NYC 2016

From the Nephew's Apartment

This year we decided to coordinate our visit to Frieda’s nephew with the US Open. We flew into JFK early Saturday morning before the tournament began and he picked us up in his X5. Soon we were caught in an unexpected traffic jam funneling into the Midtown Tunnel. This kicked off the theme of this trip: crowds, everywhere.

Well, not absolutely everywhere. After a family dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant we had a pleasant walk through a mild Saturday evening in the nephew's tree-lined Upper West Side neighborhood, and a sense of awe, which can always sneak up on you in NYC, actually did overtake me as we passed through the plaza and into the little park behind Lincoln Center. 

Arthur Ashe Stadium

  But we got to the crowds on Monday, our first day at the Open, when we took the subway to Penn Station and caught the LIRR out to the venue. After getting our tickets we waited under the big board to see what platform our train would be on, and once it was announced the real crush began, the crowd cramming through a pair of double doors like toothpaste through the nozzle of a tube. At least the train was air-conditioned, a relief in the 85° high humidity, and we even found seats. 

Although we arrived at 11:30, we still had to wait in a long line snaking around the huge venue to the south entrance, but once inside the gates it wasn't that crowded. We headed for Court 17 because Monfils was scheduled to play the second match there. It's a sweet little stadium and we got killer seats in the corner, second row. However, to get to Monfils we had to sit through a woman's match with Bencic, a Swiss we had seen get beaten at Indian Wells back in March, and every minute we sat there it got hotter. The match went 3 sets and there was not a shred of shade to be had, anywhere. The slight breeze that had provided some relief early on, dwindled and died. By the time she won, we were wilting badly. I don't know how the players can do it. In the break between matches Frieda went on a supply run while I held down the great seats and when she returned with a hot dog, curly fries, and an ice cold bottle of Evian I found that it was the most delicious water I had ever tasted. She complained that, at 1PM, Carnegie Deli was, unconscionably, already out of pastrami and corned beef. How could they possibly have allowed this to happen? Nevertheless the hot dog and fries quieted the ravenous beast in my stomach and the cold water revived me. Monfils came on and displayed some of his usual verve, but the temperature continued to climb and by the end of the first set, which he won, we simply couldn't stand it anymore. We had to get out of the sun. So we abandoned our primo seats, even more desirable now that the stadium was packed, and headed for Ben & Jerry's for some ice cream and some shade to eat it in. 

The New Grandstand

 

Fortunately, we had reserved seats at Arthur Ashe. They were up in the nosebleed section, but they were shady, as more than half that stadium is, now that the retractable roof has been added. The roof also contains and thus intensifies the crowd noise, even when it's open. Nadal was playing Istomin there, not a bad match, but so far away it was hard to get interested. Other people in the vicinity were having the same problem. They were mostly eating and drinking, talking and laughing, having a party and ignoring the match. After we'd cooled off, Frieda started getting sleepy, so we left and wandered over to the new Grandstand court, stopping to watch a little of a Baghdatis match in a small court along the way. We had seats in the Grandstand for Wednesday so we wanted to check them out ahead of time. We were pleased to find that they appeared to be shady. 

Bruce Springsteen Concert at MetLife

  We were staggered by the size of the grounds, like a city unto itself, about a third larger than the French Open, with 16 matches going simultaneously, plus practice courts. All of it jam-packed with people. If you crave crowds, it's heaven. We left about 4:45 and caught the 5:05 back to Penn, itself a shit storm of commuters at that hour on a Monday, then caught the #1 to Columbus Circle, where we stopped at Whole Foods to pick up dinner fixings.

Tuesday we took the day off from tennis and strolled along Central Park West to the Natural History Museum, but then decided, due to lack of time, to save it for Thursday. Instead we headed to Artie's Deli on Broadway for the corned beef and pastrami sandwiches we'd missed out on at the tournament. We can't visit New York without having pastrami or corned beef sandwiches, preferably both. In the evening Frieda went with the nephew to a Bruce Springsteen concert at MetLife Stadium in Jersey while I took a break from the hoards of humanity, stayed in the apartment and watched tennis on the 50” TV with surround sound. The concert attracted around 80,000 shoulder to shoulder. She said it was great and the online reviews pegged it as one of his best ever. The nephew, a Bruce Springsteen fanatic who has been to about fifty of his concerts, concurred. It clocked in as his longest ever US concert at 4 hours and 1 minute.

