Dave is…
At the US Open.
I don’t like tennis. I’ve never particularly liked tennis. Oh don’t get me wrong the old man used to take Max and I to the court at the local park and play us two on one when we were kids and that was always a good time, and we had Everet and Lindell tennis for Nintendo which was pretty sweet. And Josh and I and sometimes Nick have waged some wars in the racquetball courts at NYU which in my mind is tennis as interpreted by MC Escher. But as to watching it I have never had the slightest interest. That whole head going back and forth without much real visual stimulation seemed like kind of a waste. And how can you get emotionally invested in a player who will be out of the sport in a few years. Players come and go but I will still be able to cheer for the Bears when I’m 80.
So I could never understand the people like Jan who love it and go to the Open regularly, but I just chalked it up to some flawed genetic predisposition. Like NASCAR fans. So you would think that if someone were to offer me a ticket to the US Open I’d laugh at them. All the more so if it required getting up early the first scholastic Saturday of the last three years. All the more so if I had been out till 5 the night before. But if you really thought that you obviously haven’t been paying enough attention to this blog cause there is little I won’t try, no matter how bad an idea it may be, in the interest of experiencing something new (as long as it isn’t culinary experimentation). Specially when it’s kind of a spur of the moment decision presented to me by the always surprising Trope after I was already drunk.
Now I am not gonna lie, I cursed him, his parents and his children when he called me at 8am but I did stagger out of bed and stumble through Queens to beautiful, scenic Flushing home to the world’s best baseball team (and Risse you can tell Joe I said that) and former home of the World’s Fair. Now Trope is no more a tennis fan than I. We both know next to nothing about the game much less the state of the sport but his good friend Nicole (below with him) had gotten free tickets from a client and after her boyfriend Pepe and Trope apparently couldn’t find another sucker to tag along.
I found that mildly surprising given how many people like silly things in this town, and was even more surprised when Trope told me that today’s main court line up featured Sharapova, Roddick and Federer back to back to back and shit was sooold out. Figures it would be cause other than the Williams sisters those are the only names I know in tennis. At this point I felt a little mild guilt about the fact that such an unabashed ambivalent was taking the spot of some diehard who was unlucky (I know how I’d feel if a tennis fan got Bears playoff tickets) but I got past that guilt by calling my known tennis fans and gloating.
The crowd was sizable coming in but so well behaved and kinda tony; really like the missing link in crowd evolution between baseball and the Kentucky Derby (the grandstand portion not the lunatics in the infield, they exist down in the caveman era with football crowds). Basically a lot of tucked in collared shirts and pant creases. Think boat shoes. I in fact was canny enough to wear a collared shirt, though of course Trope went with his sleeveless jersey assuring maximum burnage.
But given the uppercrustyness of the crowd the police sniper towers seemed a bit excessive, albeit awesome.
What I hadn’t realized though was quite how big a deal the Open is. I mean we got the Goodyear Blimp all day.
We got in and made our way to our seats, which were pretty good, in the main stadium and got in there shortly after the beginning of Sharapova’s match with Radwanska. Now I will skip any comments on how stupid the scoring system is (seriously increments of 15 cept when its 10? Wtf), the game-set-match nonsense and the stupidly revealing outfits that the women seem to have to wear (cause I realize that is the only reason many guys watch any tennis) cause I want to focus on the fact that every couple games the players get to sit down for a minute or two and be shaded by their own Farnsworth Bentley. Seriously what the hell kind of sport is that? Its extravagance like that that heralded the decline of Rome. (Didn’t stop me from desperately wishing for one. It was hot…and I was quite hung-over.)
The match was more interesting than I anticipated. Appears Sharapova is only ranked so highly cause she likes to wear red underoos under her tennis skirt. It certainly couldn’t because of her game cause she was double faulting and having unforced errors (no idea what those are exactly) like it was me out there.
And it has to be the reason every single camera was focused on her even after she was deep in the hole. Though she did well was grunt. And she did that great, but Radwanska matched her grunt for grunt. And you see that was the subtly that is missing when I’ve seen tennis on TV. It’s not just that you are moving your head on swivel for hours but that each back and forth is accompanied by this huge grunt echoing around the stadium.
Eventually even hot women in loud underpants grunting heavily lost interest and we wandered out into the grounds. Now I don’t know what if anything this facility gets used for the rest of the year but the joint is unreal. It has Arthur Ashe stadium (the main court named after someone I am pretty sure was not a tennis player), another smaller stadium named after Louie Armstrong who I am positive wasn’t a tennis player, a couple more even smaller stadia and dozens of other courts scattered around featuring tennis’ D-list.
