The players’ umbrellas and chairs and big EVIAN-labeled barrels of drinks are on either side of the umpire’s chair at the base of the Stadium’s western cliff face, in a long thin patch of shade that ripples when the heads of the people way overhead move, and it’s cool in that shade—it’s cool for me, as well, in the shade of the very large man next to me, who’s wearing a gorgeous blue cord three-piecer and what seems to be a kind of huge sombrero—but the sunlight is summery, the sun (as mentioned) explosive, seeming to swell as it lowers, at 1535h. positioned about 40° above the Stadium’s W battlements; and the Grandstand Court, attached to the Stadium’s E flank, is knife-sliced by the well-known PM Grandstand shadow that Jim Courier is even now using to vivisect Kenneth Carlsen in full view of diners at Racquets (the impossible-to-get-into glass restaurant built into the wall that separates the Grandstand’s W flank from the Stadium’s E) and the 6,000+ crowd in there, a lot of whose nationalistic whistles and applause intrude into the Stadium’s sonic fold and lend a kind of surreally incongruous soundtrack to Sampras and Philippoussis’s exchanges as they warm up. Sampras is hitting with the casual economy that all the really top pros seem to warm up with, the serene nonchalance of a creature at the very top of the food chain. The Wimbledon champion’s presence aside, this third-rounder has particular romance about it because it features two Greeks neither of whom are in fact from Greece, a kind of postmodern Peloponnesian War. Philippoussis, just eighteen, Patrick Rafter’s doubles partner, ranked in the top 100 in this his first year on tour, potential superstar and actual heartthrob,7 resembles Sampras, somewhat—same one-handed backhand and slight loop on the forehand’s backswing, same café-au-lait coloring and Groucho eyebrows and very black hair that get glossy with sweat—but the Australian is slower afoot, and in contrast to Sampras’s weird boneless grace he looks almost awkward, perilously large, his shoulders square the way heavy guys with bad backs’ shoulders are square. Plus he seems to have aggression-issues that need resolving: he’s hitting the ball as hard as he can even in warm-up. He seems brutish, Philippoussis does, Spartan, a big slow mechanical power-baseliner 8 with chilly malice in his eyes; and against him, Sampras, who is not exactly a moonballer, seems almost frail, cerebral, a poet, both wise and sad, tired the way only democracies get tired, his expression freighted with the same odd post-Wimbledon melancholy that’s dogged him all summer through Montreal, Cincinnati, etc. Thomas Enqvist’s epic 2-6 6-2 4-6 6-3 7-6 (7-5) first-rounder against Marcelo Rios and Agassi’s second-round squeaker against Corretja notwithstanding, it’s tempting to see this upcoming match as the climax of the Open so far: two ethnically agnate and archetypally distinct foes, an opposition not just of styles of play but of fundamental orientations toward life, imagination, the uses of power… plus of course economic interests.
Covering the four walls down around the Stadium Court is a kind of tarp, chlorine-blue,9 and on it, su rend on irrounding the court, are the white proper nouns FUJIFILM, REDBOOK MAGAZINE, MASSMUTUAL, U.S. OPEN ’95—A U.S.T.A. EVENT, CAFÉ de COLOMBIA (complete w/a dotted white outline of Juan Valdez and devoted burro), INFINITI, TAMPAX, and so on.10 Professional tennis always gets called an international sport, but it would be more accurate to call it a multinational sport: fiscally speaking, it exists largely as a marketing subdivision of very large corporations, and not merely of the huge Tour-underwriting conglomerates like IBM and Virginia Slims. The hard core of most professional players’ earnings comes from product endorsement. Absolutely every venue and piece of equipment associated with pro events has some kind of ad on it. Even the official names of most pro tournaments are those of companies that have bid to be a “title sponsor”: the Canadian Open this year was the “du Maurier Ltd. Open” (for a Canadian cigarette company), Munich was the “BMW Open,” New Haven was the “Volvo International” (next year it’s to be the “Pilot Pen International”), Cincinnati the “Thriftway ATP Championship,” and so on. The U.S. Open,11 being a Slam and a national championship, doesn’t have a title sponsor like Munich or Montreal; but instead of decommercializing the event, the tournament’s Slam-status just makes the number of different commercial subsidizations more dizzying. The Open has an official sponsor not just for the tournament but for each of the tournament’s various individual events: Infiniti sponsors the Men’s Singles, Redbook the Women’s Singles, MassMutual the Junior Boys, and so on.12
