NEW YORK—It had been a long way back for Kirsten Flipkens, who’s been ranked as high as No. 59 but is presently No. 136, just outside the direct-acceptance bubble for the U.S. Open. On this first day of qualifying, she encountered two surprises out on Court 5. She had her hands full with Estrella Cabeza Candela, whose career-high ranking is still lower than Flipkens’ current, disappointing one. But also, Flipkens hadn’t counted on playing her first match of this event on a bustling construction site, complete with hard-hatted union guys and the usual cacophony where men are building things.
Qualifying has started, but they’re still building and nowhere near finishing a much larger, more capacious version of the Heineken Red Star Café, which had been a favorite meeting spot for years now, as well as hangout much loved by drunks of every stripe.
“Hey, those twelve-by-twelves . . .” a guy with a basso profundo voice and matching, heavy Brooklyn accent called out. “What do youse want us to do with them?”
Flipkens has enjoyed some highlight moments at the U.S. Open. In 2006, she qualified and won a match before bowing to Jelena Jankovic, who was not yet the complicated diva of today. In 2009, the Belgian was directly accepted into the main draw and she justified the honor by making the third round, where she was eliminated by countrywoman Kim Clijsters, who’ll be playing her last tournament here in a week’s time (or so she says).
It’s been lean times for Flipkens since then, though. She lost to Patty Schnyder in the first round of the main event in 2010, then fell back to qualifier status and lost in the first round of that tournament last year. And here she was, having lost the first set 6-2 and embroiled in a second-set tiebreaker, while less than a court’s length from her, workmen were revving their circular saws (“I love the smell of burning plywood in the morning!”) and firing their nail guns as diligently. Flipkens, meanwhile, was pulling the trigger on the first serves that would help get her out of trouble and into a third set.
Frankly, given the cyclone fence and mud flat surrounding the rising, two-story jumble of lumber, cinderblock, and particle board, it’s impossible to imagine the new café being finished in time for the start of the U.S. Open, although officials here insist it must be done (therefore, they clearly assume, it will be done). All I can say is that I hope the USTA has some kind of drop-dead date written into the contract. And in any event, it wouldn’t be the first time that USTA officials swallowed hard and glanced nervously at their time-and-date watches as the first day of the Open approached.
The most memorable rush to finish occurred in 1978, exactly one year after Slew Hester, a visionary USTA president from Jackson, Mississippi, made the epochal “now or never” decision to move what had become the U.S. Open out of its country club surroundings—at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills—and into a sprawling, spanking new, fully public facility, New York City’s Flushing Meadows Corona Park, where the game of choice appears to be soccer.
When Hester made the final decision, a number of stakeholders howled in outrage, anticipating a disaster on two fronts: the move from grass (and three years of clay) in a genteel setting dominated by Tudor architecture to hard courts amid a bare-bones facility built on a swamp, a stone’s throw from a major railyard. It seemed to be taking tennis down a few pegs in the prestige department.
Skeptics also doubted that any facility of the size and scope of the proposed National Tennis Center (all the extra names had yet to be appended) could never, ever be completed in just one year in New York City, what with Gotham’s complex regulations, diverse community constituents (many of whom resented the apparent giveaway of precious public park land, even if it was built in a swamp), and tough union bigs.
But Hester got it done anyway. He was able to build the place on time partly because of the force of his personality, that of the quintessential good ol’ boy who could hobnob with a union plumber just as easily as he did with a French dignitary. And that decision by Hester transformed the international tennis landscape. We were still at the height of the tennis boom (Jimmy Connors defeated Bjorn Borg in the first final at the National Tennis Center, in 1978), and the new venue confirmed that while tennis might never rival baseball or football as populist pastimes, it was no longer just for straw boater-wearing fuddy-duddies who preferred a mint julip to a shot and a beer.
Among other things, the change also helped make tennis a sport dominated by hard courts, which may or may not be a good thing. It also lit a fire under the Australians, who were soon planning their own move from the country club (Kooyong) to a site very similar to the U.S.’ National Tennis Center. The success of the new, “open” U.S. Open accelerated their process.
If you’re an American citizen embarrassed by the fact that the U.S. Open still doesn’t have a roofed stadium, maybe you can take heart from the fact that without the National Tennis Center, maybe nobody else would have a roof either. For the facility and the change it wrought in how tennis was viewed, literally and symbolically, propelled the game forward. The “new” U.S. Open’s scale and accessible, public nature contributed robustly to the global growth of the game, and inspired the other Grand Slam sites (and many lesser ones) to plan major renovations or outright changes of venue.
The conditions out on Court 5 got me thinking about all this, and wondering if this awkward attempt to build so much of the café while tennis is underway, and an ever increasing number of fans are wandering around, isn’t some kind of useful metaphor for how much the sport has changed, perhaps even for the state of American tennis. If the USTA was able to build the National Tennis Center in a year (complete with Louis Armstrong Stadium, the top show court before Arthur Ashe Stadium was completed), but can’t get a simple beer joint done on time, won’t that tell you something about the tournament, the times, or the USTA?
My ruminations were rudely interrupted when a Bruce Springsteen lookalike dropped a long rod of rebar clattering to the cement. Flipkins glared up at the work site, for it was a critical moment in the match; she was ahead 5-2 in the third, but had blown a 40-15 lead and struggled through a couple of deuces. It was now match point.
Boom! Flipkens whacked a service winner to Candela’s backhand. Somewhere, a saw buzzed through an aluminum framing beam. Flipkens dropped her racquet and looked up joyfully. Her friends clapped and called to her.
After the match, I asked her if she had ever had to play a match under tougher, more distracting conditions.
“No,” she replied. “This was definitely the worst—ever. And this is a Grand Slam event. I didn’t expect this. The umpire couldn’t even hear the let balls when they hit the net.”
As gut checks go, this was a pretty good one for Flipkens. And that’s really what the U.S. Open has been about, quite willingly and with a soupcon of perverse pride, since the cross-borough move from leafy Forest Hills to the bottomlands of Corona Park. Somehow, it will seem a betrayal of Hester’s original vision, and an ominous sign, if they don’t get that booze joint finished in time for the start of the event proper.