I'm sitting in the National Tennis Center's half-full media workroom, recalling nights spent watching Grandma and Grandpa Casey scream at their living room television over some Connors lob or McEnroe smash. And a sobering thought enters my mind: Tennis is boring.
I mean, when was the last time you got excited about a tennis match? It certainly couldn't have been Wednesday, when a parade of sacrificial lambs with incommunicable surnames laid down on center court for their ritualistic 6-1, 6-0 second-round slaughters (poor Dally Randriantefy).
It couldn't have been Tuesday, when Andy Roddick, supposed superstar of American men's tennis, bowed out meekly after his first-round match against Art Vandelay (his name is as unimportant as the "Seinfeld" reference implies).
Let's face it: Tennis is a fringe sport. It's behind golf, hockey, and maybe even soccer, depending at any given time on David Beckham's proximity to the U.S. coastline.
And yet as I threw open the doors to the tennis center grounds on a windy, humid day in late August, I saw people. Everywhere. Why, I could have been at Shea Stadium. Or Yankee Stadium. People e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.
Young, attractive people. People drinking soda through straws and Amstel through bottlenecks. People happily coughing up $15 for oversized tennis balls and $7.95 for ham sandwiches. People who seemed to genuinely care about tennis.
Ah, but I saw through their ruse. I briefly considered scrapping my idea to write about how dull this year's U.S. Open was shaping up to be, but then I remembered that this is New York -- and nothing is ever just about sports.
Take, for example, the New York Yankees. Why do they sell out every game? Is it because they are a very good baseball team? Yes, in part. But it's also, friends, because they are the Yankees. In New York, seeing a Yankees game is something to do. Businessmen take their clients to Yankees games. Fathers take their sons to Monument Park.
Seeing a Mets game, on the other hand, is something you do when you are a Mets fan . . . and a glutton for punishment. Huge difference.
In this way, the U.S. Open reaps the benefits of the Yankee phenomenon. For two weeks at the end of each summer, the National Tennis Center draws throngs of interested spectators, yes, in part because of the allure of world class tennis and the possibility of a five-set, center-court classic. But more importantly, it draws a crowd because it is an event. It is a thing to do.
Credit the USTA with recognizing this, and providing a host of alternative activities for those whose tolerance for head-swiveling, cell-phoneless, golf-clapping pastimes does not translate well into hours of watching championship tennis.
For instance, you can make your way to the America Online SmashZone, where, to my surprise, one can engage in activities that do not involve destroying computers poisoned with viruses from the aforementioned internet provider's chain-mail deluges. Instead, kids can play interactive games while parents slink off to a cocktail stand, where I'm told by a reliable source you can order anything from a martini to a shot of tequila (the latter, strangely, doesn't appear to be listed on the menu).
You can also indulge in a favorite goofball activity of high school friend Scott and I when we came to Open as teenagers: Watch the big IBM scoreboard, wait until a long match on one of the show courts enters the fifth set, run over and pretend to cheer passionately for or against a particular competitor for no good reason. The 15 or so people who are actually interested in the match, presumably family members, will adore you for that.
Or you can always just stroll around and people watch. Sure you could do it for free in Manhattan, but the difference is that staring at the wrong person here probably won't get you shot.
The idea is that no one takes the tennis too seriously. And in a down year like this, no one really should. So just enjoy it, folks* And if you see a blonde-haired web guy toting around what appears to be a 12 oz. cup of tequila, say hello and tell him you love his U.S. Open blog!