NEW YORK—It started to feel more like the U.S. Open I know and sometimes love today. The first sign came at approximately 2:00 P.M. this afternoon. At that moment I shifted, hopefully, into what appeared to be the shortest and quickest line for Southern BBQ sandwiches in the food court. And then I stood. And stood. And stood some more. It was unclear what the hold-up was, but there was a lot of standing going on in general. Still, in the end the brisket was good; at $10, it even felt like a bargain.
While the temperature got a little hotter today, and the crowds a lot thicker, it wasn’t an afternoon packed with marquee action. That’s what happens when the first round is spread over three days and six separate night and day sessions; by comparison, it takes Wimbledon and the French Open at total of two sessions to get through the same number of matches. It makes the early days in Queens the easiest to keep up with, but I miss the madness of the other Slams.
Couple that spread-thin feel with a draw that features 32 seeds, and you can go a long way before you see an especially memorable or meaningful match. But this is the Open, and everywhere you go, there’s something to see, and think, and hear, and smell, and like, and maybe learn, along the way. Before they get away from me forever, here are a few thoughts from a first Tuesday at Flushing Meadows.
*****
It’s the sound of tennis that makes all the difference
On Court 4, Nikolay Davydenko and Ivan Dodig are hitting the ball back and forth, moving each across the baseline, trading forceful two-handed backhands and sliding forehand gets. It’s good stuff, good enough that gasps—or at least fast intakes of breath—are heard from the crowd during lon rallies. One woman, seeing a Davydenko seemingly impossible squash shot retrieval, even puts her hands to her mouth and shouts, “Oh my goodness.”
She might be excitable, in her polite way, but she’s not wrong. It's good stuff, with the mix of pace and precision that most of us come to the outer courts to see. At the same time, though, Davydenko and Dodig are playing standard modern baseline tennis. Each has a two-hander, and neither comes to the net during these points. The rallies are long, and while they take each player all over the court, you wouldn’t exactly call them varied. In other words, this is the type of tennis that we routinely hear derided as boring and one-dimensional.
And, when I imagine watching it on TV, I can see where it might be dull. But it isn’t. Seeing the ball and the players move this quickly at close range is part of the appeal, but so is the simple sound that their strings make at contact. It lets you know, indisputably, that some ball is being played out there.
*****
Can we now equate “stylish” with “Federer-esque”?
Frank Dancevic, the veteran Canadian who qualified here but lost in the first round today, has a peculiarly stylish game for someone you would have to label as a journeyman. I have to check myself, though, when I say he has style; is that only because his game resembles Roger Federer’s? Dancevic has the one-handed backhand that he can come over or slice, the same easy motion on his serve, and he hits his forehand with same cross-the-body swing path. That, in today’s terms, equals beauty on a tennis court.
Federer has been so high-profile for so long, and been called the paragon of tennis elegance for so long, that I wonder if he owns the entire category at this point. It now seems difficult to convince some fans, particularly those of a traditionalist bent, that a player with a two-handed backhand can be called “stylish" at all.
Anyway, I enjoy watching Dancevic play while he's serving. Then his opponent, Marsel Ilhan, of Turkey, takes the ball, and I know Dancevic, for all of his subtle flair, is in trouble. Ilhan’s first delivery sounds like a rifle shot. Only Roger Federer has ever gotten points for style in tennis.
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Keeping tennis players straight can be tough
Dmitry Tursunov is serving on Court 10. He’s cruising around in his peeved surfer style, casual in body language but edgy in demeanor. There are very few spectators as his match with Steve Darcis begins. Two guys walk up near me and start watching.
“This is the Australian guy, right?” one of them asks.
Tursunov’s baseball hat over his curly blonde hair has apparently led them to think that he’s Lleyton Hewitt. They seem to be happy with that idea.
“This guy’s crazy,” the other one says, with obvious relish, as they take their seats.