T-Rex

  Wednesday we were back in the tennis fray and, if anything, it was even more crowded than it had been on Monday. It turned out our seats in the Grandstand didn't get shade until 2PM but we found some shady bleacher seats higher up from which to watch Pospisil and Kevin Anderson, whose wife writes a blog that Frieda sometimes reads. Then we went over to Court 8 to watch some doubles, for a change, but the seats we found there were in the sun so we didn't stay long. Some high clouds took the edge off but it was still hot. When we got to our reserved seats about 2PM shade had found them and we were able to watch Ryan Harrison upset Milos Raonic in relative comfort. But then we had to fight our way through the intense crowds to catch the 6:22 train back to the city. Between the day-people exiting and the night-people arriving, it was a two-way stampede. And then  you had the people who were just milling around aimlessly, apparently lost, getting in the way. 

The next day we returned to the Museum of Natural History and it too was jam-packed due to intermittent rain driving people to find some sort of indoor activity. We headed straight for the dinosaurs where masses of humanity milled about, snapping selfies and pictures of exhibits they didn't bother to look at, with thigh-high brats racing around, bouncing off walls and crashing into us and each other, all howling like maniacs. It was a loony bin. Finally we couldn't stand it anymore and bailed for a late lunch out on the sidewalk beneath a canopy at Ella's on Columbus Avenue. Despite all the crazy commotion at the museum, I still came away feeling profoundly impressed by the immense fertility of nature, not in terms of quantity, but rather the amazing richness of variations the process of evolution throws up. 

Central Park

  Friday we went back to Landmarc in the Time Warner Building (it's a regular stop for us) for a breakfast of their memorable pain perdu. Then we ambled over to Le Pain Quotidian in the southern reaches of Central Park for some shady seats and cold drinks while we soaked in views of the Sheep Meadow and environs. It all looked lovely from there. Because we were flying out on the Friday before Labor Day weekend and were concerned about traffic, we decided to take trains to the airport instead of a car. The E train took us to the Air Tram, an easy, smooth ride. Only problem: no seats due to the crowds. One thing the world needs more than anything else: less people. Overpopulation is all around us but people don't see it anymore because they've adapted, they take it as a given.

Indian Wells 2016

Stadium 2

When I was young I was contemptuous of comfort, but now that I've put on a few years I've become much friendlier to it, and this has affected the way we approach our annual pilgrimage to the tennis tournament at Indian Wells.

In the old days we used to hop from court to court, striving to catch the matches we found most alluring. Since all the courts had bleacher seating they were all equally uncomfortable and we carried seat pads with us. But then, two years ago, the insidious new Stadium 2 made its debut, a large concrete affair with concessions, restrooms, real chairs, even restaurants, to replace the old bleacher assembly that once served as stadium 2. Compared to the old structure the new one is a luxurious accommodation indeed that even boasts the very welcome boon of shade part of the day over seats available to general admission ticket holders, a wonderful blessing in this desert environment that is in extremely short supply elsewhere at the venue. Consequently, we have gotten into the pernicious habit of seizing seats there early and holding onto them all day, because if you leave you will never get them back or, indeed, find any seats at all in the shady area. As a result, you can end up sitting through a lot of lousy matches, or at least matches that don't particularly interest you. And that's what happened to us on Sunday, our first day at the tournament this year. (We skipped it last year because my oldest nephew was visiting with his family.)

We saw Radwanska vs. Niculescu, Tsonga vs. Millot, Simon vs. Pospisil, Jankovic vs. Vandeweghe, and, finally, Isner vs. Seppi, but not one of these matches really caught fire. Radwanska produced a blowout, as did Tsonga after a first set that wasn't as close as the 7-5 score would suggest. The Simon-Pospisil match was an oddity in which Pospisil blew Simon out 6-1 in the first set while Simon returned the favor 6-0, 6-1 in the next two: a sort of double reverse blow out in which none of the sets was actually interesting or fun. Then Jankovic totally blew out Vandeweghe in another snoozer during which Frieda wandered over to Stadium 3 for a while to catch a little of the Sock vs. Berrer match. The Isner match had a fairly close score, 7-6, 6-4, but the outcome was never really in doubt. Altogether a pretty dull day.

