Nothing But Iron: Open Minded September 23, 2005 (started September 9, 2005) by Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. For the first 40 years of my life there were two cities I wanted to visit as much as New York: Hog Jaw, Arkansas, and Slickpoo, Idaho. O.K., the truth is I had never heard of Hog Jaw or Slickpoo until this morning, when I ran an internet search on unusual city names, but the point is that New York attracted me like cotton to an electromagnet. Big, crowded, dirty, with bad air, honking cabs, snotty people, the nicer half of whom were looking to stab you or pick your pocket or both. My view of the Rotten Apple softened a little after Kelly and her sister took Mom Sandy there to celebrate her 60th birthday. They returned with glowing reviews. "You would love it," Kelly told me. I listened to her stories with growing interest–like the one about seeing The Producers with $35 tickets just a day after it opened on Broadway, or the one about a shoe department the size of a football field. (Hey, I like football fields as much as the next guy.) A few months later September 11 happened and I watched with the rest of the nation as the people of this gigantic city showed a collective courage that made me certain my preconceived notions of the city were merely ill conceived. A year ago, I decided it was time for my first visit to NYC. I would not have needed an occasion, but found one anyway. It was perfect: Kelly’s 40th birthday. To say that Kelly likes tennis would be like saying teenagers like cell phones, so naturally we would go during the U.S. Open. I began planning in secrecy, but as the months went by I began to realize three things: 1) I couldn’t probably pull this off on my own. 2) Kelly was the travel agent of the family and 3) I really needed her help. I predicted that she would be so exited that she would forgive the fact that it wasn’t a surprise. She pretty much beamed when I told her. Within a week we had a check list. In another week the list had its first check when I booked the hotel. I also bought the U.S. Open Tickets and arranged for our college-student friend Sarah to stay with the boys during our absence. Kelly picked the shows, restaurants and made flights reservations. I researched the ticket acquisition process extensively. I had heard that you had to "know someone" to get Open tickets, but the more I studied (Tennis magazine ran an excellent feature on attending the event) the more confident I became that even an anonymous person like me could buy tickets directly from the source. I happened to be off work on the early June day that the day the USTA opened sales, so I logged on. Sure enough, there were tickets to be had with a few mouse clicks and a valid credit card number. I had no clue what to buy so I bought an assortment: a day session each with reserved seats in the main venue, Arthur Ashe Stadium, a day session with reserved seats in Louis Armstrong Stadium, and a day-session grounds pass. Ashe tickets allowed access to any court in the complex. The grounds passes and Armstrong tickets allowed access to any court except for Ashe, where most of the marquis players would be featured. Our Ashe seats were at high altitude, but I figured if we didn’t like the view or if we grew lightheaded in the upper deck’s hypoxic atmosphere we could always retreat to the sea level side courts. We had also been told that we could bribe an usher to show us to a lower seat. Bottom line: we were going to the U.S. Open. We departed on Thursday, September 1. A few hours later we got our first glimpse of big time tennis from about 6,000 feet in the air. Our route to La Guardia Airport took us directly over Shea Stadium, where a baseball game was in progress, and the adjacent USTA National Tennis Center where the Open was being played. It was a magnificent perspective with a match in progress in the Ashe venue. We noticed a lot of empty seats. We landed on time, enjoyed a quick cab ride in traffic lighter than I thought possible. We had dinner at Remi, an Italian restaurant just across the street from the Rihga Royal, our hotel in the Midtown section of Manhattan. It was one of those dinners that made me wish I had the stomach of a large cow, so I would not have had to stop eating. For that matter, if I hadn’t stopped when I did, I could have had just such a stomach. Our waiter, Ben, a multilingual widower of Italian-Egyptian descent and Brazilian upbringing, was the most accommodating and colorful waiter we have met in our entire restaurant going lives. By the time we finished our meal, we felt like he was our lifelong friend. Ben was the personification of a New York’s diversity, a characteristic I enjoyed greatly. In fact, there was such diversity that it was hard to tell the tourists from the natives. There is much I would like to tell you about the city as I saw it for the first time, but this is a sports column, and you are busy people, and I still have last week’s Packer game to write about, so I will go right to the best highlight, which happened the Saturday before Labor Day. Unseeded, but wildly popular James Blake was playing No. 2 seed Rafael Nadal. We on the big screen that Blake would make a match of it. Even fans outside the stadium, who jockeyed for chairs and tables offering unobstructed views of the video feed, clapped and cheered whenever he won a point. We just had to get inside Ashe Stadium to see the end of this thriller, but our lowly grounds passes did not allow us access. A couple sitting next to us told us we could probably just walk up the exit stairs, but a very attentive usher directed us elsewhere. Suddenly the solution struck me: we could probably just walk up the entrance stairs. We didn’t have the tickets, but we did have tickets. We knew from the Ashe seats we purchased for Sunday, that grounds passes, unless one took time to scrutinize the fine print, looked just like those to any other venue. We found a busy entrance, flashed our grounds