Now the umpire has ordered Play and Sampras is getting ready to serve, lifting the toe of his front foot on the toss’s upswing in that distinctive way he has. I’ve never gotten to see Sampras play live before, and he’s far more beautiful an athlete than he appears to be on TV. He’s not particularly tall or muscley, but his serve is near-Wagnerian in its effect, and from this close up you can see that it’s because Sampras has got some magic blend of flexibility and timing that lets him release his whole back and trunk into the serve—his whole body can snap the way normally just a wrist can snap—and that this has something to do with the hunched, coiled way he starts his service motion, lifting just the toe of his front foot and sighting over the racket like a man with a crossbow, a set of motions that looks ticcy and eccentric on TV but in person makes his whole body look like one big length of muscle, a kind of angry eel getting ready to writhe. Philippoussis, who likes between points to dance a little in place—perhaps to remind himself that he can indeed move if he needs to—awaits service without facial affect. His headband matches his candy-stripe shirt. The scoreboards’ displays are now set for keeping score instead of flashing ads. Philippoussis’s name eats up a large horizontal section of each board. The wall between Stadium and Grandstand (so on our E side) is topped by the press box, which runs along the wall’s whole length and basically looks like the world’s largest mobile home, all its windows’ tinted shades now pulled against the PM sun. Three points have now yielded an ace, a service-return winner, and a long rally that ends when Philippoussis comes in on an approach that’s not quite in the exact backhand corner and Sampras hits an incredibly top-heavy short angle past him into the ad service court. The fierceness of Sampras’s backhand is something else that TV doesn’t communicate well, his racket-head control more like that of one of those stocky clay-courters with forearms like joints of mutton, the topspin so heavy it distorts the ball’s shape as the passk a as the dips like a dropped thing. The malevolent but cyborgian Philippoussis hasn’t betrayed anything like an actual facial expression yet. He also doesn’t seem to perspire.13 Two older guys in the row right behind me are exhorting Sampras in low tones, addressing him as “Petey,” and I can’t help thinking they’re friends of the family or something. And propped up over the press box—so at about the height of a radio station’s aerial—is the 1995 U.S. Open’s own ad for itself. It’s an enormous pointillist pastel print of an N.T.C. Stadium’s crowd around an outsized court, the perspective weirdly foreshortened, and then with the well-known Manhattan skyline ballooning in the immediate background in a way it decidedly does not in the real Flushing, Queens; and then above and beyond the billboard is the big zucchini of the Fuji Inc. blimp floating slowly against the cerulean of far and away the best summer sky I have ever seen around New York City. Not only is the ’95 Open’s L.D.W. air unhumid and in the eighties, the sunshine astringent and the breeze feathery and the sky the overvivid blue of a colorized film, but the sky’s air is clean, the air smells fine and keen and sweet the way line-dried laundry smells, the result not only of a month without rain14 but also this weekend of a freak high-pressure front that’s spiraled southwest out of Nova Scotia’s upper air and is blowing the oxides and odors that are NYC’s deserved own out over New Jersey. The Stadium’s bowl of air gets finer and keener the higher up in the stands you go, until, standing on top of somebody’s smuggled Michelob cooler in the top row of bleachers15 and peering over the wall due east past the edge of the press box, looking down over the big sign that says
you can see them, Them, coming, an enormous serpentine mass, the crowd, still at 1615h. coming, wh
at looks from this distance like everybody in New York City who hasn’t retreated to the Hamptons for the long summer weekend. The U.S. Open is a big deal for NYC. Mayor Dinkins is gone—the Dinkins who used to reroute landing patterns at LaGuardia just for the Open—but even under Rudy Giuliani, for a fortnight a city that ordinarily couldn’t give two chomps of its gum for a sport as patricianly non-contact as tennis is into the game in a very big way. Thirty-year-old arbitrageurs in non-rented tuxes at the Bowery Bar dissect various men’s matches and speculate on how Seles’s hiatus from the game will affect her endorsement contracts now that she’s back. Croatian doormen bemoan Ivanisevic’s early departure. On the subway, a set of tough chicks in leather and fluorescent hair concur that even though Graf and Seles and that Spanish what’s-her-face with the hymen16 in her name might rule, let’s don’t for a m.-fucking second count out the U.S.’s Zina G. ’cause this is her swan-song before the like bow-out. Or e.g. Friday, 1 September, the day after Agassi’s five-set comeback against Corretja, a Lebanese driver on the Grey Line bus in from LaGuardia and a cigar-chewing old passenger he doesn’t know from Adam bond over their shared assessments of Agassi’s rehabilitation as a man:
“It is like he used to be brat, arrogant—you know what I am saying?”
“He grew up is what you’re saying. Now he’s got balls.”
“Last night, this was a great game he played. This is what I am saying.”
