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, what 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.