Okay, let’s start things off with a confession; covering my “home” Grand Slam (I’m both an American and a New Yorker) just doesn’t feel the same. Roll out of bed, go to the hardware store and get shelf-liner, wait for the babysitter to show up, jump in the car and fight the traffic on the Long Island Expressway. . . it feels less like I’m going to a major tennis tournament than. . . ugh. . . work.
I mean, there’s no good way to get my mean or mellow on, no fighting with the waiter in the stinky white shirt whose cigarette ashes fall in my café crème as he delivers it, no melodious song from the Kookaburra bird, no BBC newscaster’s soothing voice to put me to sleep while I’m waiting for the kettle to come to a boil in the flat (this is a feat, too, because those kettles come to a boil faster than Marat Safin after he shanks a forehand).
So how am I supposed to produce a gin blossom of nose of the U.S. Open when it feels like I’m just another New York (reverse) commuter, showing up at the desk?
Granted, that changed some as I strolled past the Unisphere and fountain here at Flushing Meadow
Park and saw Arthur Ashe Stadium looming in the distance. It’s a terrific piece of architecture, actually. It’s not as industrial as the post-industrial, modernistic site of the Australian Open, which looks some coal-fired power plant somewhere deep in the Ukraine, after a bunch of art lovers managed to get it converted into an art museum. But it’s also not as precious as Wimbledon (enough with the hydrangeas and weak-chinned aristos already!) and it has an imposing, nearly majestic quality that Roland Garros lacks.
The sight of the stadium got me a little fired up, and then of course there’s that statue of the buck-nekkid dude, poised in his serving motion (modeled on Ashe’s own, although Arthur preferred to play while dressed, usually in his trademark tighty-whitey shorts).And instead of clutching a racquet, nekkid dude got just the suggestion of a handle (it looks like a twisted cigar, but who am I to draw Freudian inferences?). Guess they couldn’t sell the naming rights to Prince, or Wilson, and just told the artist, “Hold off on the racquet. Can we bring down the price a little that way?"
So far so good, I thought. Now I just hope some of these poor American stiffs trying to crawl out from under the long shadows cast by Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Chris Evert, Jim Courier et al can keep it together and win a few matches in their – our – national championships.
In the early action, we had a split. Vania King took out Alicia Molik, but Donald Young floundered and fell apart after taking the first set from Novak Djokovic. I went around to The Donald’s – whoops, wrong guy - Young's interview to check out the state of his maturity, because the state of his game was dodgy at best.
I have to confess, my heart goes out to this kid. He’s got twin diamond earrings, make-a-statement black-and-yellow Nike duds, and that little, pencil-thin mustache that I’m more accustomed to seeing on brothers in Memphis, dressed in sharkskin suits and alligator shoes, with gold stick-pins under their neckties. Young’s got a sneaky little smile that’s half-planted on his face most of the time. And he’s extremely literal, which I always find charming (articulate people leave too little to the imagination), because I associate it (prehaps mistakenly) with innocence.
Abstraction? Who needs it!
