Tournaments
Esther Vergeer serving
NEW YORK – One of these days she will not win the US Open. Maybe. But don’t count on it.
Just count on the wheeler-dealer of Flushing Meadows to ride the paved range like Annie Oakley, hitting her targets at will, making sure of one thing: you lose.
It has been this way –- her way – for years since she began competing. Fourteeen years, to be exact — while the world became her tennis ball. As the Open’s wheelchair championships commence today, Esther Maria Vergeer of Voerden, Netherlands, the chairwoman of the chairs, will begin defending her winning streak that seems to reach the moon. continue reading »
September 08 2010 | US Open | No Comments »
Bud signing autographs
NEW YORK – Lunging desperately at the little yellow ball they were eyeball-to-eyeball at the net for their last swings of the day. The witnesses, about 15,000 of them in Arthur Ashe Stadium , were screaming, urging — most of them in the corner of the young Californian, Sam Querrey.
Make the shot and hang into this fifth set melodrama on the blue pavement – or go home, downcast though knowing you’d gone right down to the US Open’s quarter-final wire. That was the bang-bang proposition for Querrey after dodging one match point. continue reading »
September 07 2010 | US Open | No Comments »
Unisphere with flowers
NEW YORK – Through one of his characters, Marcellus, a scribbler named Shakespeare said there was “something rotten in the state of Denmark.”
But if the Bard had been among 20,000-or-so ticket-holders at an open-air theatre called Arthur Ashe Stadium yesterday, he might have reconsidered that line from his ancient soap, “Hamlet.”
He would have gazed down at a battleground of blue on which a fair lass named Caroline Wozniacki, was making friends for Denmark, her homeland. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t capable of doing rotten things to the other person sharing the US Open stage: Maria Sharapova.
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September 06 2010 | US Open | No Comments »
Francesca Schiavone enjoying her latest victory
NEW YORK – A lioness is on the loose at a local public park called the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Stay out of the way. Four women didn’t, and the lioness, who speaks Italian, and deals Baroque spin, dined on them and is prowling the quarter-finals of the US Open.
Called “La Lionessa” by compatriots for her quickness to pounce and competitive ferociousness, she is 30-year-old Francesca Schiavone, bred on the dirt lots of Milan but increasingly happy at play on the Open’s swift pavement. continue reading »
September 05 2010 | US Open | 1 Comment »
The dancing fountains in the South Plaza of the US Open grounds
NEW YORK – Heavy winds coursed across the abyss called Ashe Stadium, but they didn’t blow Beatrice Capra away. That job was left to Maria Sharapova, and she went at it devastatingly.
A blonde gale wrapped in an aqua gown, screaming like a cyclone, she was miserly Maria, unwilling to part with a single game as she whooshed into the second week of the US Open, chasing the title that she won four years ago. continue reading »
September 05 2010 | US Open | No Comments »
John Isner receiving Bud's new book, dedicated to him and to Mahut and Lahyani.
NEW YORK – Waiting for Earl…
Thousands decided to wait for Earl the Hurricane at the tennis parlor in Flushing Meadows. They packed umbrellas, raincoats, hip boots, transistors, emergency rations, perhaps collapsible row boats and kerosene lanterns.
Peering at the rumpled gray sky and the US Open’s blue tennis courts, the tennis nuts were ready for anything. They weren’t frightened away by the weather bulletins, or the flash-backs to Katrina.
“We’ll resist by showing up,” said a fan from India. “I didn’t come all this way to miss the US Open. If I drown here, it’s not the worst way to go.”
After all, the tennis degenerates have proudly been through a few hurricanes. continue reading »
September 03 2010 | US Open | 2 Comments »
Lovely Beatrice Capra
NEW YORK – “…and so here I am…”
Where is “here”?
For the young American speaker, Beatrice Capra, the word had geographical and geneological meaning. She was very unexpectedly taking up space in the third round of the year’s last major tennis championship, the US Open. Wearing a No. 371 ranking, she sent No. 20 Arazane Rezai home to France, 7-5, 2-6, 6-3, yesterday. continue reading »
September 02 2010 | US Open | No Comments »
Polly, Sam and Lucy Scott buy a book from Bud
NEW YORK — You are 11-years-old, and you’re trying to beat your old man on a tennis court. He shellacs you. No mercy. But this is no casual backyard scuffle. It’s for the men’s championship of Shreveport, Louisiana.
“I wanted to win more than anything in the world at the time,” Ryan Harrison, now 18, is saying after causing the first real shakeup in the young US Open. “My dad who had been a good college player, put a good beating on me, and I took it well. I finally beat him when I was 12.”
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September 01 2010 | US Open | 2 Comments »
Sculpture depicting the ideals of Arthur Ashe.
NEW YORK — Lose your lunch but win the match.
It isn’t easy, and some might say it takes guts, and the ability to stand up when you’d just as soon lie down and take a 10 count.
You never know when the whim-whams will strike, but yesterday they did on the 14th anniversary of Pete Sampras’s historic US Open spill. A Frenchman named Beneteau joined Pete’s exclusive club by emptying his insides on Court 13, then woozily closed out an opening round victory. Of course it was in Flushing. continue reading »
September 01 2010 | US Open | No Comments »
Opening night fireworks
NEW YORK – From the sea-breezed grassblades of Rhode Island’s Newport Casino in 1881 to the steaming blue asphalt slabs of Flushing Meadows, the planet’s longest-running tennis show has settled in again for a fortnight’s duels with gut-strung cudgels. Oh, yes, I know that Wimbledon is four years older, but was dark nine years for World Wars I and II. continue reading »
August 30 2010 | US Open | No Comments »
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