Tuesday 2nd September – The Open

Firstly, I feel I should congratulate my brother Ben on making it to his 19th birthday without being killed by being run over by a car or anything. Pretty much.
Gill and I had been planning a trip to the US Open since she added me on MSN back in May. I’d always wanted to go to Wimbledon back home, but the tickets are ridiculously expensive back home and going to the US Open seemed like a sensible way of getting some tennis action into my life without having to sell a kidney. So on Thursday, Gill won a couple of day tickets to today’s match. The seats were high enough to make our ears pop and noses bleed, but we didn’t care because we’d only paid $30 each for a day of professional tennis.


We turned up at the National Tennis Centre at about lunch time (Hayley - that’s what the Americans call dinner time), having bought muffins to eat on the way there (we didn’t eat any proper food all day now I think about it. We survived on burgers, chips and ice-cream) and immediately bought a cup of tea to drink whilst we pasted ourselves in sun-block. How very English of us.

We entered Arthur Ashe Stadium (the US version of Centre Court) just after Djokovic had started playing his 4th round game against a Spaniard called Robredo. Having never heard of Robredo, I assumed straight away that this was going to be a three set game. We weren’t let down though, as both players played damn well and gave us a three hour, five set match that ended in the favourite winning.
By the time the Djokovic match was over, we’d moved seats four times, ending up in $180 seats that weren’t taken yet. We had been moved a few times by this point, both by security and by people wanting their seats back, but by this point we’d managed to settle in some seats that weren’t to be taken for the rest of the day.

The second match to play was Federer – Andreev, a match that should again have been a walk-over. This also turned out to be a five-setter though, this time due to the favourite’s suprising lack of form, rather than the underdog’s suprising new skill-set.
We’d already decided that we should stick around for the evening matches at the stadium too, which was a women’s quarter-final, as well as Andy Roddick’s 4th round match against Gonzalez. By ‘we’, I mainly mean ‘Gill’, who has a near psychotic obsession with America’s golden boy of tennis. So Dave (who hadn’t been able to come during the day due to work) bought three tickets for the match online for $65 a head and met us at the stadium. He actually managed to con his way into the last set of the Federer match too which was a surprise as the crowds waiting to get in were fairly huge by this point.

This was due to the two men’s games totalling nearly 8 hours in length. The Roddick match was over far quicker than these two with the American winning all three sets (and losing only seven games out of the 25 played), and before I knew it we were back on the last train home to Locust Valley having sat through over 10 hours of tennis for about £50 each.

For the record, despite being in the sun for most of that time, I didn’t tan at all, coming back the same colour as when I left, with only a red triangle on my chest where I’d forgotten to put sunblock.