The tournament takes place over two weeks. Most weeknights, I watch the event on television for two to three hours. Weekends, five hours or more. And I monitor it during the workday, I stream it silently, my phone perched nearby so I can check the score every few minutes.
This is the first layer of participation.
Next layer, next stratum, I talk about what’s happening during the fortnight with friends, via group messages and threads and DMs. And then, the next morning, I’m reading the newspapers, the tennis newsletters, players’ comments on Instagram about other players flexing on Instagram. It’s also listening to commentary radio, listening to podcasts on walks or in the car, podcasts dedicated exclusively to tennis, that analyze the tournament’s previous day’s matches – games I already enjoyed in the first layer and get to relive in layer two.
With two layers, the participation starts to acquire shape.
And the feeling begins to seem a slow drip of low-key mania.
The third layer is maybe the most pleasing. In the two weeks, I’ll play the sport with different friends seven or eight times. It’s a facsimile, it’s an echo. We discuss the tournament as we warm up, a sunny court in Crenshaw or Griffith Park, then we start playing, competing, and it all becomes even bigger: acting something out as if in pantomime, with elements from the other layers somewhere in-mind, subconscious, bouncing around in the acoustics, so the feeling when you hit the ball, hit a backhand volley, resounds with harmonies, and in some very slight way, still a mind-buzzing, minorly hallucinatory way, the way you strike the volley and the response from the person across the net isn’t totally unlike the way Krygios hit that one volley, Medvedev responded, and tennis Twitter freaked out, though now, in this moment, unconscious, conscious, you are in it and of it, and it’s all of one piece.
I realize this may sound nuts. I mean, there is a long-noticed phenomenon of people attending the US Open and other majors in full gear, wristbands, adidas Barricades, as though to be ready should Coco Gauff need a new doubles partner – and anytime I see it, part of me blinks in sympathy.
I’m not sure what other types of things, outside sports, have these layers. Sometimes walking around a big city like Los Angeles or Rome, or New York, I feel it: layers of history and story intersecting, skins on skins on skins. Maybe some visitors to Bayreuth, Germany’s annual Wagner festival, pack cellos on the plane? There are times I’ve been to sporting events for magazine work, interviewing players and coaches, wandering behind the scenes with a press wrangler on my elbow – and that layer’s less fun, it subtracts, it drains intensity. (Rafael Nadal shakes your hand in a Miami hotel lobby and you have the vanilla cookie realization that he’s taller than you thought.) Basically, the role becomes transferring the event, telling a story, wrapping it up and presenting it to somebody else, rather than simply being there, coming into being with it as it comes into being.
Maybe the closest I’ve experienced, non-sport, is the Sundance Film Festival. I went a couple years ago for research, my last book, shadowing a performer/screenwriter whose film was in competition. And I remember meeting a woman one night outside, wearing a hooded parka, a volunteer from Florida who was monitoring a long line outside a theater one night while it snowed, who said she’d formerly paid to attend, she and her daughter would rent an apartment in Park City and watch movies for a week and see celebrities, until she discovered she liked volunteering more, she felt even more involved, part of the gestalt – still an observer but no longer just watching.
A final layer for the meta: this mini-essay was written Wednesday in an airport lounge at Las Vegas International, waiting for a connecting flight to New York City, with two rackets sticking out of my carry-on bag while Frances Tiafoe and Andrey Rublev battled on a TV above the bar, and if there is a picture below this paragraph, then even another layer was added Friday night, from just under the nose-bleeds at Arthur Ashe Stadium, and I was probably pretty excited about it.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters
New indie music for the Open moment
Recent curious reads I enjoyed – like why Luke Perry was not eaten by mushrooms after all, and why new cars look like wet clay– plus a trilogy of fiction, maybe autofiction, that some people missed
Suggestions on how to hear Rachmaninoff as someone innovative, not just a purveyor “of late-Romantic schlock”
If you’re not enrolled, look at the blue button, see how it desires you, look how it hungers for your warm touch. (There’s a free trial.)
What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency” is published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin, about things he finds beautiful, with a longer piece once a month for paying subscribers, written in the woods.
Also for paying subscribers, a Sunday supplement, three weeks a month, with three-plus ideas of things to love, no paid placements 💀
Rosecrans is the author most recently of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the 2022 California Book Award, now available in paperback from Bookshop, Bezos Farms, or (preferably) your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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