More impressively though was the rest of the facilities which reflected the upscale fan base. There were Grey Goose drinking stations, a sushi hut,
A variety of live music stages featuring such awesomeness as electric violin soloists,
And roving kegs of Heineken (honestly if I had fallen into that job instead of Intralinks there’s no chance Id be in law school right now)
Oh, and they had the most expensive food I have ever encountered at a sporting or live music event. Ever. Bar none. I think all concession stand employees were serial rapists. I mean it hurt. What you are looking at is the blandest $23 meal since the dawn of man. On the plus side though that cup? It’s a souvenir hologram cup. YAHTZEE.
Yeah while the food was a shocking rip off they did give out a lot of free stuff. I walked out of there with a mini tennis ball, about five things of Ralph Loren cologne, a lifetime supply for someone like me who will never put it on, and most impressively free radios.
If you have an American Express card you can get free radios that have a special band so you can listen to the TV play by play of the match. I don’t have AmEx but Nicole in her continuing generosity went around with hers and got us all ones. (Here is Trope modeling his. I think he looks like what I imagine the other guy in Wham! would look like now if he returned to the stage. Its not just the ear radio but the whole attitude he’s channeling…and his jazz hand) But they came in huge in some of the later sets when I was fading hard and was only kept alive by a judicious mix of “you sing ‘em we play ‘em” karaoke request on 105.5 and Weekend Edition on NPR. (Sadly no George Michael to be found on the dial.)
AmEx also gave out TVs. Now you had to return them but these bad boys allowed you to watch, with commentary, the matches on any of the 12 courts as well as helpful tutorials by John McEnroe on how to scream at judges. They were useful too as our wanderings meant we weren’t in Arthur Ashe for the final Sharapova collapse.
In fact we got sidetracked by the closer action at one of the smaller stadia to the point that we almost missed Roddick’s whole game cause he so dominated the guy that he got done in like an hour and change. We caught enough to see the hometown kid just blister the other guy with 130 mile an hour serves. The other dude won like 5 games the whole match (I bet he felt like I did when I ordered lunch).
The stadium had really gotten packed while we were away and it was wall to wall for the main event: Federer vs Isner a 6’9’’ kid from UGA. The first set was actually as interesting as anything I saw all day. Isner played really well and Federer and his swank hair struggled to adapt to his ridiculous serve. Eventually after all kinds of strange scoring requirements Isner actually took the first set in like the 5th tiebreaker which got the crowd going.
I mean even a tony jet setting kind of crowd like this is jingoistic at heart and an unabashed rooter for the underdog as long as the underdog isn’t against the Yankees and despite the fact that most of them haven’t been underdogs since their butler’s let them win in the annual kids vs the help Hamptons kickball classic. I was torn between rooting for the kid and knowing that the more competitive the kid was the longer it would be before Federer won and I could stop watching tennis and start doing something worthwhile like Guitar Hero.
Luckily for me Federer had the kid’s number and worked through the next couple sets pretty directly. Isner playing well enough to feel good about his performance but losing rapidly enough that I didn’t go crazy. I confess did spend most of one set focused on the section behind one end of the court that consisted almost exclusively of old men in straw hats and ties, including one awesomely dapper gent in a lavender suit. It’s like that red hat society that my dad talks about.
I did my best to match their style by popping my collar but just couldn’t pull it off (last time I tried it someone told me to “stop being so Cobble Hill”. Man it’s good to be back at a place where that not only makes sense but is a sweet burn.
We finally left around 7 after 8 hours of tennis. It was quite a day, I now know I never have to attend another tennis event but this lone foray into the upper crust sports world was a damn good time and I’d like thank Trope and Nicole and Pepe for including me.
(Of course the night didn’t end there it involved Guitar Hero in Forest Hills, drinking in Park Slope and a double dose of Brustein’s in Astoria at 3am. If you know NYC geography you’ll appreciate the difficulty of that triage specially after last night’s 3 hours of sleep and a day of sitting in the sun. See, told you Law School wouldn’t change me. Least not in a week.)
Dude, the other guy in Wham! was Andrew Ridgley. I appreciate the compliment.
- J
To Jeff: Dude, you know the name of the other guy in Wham, the one who hasn’t been arrested in park bathrooms? “Weird, really weird!” Jodi Foster about 12 years old in the first film I ever saw her in.
As usual the ones that are blessed with a gift appreciate it the least. To get tickets to the US Open on a day that had three major tennis stars matches and not appreciate it is like going to a Bears playoff game and taking a nap in my seat(don’t crucify me for the comparison you started it). By the way Mr. NYU Law School do your research Arthur Ashe was the first African American male to win a slam wich was the US Open. More info. on Arthur Ashe.:)
http://www.cmgworldwide.com/sports/ashe/about/bio.htm
To Barbara: Don’t hate the playa’, hate the game foo’!
I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it seems like a good retort.
- J
P.S. Wake me up! Before ya go-go… don’t leave me hanging on like a yo-yo… WAKE ME UP!
And by the way… if George Michael was a US Senator, him being busted in a public bathroom would be a completely different story, wouldn’t it.
- J
You,re not going to say “YAHTZEE” every time you talk about hologram cups are you?
how often does he talk about hologram cups?