“It’s like Black Friday at Walmart,” a tennis fan told The Times of the record-breaking attendance at this year’s U.S. Open. This sort of review might make a normal person glad they’d opted out of attending the tournament. But the more I heard of the colossal throngs, the endless lines attendees were enduring to procure a souvenir hat or a Honey Deuce or just to get inside the stadium complex, the more I wished I were there.
I have, for most of my teen and adult life, defined myself as a tennis fan. It’s been a sort of badge of honor: I may not remember the rules of football from one Super Bowl to the next, but I can recall in bright detail the intricacies of the John McEnroe-Jimmy Connors rivalry of the 1980s. Being into tennis has given me a connection to the larger fraternity of sports fans, the parking lot tailgaters and March Madness bracketeers and the people who get up at 4 a.m. to watch World Cup matches.
John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote that tennis is “as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too.” For this mostly indoor cat who’s more at home discussing literature than LeBron, tennis has provided a passage from the cerebral to the physical, a means of getting out of my head.
In May, in a cafe in Dublin, I struck up a conversation with a woman at a neighboring table. She’d just finalized her plans to attend Wimbledon and was abuzz with anticipation for the players she hoped to see. We chatted about Coco Gauff and Carlos Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic and Frances Tiafoe, top seeds with good chances of going far. Sensing she’d found a confederate, she moved on to the Italian Open, which was going on as we spoke. As she reeled off the stats of players I’d never heard of, I felt my tennis bona fides slipping. I tried to keep up — it felt good to be connecting with a stranger in a foreign country through the lingua franca of tennis — but I was lost. I could still deconstruct every stroke in Stan Wawrinka’s electric 2015 victory over Djokovic in the French Open final, but, for no good reason, I hadn’t really been engaged with the game since Roger Federer and Serena Williams retired in 2022. I, who used to mark tournament dates in my calendar as soon as they were announced, had essentially retired from tennis myself.
The grief of the lapsed fan is hardly a serious matter. With a little light internet research, one can get back into any sport — one could even accomplish this in the few remaining hours before the U.S. Open finals begin. My friend Justin, who texts me “!!!!” whenever something notable happens in a Grand Slam match on the (in recent years incorrect) assumption that I’m watching too, has probably not even noticed that I haven’t been responding all year.
I felt a little silly for even describing my U.S. Open FOMO as grief when I chatted about it this week with my colleague Sam Sifton. But he pointed out that he felt it, too, felt the poignancy of not attending the tournament, not taking part in the ritual of walking the boardwalk at Flushing Meadows from the train to the tennis center and back. I loved that part of going to the Open too, the magic-hour light radiant on the faces of fellow fans en route to a night match.
If we define ourselves by who and what we love, and I think we should, then it’s valuable to love as many things as we can, to accumulate enthusiasms and lean into them, to hold onto passions when we discover them and not let them fall away. This way, our identities become rich, multidimensional, expansive. Sometimes it feels like there’s more to dislike than to like, more to disdain than to embrace. My longing for tennis feels like an opportunity, a reason to open my arms wider, to take more of the world in. I’m going to seize it.
