COMMENTARY : U.S. Open Offers a Little Bit of Everything

It was Day 9 of an ultra-marathon known more commonly as the U.S. Open. After a while, the mind shuts out everything except backhand cross-court passing shots and how to spell Kafelnikov.

Has the Clinton health-care package passed? Is there new movement on the crime bill? Are the Cubans still rafting in armadas toward Miami? When Pete Sampras lost, did the Fed raise or lower the interest rates?

The U.S. Open is one of four Grand Slam tennis tournaments. It is a big deal because it is in the United States, where we have lots of money and assume that events we put on are important because we are putting them on.

Each of the Grand Slam events is noteworthy for something. The Australian Open is Down Under in the summer, an exotic, faraway place where it is steamy hot in January. The French Open is Paris. Enough said. Wimbledon is everything a tennis tournament ought to be: grass, tradition, London. No night tennis. No catering to TV. Wimbledon is above all that.

And then there is the U.S. Open, a 500-pound gorilla. It does what it wants to, when it wants to, and the players and fans and the rest of the world be damned. The American way, certainly.

It is a tournament that reflects perfectly the city in which it is played. If you need a break from pushing and shoving and being rude on the streets of Manhattan, the U.S. Open provides an opportunity to come out to Queens and do those things.

One player, when asked his enduring memory of playing here, responded, “The garbage smell.” Frequently, one ponders the ironic significance of this area being named Flushing Meadow.

Nevertheless, as you wander around the premises, bruised from the jostling, your hand frequently straying to your wallet, just to make sure it is still there, your fogged mind ponders some of the sights and sounds of those first nine days.

There is Richard Krajicek, a 6-foot-5 player from the Netherlands, who has won the L.A. Open twice and is one of the few players you figure might be able to make Sampras sweat. Krajicek gets ahead, 6-0, in a tiebreaker for the match in an early round, and John McEnroe, doing TV commentating from a nearby booth, says if Krajicek loses the tiebreaker from 6-0, he will stand on his head and broadcast the next day. Krajicek does, and so does McEnroe.

Even when he isn’t playing, McEnroe adds more creativity and fun to this place than anybody else.

Sampras loses a first set to some guy named Roger Smith, from that tennis hotbed, the Bahamas. It is the first set Sampras has lost in his last 10 Grand Slam matches, and afterward, he talks about little bumps on the stadium court that make it somewhat flawed. You want to stand up and scream at Pete that this is the U.S. Open, and it is New York. Flaws are the attraction here.

Stefan Edberg gets upset in a night match, and he talks about disliking the cold, windy conditions. You ponder this a bit. A guy from Sweden complaining about the cold.

Ann Grossman upsets Mary Joe Fernandez, then spends 20 minutes in the interview room talking about her deceased father, who she says was verbally abusive and overbearing in his attempts to make her into a star player. She talks about playing on the concrete tennis court he built for her inside a barn, where she remembers hitting the ball between the cows and the pigs, and she talks about working there, five hours a day, every day, for many years. It is fascinating, but you feel as if the interview should have been conducted on a couch and you should be charging $120 an hour.

It was a special moment. For Grossman, the flood of emotion about her father was understandable, even refreshing. For her, a victory like that at the U.S. Open was huge, was what she had worked for all those hours in the barn. Quite possibly, she had never before been at the interview podium at the U.S. Open.

The next day, the New York Times, in its report on the match, lists Fernandez as the winner.

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Until Andre Agassi took it back with his thrilling, hard-earned victory Monday over Michael Chang, this tournament belonged to the Jensen brothers, Murphy and Luke. Criticized loudly by tennis purists for their showmanship, the Jensens nevertheless seemed to be the only act playing this tennis Broadway that was drawing well. On the court, they can play a little bit, although the gimmicks seem to be increasingly getting in the way of results. But off the court, they are Letterman and Leno.

Murphy, asked how he reacts to criticism from other players: “No big deal. Heck, Sampras accused me of cheating in the boys’ 12s.”

Luke: “You did.”

The Jensens have twin sisters, Rebecca and Rachel, playing on the tour. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, one of these days, we will turn on our TV sets and have a mixed doubles match featuring Jensen-Jensen vs. Jensen-Jensen. Maybe McEnroe will do the commentating standing on his head.

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One of the better things that went on in the first week, at least from a tennis standpoint, was the play of Ginger Helgeson. She played at Pepperdine, now lives in the mountains not far from San Diego and is close to breaking into the top echelon of women’s singles.

When she beat Wimbledon champion Conchita Martinez here, she went to the net 79 times in three sets. Excluding Gigi Fernandez, who later beat Helgeson, all the rest of the women in the draw may not make that many net approaches in the entire two weeks. Women’s tennis, all too often a drone of never-ending ground strokes, needs Helgeson.

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First thing Tuesday morning, way out on Court 20, a junior boys’ match was played between American Mark Loughrin and a player from India named Anirban Baruah. Loughrin, one of the best juniors in the country, won easily. But when he missed on a match point in the last game, he cursed himself under his breath. A linesman quickly reported that to the chair umpire, who gave the 17-year-old Loughrin a warning.

When the match ended, Loughrin went to a phone and called his parents, Gene and Sherry, back in Greendale, Wis. The first thing he told each of them, in separate calls to their workplaces, was that he won. The second thing he told each of them was that he had received a warning from the chair. Each said he deserved the warning.

It was a nice moment. Even at 17, winning wasn’t everything. Behaving mattered a lot, too.

Now if the rest of this place could just learn that. . . .