David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

12 The names of all the various sponsors are on a big ( very big) blue board just inside the National Tennis Center’s Main Gate, with the bigger events’ “presenting sponsors” on the left in huge caps, and in smaller caps on the right the names of pres. spons. of smaller events — Men’s 35s Doubles, Mixed Doubles Masters — as well as other sponsors whose role is unclear beyond having paid a fee to sell concessions where appropriate and/or to have a PR booth on the grounds and a venue to call their own inside the Corporate Hospitality Areas (plus of course having their name on the v.b. blue board). Here’s the whole sign’s program, much reduced in scale: in the middle (natch), “1995 U.S. OPEN— A U.S.T.A. EVENT ”; on the left: Infiniti, Redbook, Prudential Securities, Chase Manhattan, FujiFilm, MassMutual; on the right: American Express, AT&T, Ben Franklin Crafts, Café de Colombia, Canon, Citizen Watch Company (Citizen also has its name on all the big real-time and match-duration clocks on the Show Courts), Evian Natural Spring Water, Fila U.S.A., The Haägen-Dazs Co. Inc., Heineken, IBM, K-Swiss, The New York Times (which one kind of wonders, then, how objectively or aggressively the paper could report the facts if like the tournament this year were really boring or poorly managed or crooked somehow, etc.), NYNEX, Pepsi-Cola, Sony, Tampax (which, now that Virginia Slims finally got PC’d out of sponsoring the WTA, put in a bid to be the tour’s new sponsor but was turned down, for reasons that haven’t been made publicly explicit but are probably amusing), Tiffany and Co., Wilson Sporting Goods, good old Tennis magazine (which is itself owned by The New York Times Co., so that the Times sneakily gets on the Board twice), and something called the VF Corporation.

13 Another sort of endearing thing about Sampras is the way he always sweats through his baby-blue shorts in an embarrassing way that suggests incontinence and lets the world see just where his athletic supporter’s straps are (i.e., after a while the whole upper part of the shorts is sweated through except for a drier area that’s the exact shape and size of a jock). This even TV’s crude pictures can capture, and I think I like it so much because it humanizes Sampras and lets me identify with him in a way that the sheer preternatural beauty of his game does not. For me, similar humanizing foibles in transcendent players included McEnroe’s irrational fits of pique, Lendl’s and Navratis eaulova’s habit of every once in a while getting so nervous and choking so badly on a point that they looked almost spastic and the ball would actually hit the ground before it reached the net, and Connors’s compulsive on-court touching and adjustment of his testes within his jock, as if he needed to know just where they were at all times.

14 According to M. Chang’s limo driver, it’s been, like, the longest rainless interval of the century for NYC. I don’t know whether that’s true or whether New Yorkers are being enjoined from watering the mums in their window boxes or whatever, but I do know that there hasn’t been one rain-delay in the whole tournament so far, and the upper-management guys from both CBS and the U.S.T.A. are going around looking pleased in a way that’s just short of gloating.

15 Ascending in the Stadium goes like this: past ten rows of dark-blue seats — actual plastic chairs, the Box Seats — then fifteen rows of light-blue seats, then eighteen rows of noticeably less comfortable gray molded-plastic seats, then (the steps by now so steep they feel the way staircases feel to a small child) uncountable rows of plain red bleachers, the land of backward Mets caps and tattoos and hightop sneakers w/laces untied, the thick honk of Brooklyn accents, a great mass clicking of empty breeze-blown Liquor Bar cups on the cement of the bleachers’ aisles… it’s a climb during which the ears actually pop and the O 2gets thin and the perspective on the court below becomes horrific, like a skyscraper’s, the players looking insectile and the crowd moving and heaving in a nauseous way that makes the place’s whole structure seem slightly to heave and sway.

16 ( sic —no kidding)

17 Agassi’s 1995 cybercrewcut, black sneakers, and weird new French-Resistance-fighter-style shirts have, at this year’s Open, made him way more popular with male fans and only slightly less fascinatingly sexy for female fans. (Agassi’s sex-symbolism’s a phenomenon of deep mystery to most of the males I know, since we agree that we can all see clearly that Agassi’s actually a runty, squishy-faced guy with a weird-shaped skull [which the crewcut’s now made even more conspicuous] and the tiny-strided pigeon-toed walk of a schoolkid whose underwear’s ridden up; and it remains completely inexplicable to us, Agassi’s pull and hold on women.)

18 The National Tennis Center Box Office opens at 1000h., and people start lining up as early as 0600 hoping to get one of the day’s Grounds Passes, and the various incentives and dramas in this AM line of street-savvy New Yorkers are a whole other story in themselves.

19 (no kidding: miles and miles on Northern through the long intestine of Queens, NY, at least fifty traffic lights)

20 This is the actual name of the park that the U.S.T.A.’s National Tennis Center is in, a name almost perfect in its unconscious capture of northeast Queens’s summertime essence, connoting as it does equal parts urban sewage, suburban pastora, and bludgeoning sun.

21 Scalpers are asking and getting $125 for a Grounds Pass and (in at least one case) twice that for an eleventh-row Stadium seat for the afternoon’s matches. The last straightaway of the walkway to the Gate has its healthy share of scalpers making their elliptical pitches from the grassy edge, but (weirdly) thereweihe are just as many furtive-looking parties standing at the edges asking loudly whether anyone passing by has an extra ticket for sale, or would like perhaps to sell their own, as there are scalpers. The scalpers and weird people asking to be scalped seem not even to notice one another, all of them calling softly at once, and this makes the last pre-Gate stretch of the promenade kind of surreally sad, a study in missed connection.

22 (Knowles has the same sort of perpetually aggrieved emotional style J. P. McEnroe had, except in McEnroe the persecution complex often came off as the high-tension neurosis of a true genius, whereas with Knowles it comes off simply as whiny snarling churlish foul temper. All summer, following the Tour, the Mad Bahamian has been the only ATP player I would watch and actually hope he got beat, badly.)

23 (Nestor seems like a pretty good egg, though.)

24(wise king of Pylos and all that)

25 In 1979 I once played two best-of-five matches in one day in a weird non-U.S.T.A. junior thing in suburban Chicago, and one match went five sets and the other four, and even though I was just seventeen I walked like a very old man for days afterward. And since emotional flexibility is almost impossible for a jr., I remember noticing that all of us who’d played 3/5’s left the site looking utterly wrung-out emotionally, hollow-eyed, with the 1,000-yard stare of pogrom-survivors. I’ve had a special empathic compassion for male players in Slam events ever since, when I watch.

26 Sampras has a way of making it look like he hits a shot and dematerializes and then rematerializes someplace else in perfect position for the next shot. I have no theories about how he does this. Ken Rosewall is the only other male player in my memory who could seem to flicker in and out of existence like this. (E. Goolagong could do it, too, but not consistently.)

27 NYC being one of the most turnstile-intensive cities in the world, New Yorkers push through turnstiles with the same sort of elegantly casual élan that really top players evince when warming up.