David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

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 turnstile 27is 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, 28until 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 $2.0029 29and 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. 30Then, 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 popcorn 31etc. 32

Now a huge roar that makes the whole Stadium’s superstructure wobble signifies that the forces of democracy and human freedom have won the third set. 33It’s quite clear that Sampras has found his cruising altitude and that Philippoussis is going to take the first set he won and treasure it and go home to do more bench-presses in preparation for the ATP’s indoor season.

I do not know who a certain Ms. or Mr. Feron is, but s/he must be a fearsomely powerful figure in the New York sports-concession industry indeed, because a good 80 percent of all concession booths at the ’95 Open have signs that say FERON’S on them. This goes not only for the edible concessions — whose stands have various names but all of whose workers seem to have pale-blue FERON’S shirts on — but also for the endless rows of souvenir- and tennis-related-product booths that flank whatever of the grounds’ Hellesponts aren’t flanked by food booths already. The really hard-core, big-ticket souvenirs are sold on the Stadium’s E side, in an area between the plunging Infiniti and the IBM Match-In-Progress Board. There’s racketry and footwear and gear bags and warm-ups and T-shirts for sale at separate booths for Yonex, Fila, Nike, 34Head, and William Serbin. There’s a U.S.T.A. booth offering free U.S.T.A. T-shirts with a paid U.S.T.A. membership (which membership is essentially worthless unless you want to play in U.S.T.A.-sanctioned events, in which case you have no choice but to enlist). But any item with a “U.S. OPEN ’95”—mention on it is sold exclusively out of a FERON’S booth. Of these booths there are “0/40 at FERON’S,” “FERON’S U.S. Open Silks,” and “FERON’S U.S. Open Specials.” 35It’s not at all clear what the term “Specials” is meant to signify in terms of price: U.S. Open ’95 T-shirts are $22.00 and $25.00. Tank-tops even more. Visors $18.00 and up. Sweatshirts are $49.00 and $54.00, depending on whether they’re the dusty, acid-washed autumn colors so popular this year.

It’s also clear that the sea-lanes of trade between FERON’S itself and the good old United States Tennis Association are wide open, because no official FERON’S souvenir says “U.S. Open ’95” without also saying “A U.S.T.A. Event” right underneath.

The grounds don’t exactly empty out between the end of the afternoon’s slate of matches and the start of the evening’s, 36but the crowds do thin a little. Flushing Meadow gets chilly and pretty as the twilight starts. It’s about 1900h., that time when the sun hasn’t gone down yet but everything seems to be in something else’s shadow. The ticket-takers at the Main Gate’s turnstiles change shifts, and the consumers coming down the promenade are now dressed more in jeans and sweaters than shorts and thongs. Lights over all the N.T.C. courts go on together with an enormous thunk . The courtlight gives the underbelly of the hanging Fuji Blimp a weird ghostly glow. There’s more serious, 5-Food-Group, dinnerish eating now going on at the International Food Village and in the Corporate Hospitality Areas. Sampras and Philippoussis have quit the field in the Stadium, Sampras bearing his shield and the Australian carried out upon his own (as it were). Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and Mary Joe Fernandez are now warming up on the Stadium Court while people in the bleachers try to stagger very carefully down the steps to get out, lugging their coolers and cushions, looking simultaneously sunburned and cold. Coming up on the Grandstand Court is a mixed-doubles match I’m looking forward to because one of the teams on the program has the marvelous name “Boogert-Oosting.” Various tangential singles matches are under way on Courts 16–18, and something that’s fun is to go over to these Show Courts and not to go all the way in and sit in the little sets of stands but to stand on the path outside the heavy green windscreens around the Show Courts and watch the little stripe of bare fence near the bottom for the movement of feet and to try to extrapolate from the feet’s movement what’s going on in each point. One unbelievably huge pair of sneakers under the screen on Court 16 turns out — sure enough — to belong to Richard Krajicek, the 6'6" Dutchman who plays like a mad crane. These shoes have to be 16EEEs at least; you wouldn’t believe it. I am holding a $4.00 kraut-dog and sodapop I would very much like to find someplace isolated and quiet to consume.