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