Sixteen hours of tennis in one day. Start at 11.30am on Tuesday, finish at 3.33am on Wednesday, four fifth sets across four matches. Ben Shelton beat Carlos Alcaraz after 4hr 28min in a fifth-set tie-break; the Spaniard left Arthur Ashe at 3.40am.
On the women’s side the seedings held: the whole top 6 in the quarters, then the world’s top four in the semi-finals, which had not happened for 51 years. Zheng Qinwen came back from 0-5 to 7-5 in the third set against Madison Keys in the third round, then did the same thing in the first set of her fourth-round match against Iga Swiatek. Aryna Sabalenka turned round her match with Linda Noskova, the 21-year-old Wimbledon champion, to reach the final. Coco Gauff played the semis a year after a tournament where the state of her serve had left her in tears on court. Elena Rybakina won the title.
Our club league man watched all of it with his Sunday calculator.
That comeback from 0-5, I make it. Not every time, but I make it. The problem in club league — interclubs, Belgium’s weekend team league — is that at 0-5 the captain has already put the new balls away and ordered the toasted sandwiches. And 3.33am, honestly, that’s doable: I finish at 8.15pm and I’m cooked, but with the lighting on court 4, 8.15pm is already polar night. Two practice sessions away, mind you. The level in club league has gone way up, people don’t realise.
The setting was less flattering. In The Guardian on 14 September, Tumaini Carayol called this US Open the worst grand slam tournament in recent memory, between the leaks in the media centre, the tournament shop flooded by a broken pipe and the sign at the entrance to Arthur Ashe: “Pardon our appearance while we write the next chapter of Arthur Ashe Stadium.”
At 3.33 in the morning, in 1980, you did not play quarter-finals. You slept, and the next day you read the score in the paper. Well. It’s the times.
It’s true, we checked: The Guardian.
