Arthur Ashe Stadium at the US Open
It is approaching 4:30 AM here in southeastern Connecticut and raining very hard.
We are about 30 miles from Flushing Meadows where the US Open is 'trying to be played.'
We here in the tri-state area enter our third consecutive day of potential washout and its likely that the tournament will be extended into Monday and possibly Tuesday next week.
The rain is a result of tropical storm Lee, which brought 10-15 inches of rain to Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, moving up the Atlantic coast mixing with a persistent northeast cold front pushing in our direction.
The result is extreme frustration for the players. They are under pressure by tournament director Curley to squeeze in matches so as to have the women's and men's finals on Saturday and Sunday respectively.
A riveting example of disappointment was a much frustrated Nadal who was interviewed on ESPN after he had left the court after only 15 minutes of play; he had started his round of 16 match with Gilles Muller at 12 noon, played only three games and was down 0-3! Though the court conditions were not optimal (the backcourt was still wet), he appeared amenable to play.
(A trio of players: Nadal, Andy Roddick and Andy Murray had marched into the tournament director's office to protest the resumption of play at noon when it was obvious to all that it was still raining!)
Meanwhile, the commentators led by John Mcenroe were discussing the lack of a movable roof over Arthur Ashe or Louis Armstrong stadiums. It seems that when the facility was being planned in the mid 1990's, Mac had urged the USTA to include a sliding roof (much like Wimbledon introduced and Roland Garros has planned for 2015!) only to be shot down. The cost now is prohibitive running up to $200 million. This is a near impossible engineering feat for the Ashe venue because of its sheer size and it is not likely to happen for Armstrong due to cost.
The problem with covering only Armstrong is accommodating the 22,000 plus fans from the larger Ashe stadium to the Armstrong facility that barely holds 10,000 fans.
On the bright side is the excellent online weekend coverage by the US Open website. We tennis fans were able to view up to 6 matches simultaneously aided by a reliable PIP screen. (This was a boon as the Tennis Channel was pulled from our Cablevision system over a monetary dispute.)
The streaming HD quality images online were outstanding. We were able to witness exciting matches- especially the number one seeded Wozniacki versus number seventeen seeded Kutsnetsova. The latter played the highest level of tennis in the first set only to be upended by a stronger Woz in an thrilling three setter: 6-7, 7-5, 6-1.
Another memorable match was the five setter between the eighth seeded American Marty Fish and eleventh seeded Jo Wilfred Tsonga; it was a tight match that featured Fish finishing at the net 87 times via his serve and volley and Tsonga winding up at the net 47 times (but only once on a serve and volley). (Thanks to the New York Times' Straight Sets blog for the numbers.) This was tennis reminiscent of the era of fast grass court tennis at Wimbledon and Forest Hills (when the Open was played there.) Tsonga pulled out the match in the fifth set; the score was 6-4, 6-7, 3-6, 6-4, 6-2
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