It was right about the time Marcel Granollers approached the umpire’s chair that I vowed never to set foot in Arthur Ashe Stadium again. Granollers, it was easy enough to surmise, was annoyed by the noise in Ashe: the noise amplified to the skies, as it were, by the new, $150 million retractable roof now closed high above him and his opponent, Andy Murray; the noise comprising downpour thud and Long Island Railroad rumble and upper-tier attendee chatter, the latter noise growing ever louder to be heard over the roof-trapped noise, making it all but impossible, Granollers would later say, to “feel” the game. Which, I guess, was a lovely Mediterranean way of saying he could not concentrate. From my press seat at the top of the lower promenade, I couldn’t concentrate either.
It would have been hard enough with the roof open: a second-round match on a dreary Thursday between a man soon enough to become world No. 1 and an unseeded, aging Spanish journeyman, a match in no way meant for a cavernous stadium that holds more than 22,000, the largest tennis venue on earth. (It would be over, in Murray’s favor, quickly enough: 6–4, 6–1, 6–4.) In truth, I’d only gone into Ashe, a venue I’ve never liked, to get my own feel for the new roof, which had had its maiden closing just the night before. It felt awful.