Magdalena Rybarikova

 Of course, you can't always predict which matches are going to be good. Sometimes a match looks good on paper but doesn't pan out. Other times a match that appears likely to be boring turns into a thrilling barn burner. That's what happened in the first match on Monday when the Swiss Belinda Bencic, the number 7 seed who has a victory over Serena Williams tucked into her resumé, ran into a surprisingly feisty Magdalena Rybarikova from Slovakia. What we had anticipated would be a routine dismissal turned into a fiercely competitive knock-down-drag-out from which the Slovak, surprisingly, emerged triumphant.

This was followed by Raonic and Tomic, a match that looked potentially interesting on paper as they were ranked only 5 positions apart at 12 and 17, respectively, but which in the event turned out to be quite dull. At first it looked like Tomic just didn't care enough to make an effort, which is the way he's always looked whenever I've seen him live, but in time it became apparent that he was nursing some sort of injury and he ended up retiring in the middle of the second set after having won only 2 games. 

Alexandr Dolgopolov

Then Dolgopolov and Gasquet came on, a match we were eagerly anticipating. Dolgopolov, who has a unique game, is currently Frieda's favorite player, and we both like Gasquet as well. Dolgopolov, known as “The Dog,” came out on fire and got us thinking he was going to pull off an upset (Gasquet is ranked almost 20 spots higher), as he did against Nadal in 2014, but after taking the first set 6-2 his game began to fall apart, the unforced errors mounting sharply. It was heartbreaking to watch, you could see the frustration on his face. He suffers from some sort of chronic autoimmune disease that can cause him to run out of gas. He lost the last two sets 2 and 1. 

Next up were Stosur and McHale, a match in which neither of us had much interest, and as it went on I started to doze off and Frieda got increasingly antsy. She was tired of hanging out in Stadium 2 and wanted to go wander the lovely grounds. They don't call it a “tennis garden” for nothing. But even more she wanted to see a doubles match that was going on in Stadium 6 between Sock/Pospisil and Bellucci/Pella. I have a soft spot for Jack Sock, an American who was born in Omaha, where I grew up, and grew up in Kansas City, where I was born, and to whom I am additionally connected by having the same initials, and she has adopted him as well. I told her to go on over and call me if she found seats, which she did a few minutes later, so I abandoned our precious seats in Stadium 2 and hustled over there. I got there just after they'd closed the gates so had to wait for the next changeover, and when that came the time was used up by people exiting so there was none left to let in new arrivals and, consequently, I had to wait another 3 games in the bowels of the bleachers looking at other peoples' backs until I finally got in. Turning around and looking toward the top of the stands I saw her waving frantically . “What took you so long?” she asked when I reached her. I sat down and immediately noticed the magnificent vista of the mountains to the south over the far rim of the bleachers, which you can't see at all from inside the massive concrete bowl of Stadium 2. It felt thrilling to be exposed like this to the stark beauty of the natural environment, hanging there in the dusky evening air above the lighted court; it reminded me of the old days when we'd wandered the grounds at whim. And the match was exciting as well, a close affair which Sock and his partner the Canadian Pospisil pulled out in a final super-tiebreaker. (They made it to the final.)  But I had forgotten just how brutally uncomfortable it was to sit on a flat metal plank.

Jack Sock

When it was over we left and headed back to Stadium 2 where the Frenchman Gael Monfils, another favorite of Frieda's, was scheduled to play. But alas, the place was packed and there were no seats to be had, except way up in the nosebleed sections. It was getting dark anyway so we decided to call it a day and bug out. We still had to get some dinner and drive 80 miles on I-10 back to a La Quinta Inn near the Ontario airport so we could catch our flight home in the morning.

If we return next year maybe we'll get reserved seats in Stadium 2 so we can leave and return to them later. The down side of that is that they cost four times as much.