I had been to the US Open tennis once before in 2005 and I liked the experience. I was not interested too much in 2006 and it was a good choice since a lot of the games got rained out. This year I wanted to go and I thought the weather will not be so bad this time around.
The US open has both day and night games (probably the Australian open has as well). The day games are disadvantageous for one you have to take a day off or you have to go on the weekend, also since you sit in the seats that are quite high up the visibility is not so good and also the warm weather is not so enjoyable for me. Then the other tricky part is to get tickets for the night in which there are good games. That is purely left to chance and it all depends on the scheduling and you will come to know only the night before about the schedule.
This time around i decided to go for the second week where you might get to see more closely fought matches. I got lucky here. The first match was Venus Williams against Jankovic. Although it was a straight sets victory for Venus, the match had a different story, it was closely fought and could have gone either way. The second match was the highlight of the evening, Roger Federer going against Roddick. The game started off according to script, where both the men held their serves and then in the tie break, Roddick made a couple of errors and it was over. Federer was not at his best, but he used to come back to his best when he was down. It was a real treat to watch some of his shots and whatever Roddick did he had an answer. In fact, between the service breaks, he used to go back out early as if to affect Federer mentally, but nothing worked. In the end it was a usual story of Roddick losing (13 of the last 14 times) the match.
The atmosphere was good but it is the most noisiest grand slam. There is no etiquette and people walk around between points and there are cell phones ringing and so on. New Yorkers feel they can do anything and that is the attitude i guess if you have money.
Federer has won 12 grand slams already and that is quite amazing to see one person dominate a game so much. The other person who comes to mind is Tiger Woods who is along the same path in golf.
Overall, it was a fun evening and to watch a man who might one day will be considered as the greatest of all time.
