We sat courtside for some tennis Saturday. The US Open comes here every year and tickets are pretty easy to score.
Branko, my fellow chemist, came down from Boston and we joined Thomas, my teacher friend who now runs the Tennis Blog of the New York Times. 
The beautiful thing is you can wander amongst parallel games, in and out at will, a real blessing for my attention deficit.
The people watching is excellent, fascinating. The crowd is extremely white. They have skin tans and wardrobes that indicate they do stuff like this all summer long. In the fans there is a bias toward female youths, sort of like the balcony at the ballet, but with dad in attendance this time.
There’s real horse race unpredictability to the US Open. In the space of an afternoon, with so many simultaneous games going on, there are always dramatic inversions of routine. It’s the complete opposite of football where you invest a whole afternoon watching one team, usually the favorite, grind another into a predictable loss. Here, at a tennis tourney the champion Maria Sharpova (seeded 2nd out of 64) went down in flames, losing to a youngster and then Roger Federer, the world champion, from Switzerland, was temporarily played to a standstill by a kid that all of the following sympathetic traits: new guy (22 years old, NCAA champ), hometown boy (or at least American, from Georgia), and eccentric body type (a giant: 6’ 8”). Federer eventually pulled through but the kid was thrilled just to hold his own. 
Where we sat, the kind of expensive mid level of the main stadium, most boxes were occupied by a wealthy patriarch, lording over his high status brood. In some ways it was like who you’d see at a church in a wealthy neighborhood: well dressed WASPs, both parents present and 2.2 kids in tow.
There was a high level of giddiness in the audience. Everyone – me, them, the teens, where all kind of pinching ourselves: Am I really sitting behind Federer, close enough to hear little sounds like his shoes, him tapping his strings? I think some of the giddiness too is all the rich people getting to watch each other and to be seen. The fathers show off their good postured, well clothed brood, the women show off their tans, and everyone congratulates themselves on being part of this well-respected pasttime.
On the medium sized court, an African-American hopeful, super young Donald Young, was making a sort of comeback. After high expectations last year as a newbie the fellow had lost a dozen matches in a row but Saturday he staged a sort of re-birth, fighting his way to almost a draw against a well-known Spaniard. This match vacuumed 99.9% of the black fans in attendance away from the other courts to root for, again, a hometown sentimental favorite going head to head with a European.
We paid $118 each but that got much better seats than usual. I budget for two such tickets a year and it makes life way better to have already okayed it with myself ahead of time. For the money you get an around the clock show: 11am to 10 pm if you can stand it that long.
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