******
Luxembourg has a flag
Gilles Muller is on Court 9, perhaps the least visible of all the side courts here. It’s stuck in the middle of a row of them, with no bleachers. But this has not deterred the Muller faithful. There are approximately four of them. Their signature seems to be that they paint their lips and the area of their cheeks to the left and right of them, in the color of the flag of Luxembourg; it's basically a multi-colored stripe across the middle of the face, and it looks weird. But they’re smart enough to know that unlike many countries—say, Spain and the United States and now Serbia—no one has a clue what the flag of Luxembourg looks like. So they’ve helped us out by emblazoning their T-shirts with the word “Luxembourg.” Why one of them is in a cowboy hat and another has a Statue of Liberty foam cap on, I have no idea.
The four of them are not loud, but they are indefatigable. They chant Muller’s name. They chant “Hey, hey, hey.” And then . . . they chant Muller’s name again. I can’t help but think that it’s a sad day in New York when the rowdiest people on the grounds are a bunch of guys from Luxembourg.
Muller wins and high fives all of them afterward.
*****
A player can have a bad year, and so can a fan
I saw Adrian Mannarino play for the first time in Melbourne, where he completely befuddled Ryan Harrison in the first round. I wasn’t impressed by Mannarino, really, but I was intrigued by his strokes and his game. He seemed to do a lot with very little. He cruised about, used abbreviated swings, and had good hands. And he always looked like he had just gotten out of bed.
I enjoyed watching him live again in Indian Wells, and on TV during the clay season. Mannarino was, in my mind, a tiny twig on the Miloslav Mecir family tree (and yes, that is the nerdiest phrase I’ve ever written). But the tide started to turn in my opinion at Wimbledon, when the Frenchman walked on Centre Court with gimmicky black sneakers (he wasn’t allowed to play in them) and then put up feeble resistance against Roger Federer. Today, though, my Mannarino fandom reached its low point, during his dispiriting, plainly boring straight-set loss to Florian Mayer.
By the time I get there, in the second set, Mannarino appears to be hitting forehands out intentionally. He’s pretty much clearing Court 11 of fans along the way; at each changeover, more people flee. Then, when he’s down 0-5 in the second, Mannarino decides to argue with the chair umpire over . . . something. The ump pretends not hear him, then gives him a curt nod when he’s done, as if to say, “Are you finished?” Mannarino looks into the crowd in disgust. A woman in the front row purses her lips and tilts her head at him: “Boo hoo.”
The nice thing about tennis, though, is that there’s always someone else to watch. Today it’s Mannarino’s opponent, Mayer. From his awkward, wing-flapping service motion to his super-flat strokes to his jumping backhand—it looks he’s celebrating the chance to hit that shot—the 27-year-old German is unorthodox in all ways, and streaky as hell.
We’ll see if I do any better as a Florian Mayer fan.
*****
Sometimes you can’t explain it
Ana Ivanovic, who is finishing the day in Ashe, is skinnier than ever. Her legs taper down to next to nothing by the time you get to her shoes. Her lack of heft doesn’t seem to be helping her in the first set today; Ivanovic’s shots lack their old pop to start.
When she goes down 1-3 in the first set, I feel like I’m watching a re-run from yesterday afternoon, when another recent star gone south, Melanie Oudin, continued her run of bad, nervous play. Ivanovic looks worried, even fatalistic. She’s tried a lot of coaches over the years, a lot of changes, a lot of fixes, to her service toss especially. Watching her avoid stepping on lines, and even, it appears, on ball marks—between points, she’ll suddenly take an extra long stride out of nowhere—I find myself wishing that she would stop thinking so much.
But that’s the problem when you’re losing in tennis—there’s no one answer, and that includes the “just let it flow and don’t think” advice that we hear so often. Have you ever tried to not think? Not all that easy, is it?
All seems lost and Ivanovic appears doomed to eternal frustration. A phrase for this post comes to my mind that seems appropriate for Ivanovic: “Every tennis tournament has 127 unhappy endings.” Contrary to what we're taught and what we hope, most of the time the fairy tales don’t come true. Even the most talented players, even with all the hard work in the world, never solve their problems or get out of their own way.
As I write those words, though, Ivanovic starts winning. Serves find the box, ground strokes find the court, and her opponent starts to miss. She finishes the set with a forehand winner on the line and lets out an old-fashioned, full-throated, “Adje!” Who knows why, after all the struggles, it all came out OK today.
Every tournament has 127 unhappy endings; fortunately it also has a lot of surprises.
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