If a Grand Slam tournament happens and there are not 50,000 daily spectators there to watch it, is it really a scene? The players are making it one.
The four biggest tournaments in tennis, known as the Grand Slams, so clearly reflect the cities in which they take place. January offers the Australian Open, a free and easy party in Melbourne. The French Open, in springtime in Paris, leads with the beauty and elegance of Roland Garros and its red clay. Wimbledon, in July in London, with its hallowed grass, is tradition and history, with a box reserved for the royal family. And the late summer finale is the United States Open in New York, a tournament every bit as noisy and chaotic and nonstop as the city itself, with matches that sometimes start near midnight and stretch well past it, with fans carousing into the night. Except of course, when the U. S. Open takes place amid a pandemic. Through this spring, New York became more quiet and empty, with atypically bare pavement in Times Square and silence on the streets broken only by the citywide cheers each night at 7 o’clock from the windows to herald doctors, nurses and other essential workers. Gone, seemingly, was everything that made the city the city. That contrarian version of life arrived Monday at the U. S. T. A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, a bow to the safety precautions required to limit the spread of the coronavirus. To be here during the opening day of the U. S. Open was to experience something nearly impossible to envision. A usually crammed boardwalk connecting the subway to the west gate was devoid of nearly all signs of life. No one begging for or trying to sell an overpriced, last-minute ticket. No endless lines trying to get through the six metal detectors that were still operating but had little metal to detect. The Adidas and U. S. Open stores were filled only with people stringing rackets, six feet apart, instead of fans swiping plastic for souvenirs. Metal shutters were pulled down on every stand in the food court. No Franks and Fries or Neapolitan Pizza or Ben & Jerry’s.