“He used to just be this hairball. Now he grew up. Now he’s a person.”17
But so they’re coming, 40,000 yesterday and 41,000 today, ready to shell out $25–$30 for a ticket if they can even get one.18 They come by infernal and Stygian IRT subway out to the end of the #7 line, the Shea-Willets stop. They converge on NE Queens via the Van Wyck and L.I. and Whitestone Expressways, the Interborough, the Grand Central Parkway, the Cross Bay, bringing much ready cash and whatever religious medals apply to parking spaces. City dwellers navigate by limo, cab, or bus the empty canyons of L.D.W.’s Manhattan, bound for 36th St. and the Tunnel or 59th and the Queensborough Bridge, then travel forever19 up Northern Boulevard, bringing coolers and blankets and rackets and butt-cushions with GIANTS and JETS on them and sunscreen and souvenir hats from last year’s Open, up Northern Blvd. under circling air traffic until the landmarks start emerging—the squat neutron-blue ring of nearby Shea Stadium; the huge steel armillary sphere and Tinkertoy-shaped tower of the ’39 World’s Fairgrounds that adjoin the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow Corona Park20; or (if coming in from the S-SW) the massive exoskeleton of a whole new N.T.C. Stadium Complex, incomplete and deeply eerie as seen from the Grand Central Pkwy., a huge exposed ribcage looming over fields of raw dirt and construction-site clutter and dumpsters from the New Style Waste Disposal Co., w/three huge canted cranes motionlessly erect against the northern horizon. No labor is under way on the new Stadium this Labor Day Weekend except for two hard-hatted and forlornly bored Security guys patrolling inside the site’s fence.
The N.T.C.’s Main Gate is on the grounds’ NE side, connected to the #7 train’s subway stop and parking lots by a broad blacktop promenade that leads from the commuter stations south past Park Rangers’ offices and a couple of big open communitarian circles—the kind of open urban venues that look like they ought to have spurting fountains in the center, though these don’t—with green benches and complex skateboarding and vigorous sinister underground commerce. At some point the promenade curves sharply west so that the Open’s moving crowds pass within sight of rampant picnicking and soccer in F.M.C. Park (the “Meadow” part, apparently); then the walkway’s final blacktop straightaway’s enclosed by high fences topped with flags of all nations as you head for the parallel lines for actual entry at the tournament’s Main Gate, the Gate’s own tall fencing black iron and almost medievally secure-looking and itself topped only by good old U.S. flags, with the Open’s/U.S.T.A.’s familiar greeting and self-assertion in bright brave 160-point caps on a banner hanging over the turnstiles, of which turnstiles there are six total but never more than three in actual operation. The turnstiles are only for those who already have tickets21—the East-Bloc-length line for AM tickets at the Box Office evaporates every day by around 1100h., when stern megaphones announce the day’s sellout.
Besides the Stadium/Grandstand, there are three other N.T.C. “Show Courts,” i.e., courts with serious bleachers. At 1640h., Court 16 is running men’s doubles with Eltingh-Haarhuis, the world’s #1 team, and its little wedge of aluminum stands isn’t even full. American tennis crowds seem decisively singles-oriented. Court 17 has Korda and Kulti against the Mad Bahamian Mark Knowles22 and his 1995 partner Daniel Nestor, the Canadian who’s fun to watch because he looks so much like an anorectic Mick Jagger.23 Court 18 has women’s doubles with four players whose names I don’t recognize and exactly thirty-one people in the stands. (All four of the females on 18 have bigger forearms than I do.) Natasha Zvereva, looking incomplete without Gigi, is warming up against Amy Frazier in the Grandstand. In the Stadium, Philippoussis and Sampras have split the first two sets, 6 and 5. What a big match sounds like outside the Stadium is brief strut-rattling explosions of applause and whistles and then the odd flat amplification of the umpire speaking into the abrupt silence his speaking has created. Daniel Nestor’s last name, while also Hellenistic, is Homerian,24 thus allusive to a wartime way before Athens v. Sparta. The fact that Sampras has won so many Grand Slam titles may have a lot to do with the fact that Slams’ males’ matches are the best of five sets. Best-of-fives require not just physical endurance but a special kind of emotional flexibility: in best-of-fives you can’t play with full-bore intensity the whole time; you have to know when to kind of turn it on and when to lay back and conserve your psychic resources.25 Philippoussis won the tie-break of a first set in which you got the impression that Sampras was sort of adjusting the idle on his game, trying to find the exact level he needed to reach to win. The suspense of the match isn’t so much whether Sampras will win but how hard he’ll have to play and how long it’ll take him to find this out. Philippoussis hits very hard but has no imagination and even less flexibility. He’s like a machine with just one gear: unless forced out of his rhythm by a wide-angle shot, he moves exclusively in forward-backward vectors. Sampras, on the other hand, seems to float like dander all over the court.26 Philippoussis is like a great and terrible land army; Sampras is more naval, more of the drift-and-encircle school. Philippoussis is oligarchic: he has a will and seeks to impose it. Sampras is more democratic, i.e., more chaotic but also more human: his real job seems to be figuring out what his will exactly is. Not a lot of people remember that Athens actually lost the Peloponnesian War—it took thirty years, but Sparta finally ground them down. Nor do most people know that Athens actually started the whole bloody thing in the first place by picking on maritime allies of Sparta who were cutting into Athens’s sea trade. Athens’s clean-cut nice-guy image is a bit overdone—the whole exhausting affair was about commerce right from the beginning.
