The Clearing

After ordering breakfast at Panera this morning, I am asked for my name, as is customary, so that they can announce it when the food is ready. I say, "M O" (after years of name/spelling mangling experiences I have settled on this relatively painless compromise), to which the woman's response is "how do you spell that?". I'm perplexed and tell her that that is how it is spelt.

A few minutes later, guy at the bar makes eye contact and asks "Ahmed?", a charge that I vehemently deny. I think about it a few seconds, go back over to him and ask him to repeat the name. And, lo and behold, it's Ahmed again! With no likely Ahmeds around I'm beginning to put two and two together here. I ask him what is in the bag and he confirms that it is what I had ordered. My irritation shows, he's grinning a little apologetically, I'm saying "Ahmed? How did it become Ahmed? Maybe I look like an Ahmed...". 7 years of trying to improve my enunciation and these guys across the counter still can't understand what I'm saying! I think I'll ask the chap to pick a random name for me next time round.

Labels: Rants, Reflections on life

After asking around, asking dozens of people to come along, it was finally my dear ole sister--whose interest in tennis can be described at best as casual--who took pity on me and decided to accompany me to the US Open. I had decided on Wednesday, the 6th of September, as the men's quarter finals were slated for that day. I arrived at base camp, Princeton, which is where sister is currently based a day earlier, late in the evening. Over dinner we were chattering excitedly about what all we would be taking to the US open, what we would do to avoid getting into the bag line, and other logistic issues when we realized that I had left the tickets back in SC! Major panicking happened on my part and the stoic in me started to make a case for me to drive back to SC and bring the tickets. This would have entailed driving for eight hours through the night and being sleep deprived the next day which would have been, going by experience, detrimental to full enjoyment of this unusual outing.

After we had a few seconds to think about it, common sense prevailed and we decided to call Ticketmaster, the people we had bought our tickets from. In case you haven't heard, Ticketmaster rocks, for apparently this is a fairly common occurrence (duh!) and they have this system of providing replacement tickets at the venue when things like this happen. I didn't drive all night but I still managed to get very little sleep that night--always find it hard to sleep at places away from home when I first get there--yes, an extremely inconvenient trait.

We left around 9:30 aiming to get there a little after the start of the day session at 11. This involved switching trains thrice and a travel time of roughly an hour and a half through parts of New York I had never been before. By 11:30 we were in our nosebleeders high up in Arthur Ashe stadium watching Safin and Haas continue their game from last night which had been stopped due to rain. I had imagined that we would be so high up that it would be difficult to follow the action on the court. Fortunately, having pessimistic bouts has its advantages sometimes, was pleasantly surprised to see how well we could see the action down there. Though after the initial euphoria died down I found myself finding it hard to care about the game much. Some of it was my lack of sleep compounded by having such high seats--yes, they seemed quite far now-- and some of it was the quality of the game which was not very high. I was obviously rooting for Safin, hoping that he would beat Federer in the finals like he did a year ago at the Australian. Shivani had slept better, and about an hour or so into the match she went exploring the rest of the complex. She came back with reasonably good Indian food--a tip we had got from Jon Wertheim's column in the Sports illustrated--the only kind of food I wanted to eat in that sorry sleepy state.

Federer was playing in Armstrong but decided not to relocate as I still had hopes that these two here would elevate the level of their game as the match progressed, besides, Fed was playing a virtual nobody and that match had whitewash written all over it. The Haas-Safin match went to a fifth set tiebreaker but the game remained too error-strewn to become interesting. The stadium itself was only half full, the crowd didn't seem much into the match either, partly also a relic of being such a large stadium that when not filled close to capacity it tends to dissipate any kind of collective involvement from the crowd.

After being resuscitated by the food we decided to take the half-filled state of the stadium to our advantage and moved to a tier below ours to watch the next match which was between Henin and Davenport. The view from there was obviously much better, it also suited my short attention span really well. This match was a better contested one but I left when Davenport got broken late in the first set, she didn't seem like she was going to take a set of Henin.
I had, by this time, been watching uninterrupted tennis for a while and decided that I was now feeling sufficiently non-zombie-ish to venture out of my seat. I left the stadium and went to Armstrong where Nadal was playing Youzhny, the atmosphere here was much more exciting, everybody was closer in and more involved with the match. Youzhny was playing great, hitting absolutely stunning backhands while Nadal was very much on the defensive against his opponent's ferocious attacking game. Though my support for Nadal was just as ferocious I couldn't help but admire how well Youzhny was playing.

After the second set Shivani and I met outside Armstrong and made another, this time more relaxed, trip around the grounds. We went to the really small courts where you can literally touch the players. We saw Jankovic, Safina, Hantuchova, Martina, Bjorkman, and Myirni among the notables. Had some more overpriced borderline palatable food, and then went back to see the completion of the Nadal match. Youzhny was too good, and wrapped it up in 4 sets. We then went back to Ashe to see the end of Blake and Berdych. Berdych was totally off his game and Blake was totally destroying him. By now I was sufficiently in good spirits and really got onto cheering Berdych into making a match of it, it was the third set and it seemed like it was only a matter of time. All this was tinged with a note of desperation as I didn't want to go back yet and this was the last match planned in Ashe for the day session.


I have no idea where I will be next August so I'm really glad that I finally, after being in the US for so many years, made the trip to Flushing meadows. Curses to all my friends for not being tennis fans and not coming along, and thanks to S for being such a sport.

Labels: Sports, Trip description