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September 8, 2004

Best Souvenir EVER

For someone who has lived in New York for going on five years and
who is a pretty devout sports fan with at least a passing interest in
tennis, I am ashamed to say that 2004 was the first year I made it
out to the US Open Tennis Tournament. In fact, I had never
actually been to any sort of professional tennis tournament, much
less the most important one in the United States of Freedom!

At the same time, I do maintain a weakness for David Foster
Wallace, and so was more than a little curious to see what the
denizens of the real-world Enfield Tennis Academy looked like up
close:

The US Open, presented exclusively by the following thirty-one platinum sponsors!:
my my my, if the US Open
wasn't just a unique opportunity to engage middle-to-high income
consumers in an immersive and unmatched promotional milieu!
Unlike gauche baseball or football games, the US Open is a
premium sporting event, drawing a different sort of consumer with
high-end tastes and niche needs. Or so the up-its-own-ass signage
and presentation plastered literally EVERYWHERE around the
concourse led me to believe -- with at least 18 different brands
and firms represented. And as expensive as those logo placements
certainly were, good for the folks at the USTA for holding the line
and refusing to let anyone present their brand's visual identity in
anything but white on green inside the stadia. Good for them. Of
course, the folks from Nextel who greeted us with a wave of
yellow and black as we came through the main entrance could
have been passing out koozies at the Talladega 400, but hey, at
least that doesn't make it onto TV. If I had to pick, I would say
that the best signage was definitely the little logos that they
placed at either end of the nets on each of the courts, dutifully
changed prior to the start of each match.

Unidentified Product Lust: look closely at the crowd shots
on your TV, and you'll notice certain folks clutching what look like
giant tennis balls in the stands, or, as I like to call them, THE
GREATEST SPORTS SOUVENIR I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE
LIFE. Ohmygod. These things are phenomenal. They seemed to
be selling like crazy, and with good reason. They're just flat-out
awesome, though I suppose that explains the, ahem, healthy $40
price point. I have no idea how you bring a child under the age of
12 to the Open and walk out of there without one of these
things.

What Happened Out There, Baumer?: I had no idea how
close you could sit to the players. With the exception of the
cavernous and impersonal Arthur Ashe stadium (where the upper
tier bordered on vertigo-inducing), a general admission ticket and a
little persistence could earn you a seat just 10 meters away from
the players. Very cool -- you really get an excellent feel for the
speed and movement of the ball, and can definitely read the
emotions of the players. Being that close really made me want to
see someone just completely lose it. Just a total meltdown out
there: I feel like you would get to hear every expletive and even
the ping of the racket smashing against the court. Unfortunately,
we only watched well-behaved players. Sigh. Now I get why
Johnny Mac put fannies in the seats.

Posted by thatkid at September 8, 2004 11:34 AM under ThatKid

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