What’s fun about having a U.S. Open ’95 Media Pass is that you can go in and out of the Main Gate as often as you want. For paying customers there’s no such luck: a sign by the turnstiles says ALL EXITS FINAL with multiple exclamation points. And the lines for entry at the three active turnstiles resemble those grim photos of trampling crowds at Third World soccer matches. Wizened little old men are paid by the tournament to stand by the turnstiles and take people’s tickets—the same sort of wizened little old men you see at sporting-event turnstiles everywhere, the kind who always look like they should be wearing Shriners hats. Going through one turnstile right now at 1738h. is a very handsome bald black man in an extremely snazzy Dries Van Noten camelhair suit. Pushing hip-first through the next turnstile27 is a woman in an electric-blue pantsuit of either silk or really good rayon. At the third active turnstile, a young foreignish-looking guy in an expensive flannel shirt w/Ray-Bans and a cellular phone is having an argument with the turnstile’s ticket-taker. The guy
is claiming that he bought tickets for 3 Sept. but has mistakenly left—takenly them at home in Rye and will be dam-ned if he is going to be forced by a minimum-wage little wizened ticket-taker into going all the way back to Rye to get them and then coming all the way back down here. He has his cellular phone in his hand, leaning over the ticket-taker: surely, he insists, there’s some way to verify his ticket-holding status without his going and coming all the way back to produce the actual stupid cardboard rectangles themselves. The ticket-taker, in a blue suit that makes him look a bit like a train’s conductor, is shaking his gnarled little head and has his arms raised in that simultaneously helpless but firm gesture of Can’t Help You, Mac. The young man in flannel from Rye keeps flipping his cellular open and starting to dial it in a menacing way, as if threatening to get the ticket-taker in Dutch with shadowy figures from the Open’s Olympian management heights the young man’s got connections with; but the stolid little attendant’s resolve stays firm, his face stony and his arms raised,28 until crowd pressure from customers at the flannel man’s rear and flank force him to withdraw the field.
The first thing you see when you come inside the Main Gate is teams of extremely attractive young people giving away free foil packets of Colombian Coffee from really big plastic barrels with outlines of Juan Valdez & devoted burro on them. The young people, none of whom are of Colombian extraction, are cheery and outgoing but don’t seem to be terribly alert, because they keep giving me new free samples every time I go out and then come in again, so that my bookbag is now stuffed with them and I’m not going to have to buy coffee for months. The next thing you see is a barker on a raised dais urging you to purchase a Daily Drawsheet for $2.002929 and a Program+Drawsheet for a bargain $8.00. Right near the barker is a gorgeous spanking-new Infiniti automobile on a complicated stand that places the car at a kind of dramatic plunging angle. It’s not clear what the relation between a fine new automobile and professional tennis is supposed to be, but the visual conjunction of car and plunging angle is extremely impressive and compelling, and there’s always a dense ring of spectators around the Infiniti, looking at it but not touching it.30 Then, over the Daily Drawsheet pitchman’s right shoulder and situated suspiciously close to the Advance Ticket Window, is what has to be one of the largest free-standing autotellers in the Western world, with its own shade-awning and three separate cash stations with controls of NASA-like sophistication and complexity and enormous signs that say the autoteller’s provided through the generosity of CHASE and that it is equipped to disgorge cash via the NYCE, PLUS, VISA, CIRRUS, and MASTERCARD networks of auto-withdrawal. The lines for the autoteller are so long that they braid complexly into the lines for the nearest concession stands. These concession stands seem to have undergone a kind of metastasis since last year: they now are absolutely everywhere on the N.T.C. grounds. One strongly suspects that the inside story on how a concession at the U.S. Open is acquired would turn out to involve levels of intrigue and gamesmanship that make the tournament’s on-court dramas look pallid, because it’s clear that the really serious separation of spectator from his cash takes place at the N.T.C.’s concession venues, all of which are doing business on the sort of scale enjoyed by coastal grocery and hardware stores during a Hurricane Warning. The free-standing little umbrella’d venues for Evian and Häagen-Dazs are small potatoes: there are entire miniature strip-malls of refreshment stands gauntleting almost every sidewalk and walk-way and easement on the grounds—even the annular ground-level tunnel of the Stadium/Grandstand, offering sodapop for $2.50 - $3.50, $3.00 water, $3.00 little paper troughs of nachos or crosshatched disk-shaped french fries whose oil immediately soaks through the trough, $3.50 beer, $2.50 popcorn31 etc.32