umpire.
After all my time on this court I kept noticing new things, like the words painted above the exit, an instruction to fans that now seemed like a prophetic warning for players: “Re-entry is not guaranteed.”
Also, at one point, the sound of the Long Island Railroad penetrated the match. I had always heard about the noise of planes at the Open – I was now watching them sail off in succession over the eastern stands – but not about trains.
Falconi took a game, and had a chance for another. After one well-played point, the woman next to me let out an ear-splitting whistle. “You’re going to be hearing that a lot, hopefully,” she said to me. “So I apologize.”
I never heard it again.
A little before six I took a seat on Court 6, for a mixed doubles match between Chan-Fyrstenberg and Vesnina-Paes. The light had taken on a poignant clarity, and the air was starting to turn that early autumn evening cool. Mixed doubles is probably the most overlooked type of tennis and yet it beautifully demonstrates the sport’s singularity, for on what other playing field can you find a team of both genders competing against another? And in what other sport do you find a Pole and a Chinese woman playing a Russian and an Indian? In tennis, east teams with west.
But another view was expressed over on Court 13, where Hradecka-Cermak were playing Kops-Jones-R. Ram.
“Mixed doubles is not fair,” a young Czech spectator confided to me. “It depends on how much gentleman you are.”
I knew what he was getting it, and I asked him if the man, serving to the woman, doesn’t always go for broke. “If it’s an important point, yes,” he said. “Normally, no.”
I asked what he thought of Berdych’s chances. He said that, as much as he liked his fellow countryman, when he plays Federer he always roots for Roger. “He’s amazing,” he said, in what was one of the finest testaments to Federer’s greatness that I’ve ever heard.
I met my friend Bob back on Court 6 for yet another mixed doubles match: Dulko-Schwank vs. Vandeweghe-Butorac.
“You gotta write something about what preceded ‘come on’,” Bob said. “Everybody says it now.”
“It’s true,” I said. “Even players whose native language isn’t English.”
“It’s like the cellphone,” he said. “You can’t live without it.”
After a miss, Vandeweghe slammed her racket onto the court, turning it into abstract art.
“Good thing the family has money,” said Bob.
We were joined, appropriately, by Bob’s friend Mary Ann, and the three of us headed over to Louis Armstrong. This was like the World’s Fair, where you hopped from pavilion to pavilion, wondering what marvels you would see next. On the way, we came upon a group of young women all wearing T-shirts that read on the back: “If we wanted soft serve we would have gone to DQ.”
“They’re the tennis team from South St. Paul High School in Minnesota,” one of the older women with them told me. “They came up with the slogan themselves; it had nothing to do with Dairy Queen.”
In the stadium, Samantha Stosur was exchanging ground strokes with Nadia Petrova. At one point, just as Stosur was about to serve, music came wafting onto the court.
“It’s coming from Arthur Ashe,” Mary Ann explained. “It’s the music they play at the changovers. I’m surprised that the players don’t complain.”
Stosur held on to win, allowing us to eat a late dinner in the food court – chicken stir fry – while watching on the big screen Roddick and Sock. It seemed the perfect way to end the day, but on the shuttle back into Manhattan I sat next to a lines person who was much more interesting than the doubles player in the morning. He told me that at every match there is someone judging the lines peoples’ performances, and those with the best marks at the last weekend are the ones who get assigned to the finals. Knowing that, I slept very soundly.