Going to the US Open

July 20, 2009 11:46 PM

I want to go to the US Open to watch Federer and Nadal play in the first rounds, but I don't know when they will play, and the web site doesn't help much. Help me!

I'm thinking about going to the U.S. Open Tennis Championship in September. I have no intention of watching the semis or the finals since tickets are too expensive and the best ones are taken anyway. My plan is to purchase tickets for the first rounds so I can see Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal play. However I just read at US Open website that it's impossible to know what time the players will be in action until the night before the matches.

I know that the the numbers 1 and 2 in the ranking play in different days, so Roger will play in the first day and Nadal in the second (in case they keep their positions until there). My plan is then was to purchase tickets for both days so I can see both, and watch the rest on TV. However when I went to purchase the tickets, I noticed that there are two sessions: morning and evening. My thought was that the top-ranked players would play in the evening session, but looking at the 2008 schedule I found out this is not true (Federer played 11:00AM and Nadal 7:00PM in different days).

Any advice the hivemind can give me on what to do if I want to see the two greatest players in the world without having to spend two full days at the stadium? I love Tennis but the wife only wants to see Nadal :|

posted by dcrocha to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (7 answers total)

Since nobody's touched this yet...

It all depends on a) the draw, b) what the organisers want, and c) what the host broadcaster wants. In theory, the draw should be random; in practice (and I'm not sure on the ITF policy regarding this) not so much. Certainly the organisers seem to be able allocate the seeds across the draw such that the closely-ranked &/or favourite players don't meet until the second week.

Then, you throw the broadcasters into the mix. They have a fair amount of influence with the organisers as to what matches appear on what courts at what time, even to the extent of influencing the schedule on a given day. Obviously, the seeds usually end up on the main courts in prime-time - but not always; given the choice between #1 vs a nobody, or strong #5 vs a fast-rising #30, the first may end up as a morning match on an outer court while the second will end up on centre court at 7:30pm.

On top of this, you throw the players into the mix. There have been rumours on at least 1 occasion that a certain pair of closely-related players had the draw modified because they were either scheduled to meet in the first round or on-track to meet in the second. Not saying they did or didn't but that was the rumour at the time, a few years ago. Personally I don't think they did, but there's no denying that 2 players like that meeting in round 1 or 2 is most definitely not what the organisers or broadcasters want. Can't have that happening; gotta put that sort of action off until at least the semi's...

In short: you're not going to know until the draw is made and the timetable drawn up, in the week or so before the tournament. And even then, that may change.
posted by Pinback at 2:38 AM on July 21, 2009

Yeah, the US Open is such a difficult slam to plan for because of the day/night sessions. Like Pinback said, you're just not going to know until the evening before. I have picked up two day sessions and one night session to hopefully cover everyone I want to see this year.
posted by meerkatty at 5:02 AM on July 21, 2009

What's even worse is that since men's matches are longer, the first round stretches to the third day. In 2007, Nadal was the 2nd seed and played in the third day session.
posted by smackfu at 6:15 AM on July 21, 2009

There's not much you can do as others have said.

For the opening rounds, in the evening session only one men's match is played on Ashe, whereas in the daytime session, I think there were 2 men's matches. (I never went to Ashe during the day last year.) My guess is they'll do something similar to what they did last year: put 1 of either Federer or Nadal on Ashe in the evening for one day and an American on Ashe in the evening for the other day. But there is no way to know for sure.

Your best options are to buy all 4 tickets and either 1) sell the ones you don't want, 2) eat the cost and not go, or 3) go to all of the sessions. You wouldn't necessarily have to spend the whole day there but you might have tickets you don't really want.
posted by mathlete at 6:17 AM on July 21, 2009

The only way to guarantee ahead of time that you get to see both players (provided both play) is to buy a mini-plan and resell the remaining tickets. It still has risk of not recouping the loss of the rest of the plan, but it's not as risky as waiting last minute and seeing if you get lucky through craigslist.
posted by spec80 at 7:18 AM on July 21, 2009

I just want to say that I love going to the Open, and you can have a great day in the early rounds regardless of who's playing at arther ashe. At any time there's 10 or 15 matches going on at smaller courts all over. You can watch world class tennis occur right in front of you.
Its a crapshoot who's on the big courts, but I swear if you like tennis you'll have a great day regardless of who it is.
Love the day sessions
posted by alkupe at 8:54 AM on July 21, 2009

For the record, Federer ended up being the first seed and is scheduled as the day match on Day 1. Andy Roddick is the men's night match on Day 1 — even though he's only the 5th seed, he's very popular as an American. (The Williams sisters are the other big Ashe matches on Day 1.)
posted by smackfu at 6:46 PM on August 30, 2009