US Open in NYC
After reading about the old version of the US Open from David Foster Wallace (on my way to stumbling into a tournament in New Zealand) I was excited to go see the big modern cultural and competitive event in person. Ned had been before, so he organized the tickets and got us good seats for the third round on Saturday night and Sunday night of the long Labor Day weekend.
The Saturday night session was great - the whole experience was new for me. I’d never been to such a gigantic monument and space devoted to one sport. Watching Bublik smash a serve at 135mph and then gently drop-shot his second hit, barely making it over the net to make Tommy Paul scramble, was utterly amazing. They were the last match: went into three tie-breaker sets and lasted until nearly 2AM. Ned and I stumbled home on the subway because we had left home before 5AM and run through Prospect Park in the afternoon.
Sunday morning we woke up and ran over 10 miles in Prospect Park again before riding the subway back to Queens for the Mets game. Citi Field is just across the street from the Arthur Ashe tennis stadium, like a fun-house mirror of sports. I think the US Open is the closest I’ve come to something like the Kentucky Derby: a sporting event with such a high ratio of “people wanting to be seen” to people wanting to see the event. Walking from the beer-and-peanuets Mets crowd, through the street vendors selling orange juice and grilled octopus in Flushing, back into the beauty of tennis fashion and cocktails was quite jarring. But NYC makes it all feel of-a-place.
The Sunday night session was even more packed because Novak Djokovic was handily beating his challenger opponent, Struff. The best match we saw that night was Rybakina battling Vondrasouva. Our seats were a little further back but still you could still feel how they were struggling to overpower each other.
Monday morning we woke up to run a final farewell in Prospect Park and then browsed Brooklyn by foot until our evening flight. My legs were sore from joining on all of Ned’s marathon training.
Video
I’m trying to take more and trying to get better at editing video. Editing video is teaching me how I need to be shooting video. I’m trying to edit and publish quickly, to get more reps in. Here’s a vignette of the weekend: