Here’s what I know about tennis: if you’ve got love, you’ve got nothing. From love to 15 to 30 to whatever comes between 30 and the sets and the matches, with those advantage points and tiebreakers thrown in, tennis scoring is less intuitive to me than the Cyrillic alphabet is after eight beers, so who cares? But, things change. My Special Lady Friend is a fan, so now I pay tennis slightly more attention than I do cricket. She just returned from the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, in Flushing Meadows, Queens, where the US Open, the year’s last major tennis tournament, is currently being contested. So, with a grateful nod to the insight of Kathy “Heff” Heffernan, the pride of Swampscott, here’s the word from Flushing Meadows:
ON THE COURT
Youth was served, and youth held serve. Melanie Oudin, a 17-year-old American competing in just her second US Open in the women’s singles division, unexpectedly ousted two seeded players, Elena Dementieva and Maria Sharapova, on her way to meeting 13th seed Nadia Petrova in the fourth round. Sharapova was both a former World No. 1 and US Open Champion (2006), while Dementieva was seeded fourth overall in the tournament, but Oudin, the young girl from Georgia (the state, not the republic), was unfazed. When Oudin put away Petrova, the third Russian in her troika of opponents, she became the youngest woman in the US Open semifinals since Serena Williams, 10 years ago. An American hasn’t made that many Russians blink since JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis. People love an underdog, and Heff lit up telling me about how the crowds surged behind the heretofore unknown Georgia Peach.
Women’s tennis in America might have a new sweetheart (Heff loves her already), but, even in a tournament whose top women singles seeds have been ravaged by upsets, potential spoilers remain. The only player standing from the tourney’s top five, as of Monday, is the aforementioned Serena Williams, who has won the US Open women’s singles title three times, including last year. Even I have to admit, should Williams and the upstart Oudin make it through their next matches and meet in the finals, I might have to watch.
OFF THE COURT
According to Heff, there were several signs that the recession has effected the US Open. The most troubling, in her eyes, was how access to various parts of the USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center has been restricted this year. At previous US Opens, a grounds pass gained you admittance to all of the smaller courts (there are 22 within the complex and 11 in the adjoining park), plus Louis Armstrong Stadium, the facility’s second largest court. Only the seats in Arthur Ashe Stadium, the largest tennis venue in the world, where the US Open finals and marquee matches are held, were off-limits. By excluding the Armstrong seats, longtime attendees, like Heff, felt like they got less for their money, and everything in the joint cost plenty of money. The hamburgers were 18 bucks, which is exorbitant, even for New York City stadium fare.
Heff also noticed more young kids at past Opens, which was a change, because tennis spectatorship requires people to mostly sit still, and she laughed about the organizers, who seemed to cut corners by forgoing soda lids. There were no lids, anywhere, making the incredibly expensive drinks an even dicier investment.
But to Heff, those facets of the experience were nowhere near as important as the tennis. That was obvious from the way her face lit up when she started talking about Melanie Oudin again.
Rick Wormwood can be reached atrickwormwood@gmail.com.
