Sports fan that I am, (cough, cough) it seemed appropriate that I spend at least one day at the US Open.
So with Carrie, the resident tennis expert, I took the subway out to Flushing Meadows for an awesome day of entertainment. With games being played simultaneously on sixteen courts, there was always something to see and we watched eight hours of continuous tennis! It was just like a music festival, but with a lot more stages.
We saw:
- Roger Federer wipe the floor with Ivo Minar (6-1, 6-1, 6-1)
- Gustavo Kuerten (Gu-ga to his fans) beat Paul Goldstein in a 4 set, 3-hour marathon
- Anastasia Myskina overpower Tamarine Tanasugarn (6-3, 6-1)
- and Aussie Samantha Stosur go down in two sets, unable to match the strength of Tiantian Sun.
But the best game of the day pitted Andy Murray of Great Britain against Andrei Pavel of Romania. Several hours into the game, Murray did the unthinkable and was physically ill on the court. After a 21 minute delay, many bottles of Evian, a lot of head scratching about what to do, and an icky clean-up operation, play resumed. Murray recovered and hit back with serves of up to 212 kilometres per hour. The crowd went wild, cheering every point he won. But when a bad line call was made against his opponent Pavel, who then received a one point penalty for backchat, the crowd didn’t quite know who to cheer for. So… we just cheered for everybody! The players started doing little victory dances to hype the crowd up and we loved it. Best game ever.
I’ll close with two quick funnies: 1) During one game, a ball from a nearby court strayed onto our court. The brainiac ball girl recovered the ball and pegged it over the crowd back into its own court. Right in the middle of a rally. Not quite sure how the players or ref handled that one. 2) Believe it or not, there’s a player whose surname is Smashnova.
3 comments
I am sooooo jealous!! I was really hoping to be in New York for the US Open this year but we couldn’t get the flights. Oh well, maybe another year!
We are also very envious!! We just LOVE tennis. We’re hoping to one day make it to the US Open and Wimbledon.
One of the coolest things about it is that you just walk up to the venue and get tickets. No pre-planning necessary!<br><br>Also, there are rumoured to be $10 tickets around at different retailers (sports stores etc) but we weren’t savvy enough to get them.<br><br>If I, never having watched a tennis game from beginning to end, loved it, I’m sure you guys would be in your element!