U.S. Open : Players Ready to Take Their Chunk Out of the Big Apple

Playing it is as noisy as standing on a runway. It’s choked by crowds and smothered by heat and has the ambience of a bus station.

But in tennis, it’s still the U.S. Open and no matter how oppressive the conditions, the year’s fourth and final Grand Slam tournament looks attractive enough to those who court it.

Take for instance, Ivan Lendl, the men’s singles favorite.

The transplanted Czech, who lives a short drive away in Greenwich, Conn., is a three-time winner. His streak was interrupted by Mats Wilander in last year’s final when Lendl also lost his No. 1 ranking.

Since then, Lendl has become No. 1 again and asserted himself in the Grand Slams. Both Lendl’s losses were to the eventual champions.

He won the Australian Open and lost in the semifinals at Wimbledon when he probably should have won.

Lendl led Boris Becker in the fourth set, 3-0, when rain delayed the match. Becker came back to win both sets and defeated Stefan Edberg in the final.

Lendl’s only slip-up was in Paris, where he lost in the fourth round to 17-year-old Michael Chang, who went on beat Edberg in the final.

So to prepare himself for the U.S. Open, Lendl played in an exhibition this week at Jericho, N.Y., on Long Island, even if his thoughts were really somewhere else.

“No matter how hard you to try concentrate, you are always thinking about the Open,” Lendl said.

Lendl was asked if he is ready for the Open, which begins today.

“I was ready last week,” he said.

The Open has proved to be a difficult tournament to prepare for. The United States Tennis Assn.’s complex at Flushing Meadow, N.Y., in Queens, was built in 10 months on a site from the 1964 World’s Fair.

The National Tennis Center opened in 1978, designed to handle 250,000 fans, but because more than 400,000 actually show up, there is severe overcrowding.

For the players, there are other problems. Shadows cross the Grandstand Court in the afternoon, but that seems a minor worry compared to the noise from jets taking off from Runway 13 at nearby LaGuardia Airport.

“It’s unbelievable and scary, too,” Martina Navratilova said. “If a plane flies overhead, you can’t hear the ball when it’s hit.

“I saw John Alexander playing doubles once and he actually whiffed on a ball,” she said. “It was a mis-hit and he couldn’t hear it, so he swung way in front of the ball.”

Players have also found that speed of the surface differs from court to court, which is tough enough to get used to, but that’s not the whole problem.

Brad Gilbert, with four consecutive tournament victories, is the tour’s hottest player coming into the event. He said that everything considered, the Open is one of the world’s toughest sporting events.

“It’s hot, best-of-five, you got planes going over your head, you’ve got people walking around the back courts,” he said.

“It favors the top four guys because they’re usually in the Stadium Court or Grandstand Court. The reason why it’s harder for an outside guy to win is you can play on Court 17, Court 12, they’re all different speeds. The environment is different on the outside courts.”

The most different is probably Court 28, where play is sometimes made difficult by clouds of smoke wafting over the court from hamburgers grilled at a next-door concession stand.

“I lost a match out there once--1982 to Kim Warwick in five sets--you choke, smell burgers for five sets,” Gilbert said.

“You know, it’s incredible. And then, all of a sudden, you’ve got about 1,000 people standing around the rails of the Stadium Court and they’re looking down and they’re dropping Coke cups and screaming.

“It’s tough. I mean I love it. I wouldn’t want to play anywhere else.”

Gilbert may have to, however. The USTA’s lease with Flushing Meadow runs out in five more years. According to Tennis Magazine, the USTA is negotiating with the New York City Parks Department over a new lease that would add eight acres to the tennis complex.

On the new land, the USTA could build a new stadium with luxury suites and better facilities for the players and media as well as more seats. The existing Stadium Court, which holds 19,500, would be scaled back to about half its size and used for other featured matches.

The cost of the project is estimated at $100 million. The 21-acre tennis complex was built 11 years ago for $10 million.

The other option would be to move. There may be plenty of suitors for the U.S. Open, and with good reason. It is estimated that the two-week tournament generates $78.5 million for the New York economy.

And, after all, if the USTA actually has to move the Open, they can surely find a suitable new site. Maybe there’s a vacant airport terminal close by.

U.S. Open Notes

The only top 10 player to miss the men’s singles is No. 8 Jakob Hlasek of Switzerland, who will be sidelined for at least three months because of a fractured bone in his left foot. . . . Full circle: Chris Evert is seeded fourth in her 19th and last U.S. Open, the tournament in which she first burst upon the Grand Slam scene. Evert was 16 and in her first U.S. Open in 1971 when she reached the semifinals after saving six match points in her second-round victory. . . . Steffi Graf, winner of two of the three Grand Slams this year (Australian Open, Wimbledon; lost French Open final to Aranxta Sanchez Vicario) is top-seeded in defense of her first U.S. Open title.

Michael Chang worked out twice a day at Sunny Hills Racket Club in Fullerton with his father Joe, brother Carl, and John Austin, Tracy Austin’s brother, then played in an exhibition over the weekend in Wilmington, Del. “I didn’t make any drastic changes,” Chang said. “(I wanted to) just sort of get everything grooved and everything feeling good . . . not having to worry about missing a shot because I’m not confident with it.” Chang said his goal for the U.S. Open is to improve on his round-of-16 performance in 1988. “After last year and after having the experience of winning a Grand Slam, it’s probably going to be easier for me just to go out there and play and not worry about the crowds, the presure and stuff,” he said. “The Open is the real key tournament for me that I wanted to peak out for. Hopefully, I can do that.”