passes, and the mildly interested usher waved through. I knew Kelly was behind me as the escalator ascended to the upper decks, but I did not dare look back for we would have both betrayed our trespass by the widest of grins. Two minutes later we reached the Promenade (French for mountain top) level, relieved to see hundreds of empty seats in each section. There were no ushers assigned here, so we had no trouble getting to open seats. We watched the last three games, pinching ourselves to see if we were really there. The crowd was enraptured. I won’t soon forget the look on Kelly’s face (see photo) as Blake edged closer to victory. At one point she caught me watching her. "I have goose bumps!" she said excitedly. Blake closed out the match to a standing ovation. The highlight could have ended there, but it didn’t. Andre Agassi and Tomas Berdych entered the court for the next match. I wanted to get pictures of Agassi to show our friend Mary Jo, a huge fan, so Kelly and I walked to the heavily-guarded exit from the courtside box seating. No fooling these ushers, but we noticed a number of people were leaving. Leaving before the Agassi match? Sure. My theory is that much of the courtside seating is controlled by corporate interests, meaning that at this point in the tournament, there are a lot of people who see tennis as I might see the shoe department at Macy’s, an interesting curiosity, but not worth my entire day. (Not unlike the Kohl Center in that regard.) The downside is that many of these ticket holders don’t even bother to show up, nor to they take the time to give the tickets to any one of the millions of fans who would give the last unopened can of Penn 2's on the face of the Earth to sit that close. New York’s many powerful non-sports temptations–dining, shows, site seeing, shopping–must have had a competing influence as well, even for committed tennis fans. All of this turned out to be good news for those seeking seat upgrades. As one man walked out I asked if there was any chance I could use his ticket stub to get close enough for some pictures. "Sure," he said noticing Kelly at my side. "I have two, why don’t you take them both and stay awhile." Didn’t have to offer that twice. "They’re good seats," he said, as he we thanked him. At $285 face value, we kind of figured they might be. We ended up about six rows from the court, right on the baseline–a redefinition of high definition–and we stayed there for the next three hours. Agassi dazzled us with his combination of power and grace–crushing topspin ground strokes punctuated with occasional drop shots that were, as we amateurs say when we are too tired or too old to chase down the tough ones, "just too good." So that was the best day ever in our tennis watching history. Not of Rose Bowl caliber, but definitely in my top five all-time spectating experiences. I sensed that Kelly felt at least as good as I did. It would be awhile before she would again have thoughts of Macy’s. There is more–enough to fill a small novel, but I’m playing tennis in a couple hours, so you get the rest in bullet points: The next day, using the same methods, we got courtside upgrades for Williams versus Williams. As a fellow eldest sibling with larger-breasted (Bruce and Mike for sure, probably Matt too) sibling rivals, I was cheering for Venus. I studied Anastasia Myskina, and not because I am an anastasiologist (da dum tum) and not because her tennis outfit seemed to struggle to cover the 6% of her body surface area that it was purportedly designed to cover. I studied her because I could not figure out the physics that enables a skinny woman with arms almost as big as my twelve-year-old son’s to hit a serve 117 miles an hour, in the context of the physics that constrains a man of my own body habitus to hit that same shot with a velocity barely capable of passing Dorothy and Toto on their bicycle. Kelly booked three shows–Wicked, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Doubt. I would pay to see any one of them again. Doubt was of serious and controversial subject matter. Its cast of four included two nuns, a priest and the mother of a boy at the parish school. You can guess where that’s going. My favorite was Scoundrels. To call this show funny is like calling the Roger Federer a pretty good tennis player. Runner up: Wicked, which could be called Wizard of Oz–the Rest of the Story. Clever. Funny. Suitable for kids, adults and wicked witches. Worst service: Starbucks. Yeah, go figure. They were two-for-two in screwing up Kelly’s orders. The first time she got iced instead of hot. The second time she got grande when she ordered a venti. She really needed the venti. Quote: "Where is Andy’s mojo?" –ubiquitous ill-fated American Express advertisements. As for the mojo, we never saw it, probably because Gilles Muller has it hanging from his rear view mirror like a lace wedding garter. Quote: "Nex storrr, Roshormoshirrr. Please rrruturmin wash morrmmmgantum." –typical unintelligible subway announcement. One suggestion, MTA, lose the Mr. Microphone for a real PA system. Quote: "Forty’s not so bad. If this is turning forty, I’d do it all over again." –Kelly, basking in the light of the U.S. Open. Quote: "There are people in Chicago who could learn a good lesson in Midwestern hospitality from these people." –I said that. Quote: "I’ll come back here." –I said that too. _______________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column that is officially recognized on the 7th page of the Google search engine under the search words "nothing but iron". This issue is dedicated to Andre Agassi, for continuing to inspire us middle agers to try things we probably wouldn’t try if we were rational thinking human beings, to Ben for his warmth and hospitality, to the complete strangers who shared their courtside seats with us, and most of all to Kelly, the most amazing forty-year-old wife a guy could have. ©2005 DrTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.