David Roth's Weak In Review: Tennis' Grand Opening And Summer's Closing

There is no nice way to put this: an evil brown puddle had begun to express itself, with some chunkiness and alarming insistence, from beneath the counter of one of the noodle places in the Golden Mall. The Mall is a fully harrowing underground food court—close and hot and low-ceilinged under sizzling fluorescent lights—at the center of a weird nebula of other establishments of opaque purpose and dubious repute. The food there is delicious, spiky with spice and lit with chili oil and flagrantly gluten-unfree. I ate a lot of it, honestly and seriously as much as I could manage to eat. Then we walked past the proprietress of the dumpling spot, who was shouting at either the expanding brown chunkpuddle or the person responsible for it, out and up onto Flushing's Main Street, and got back on the train. We went one stop and got off to watch the best tennis players currently alive.

This sounds stranger than it actually is, the objectively strange puddle notwithstanding. Tens of thousands of other people were doing the same thing. They stepped out of chauffeured cars or parked way out in the U.S. Tennis Center's tree-draped lots, but most of them got off the trains—the Long Island Railroad or the 7—and submitted to the requisite ticket scans and pat-downs and contemporary fan indignities, at which point they were allowed entrance to a strange and sacred space that exists for only a couple of weeks per year.

For all the awful things about living in New York City during the summer—the extra-frisky vermin and the subway stations that smell like radioactive yogurt and the generalized uptick in impatience and body odor—there is also the U.S. Open. It's not that New York is better during the Open, really; the same shitty things that happen here continue to happen while the tennis is being played, and even happen to tennis players. But the U.S. Open also alters and opens the city in strange and subtle ways, and serves to center things, and level them.

It is simultaneously as grandiose and as humble as anything sports has to offer, and as happily accessible a public thing as there is in this privately held place. You do not need to be in New York to feel this, of course. You do not even need to care that much about tennis to be grateful for the unique and immersive thing that the U.S. Open is, and for the giddy and assaultive and sunnily overwhelming thing that it becomes. There is nothing in sports that is quite like the U.S. Open—quite as big or quite as open, quite as posh and Olympian or quite as public and human. We can forget all this, with the same passive purpose with which we refuse to remember that summer itself ends. And then we remember it, or the Open—through the sheer insistence of its round-the-clock Open-ness—reminds us.

Summer always ends, because that is the way the earth rotates. The long days shrink and baseball winnows itself down and out into the offseason, and then it's all those dim months of the NFL's paintball militarism and implication and seething pee-shy lite beer commercials. But the Open is as good a way to send it out, and as pure a summertime experience, as we've yet devised.

When the Open is rolling, there are a dozen matches happening at once, all day; stay up late watching the end of a match on a Friday night and sleep in on a Saturday, and you can go 24 hours of consciousness without a tennis-free moment. Not all of this tennis is great, necessarily, and when only one side of it is great there isn't much in the way of tension. On the night I went, I saw Roger Federer take apart a Belgian player named Steve Darcis with pure metronomic viciousness; it took 80 minutes, and Darcis looked like he was near tears by the end of it. But a ticket to the Open is a ticket to the Open, and entitles you to watch either the hyperspeed ping-pong of a doubles match from 15 feet away or a vintage Federer vivisection from the top of Arthur Ashe's upper tank. Or both, or neither. It's not an inexpensive ticket, but it is an open-ended one. The ultra-elites are there, but they are safely sequestered in their suites and VIP Caviar Domes; for everyone else, the Open functions like a festival, and the crowd approaches it as such.

This is true even when we're watching from home. Because the Open is so long, and because there is just so much of it, it invites us to watch in a different way. The bespoke narratives that are there when the Open begins tend, in the process of things playing out under the pressure of all that heat and topspin and rampant random chance, to be eliminated. There is a certain subtextual slapstick in watching those tasked with crafting the TV-ready macro-narratives scramble for something that is too determinedly and defiantly unpredictable to fit in the readymade frames. As a result, a week of watching the Open becomes a sort of self-guided tour—players emerge, rivalries bloom and wilt in an afternoon, and we wind up taking it upon ourselves to find the things we want. It is so easy, and so natural once you get into the swing of it, that the rarity of the experience is not immediately obvious.

Some of the greatest players the sport has ever seen are there, but they are not outside or above any of this. Serena Williams, who has dominated women's tennis in a way few athletes have ever dominated any sport, can still wind up staring at the business end of match point on a Friday afternoon against an unseeded Italian thirtysomething that only a few diehards even knew was on the tour. She can even lose. Serena is still great, and still quite probably the greatest; she has ruled the Open as few players ever have, but the Open does not really recognize sovereigns. It is an anarchy and a utopia, and we are going to miss it like crazy when it's finally time to go home.