Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. These are times, watching the young Swiss at play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re OK. He’s not Italian after all.ĪLMOST ANYONE WHO LOVES tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. The stands he wants to open’ll sell gyros, he says. But it turns out, when he gives me his card, that he’s a legit businessman, a concessioneer, here to labor instead of recreate/consume he’s scouting out possibilities for opening a couple of stands here at next year’s Open, when the new Stadium’s up and running and even more vigorous attendance and commerce can be foreseen. You half-expect him to have a white fedora and violin case. He has heavy brows and wingtips and a Eurocut silk pinstripe suit of the type that Cagney-era gangsters wore. The Italian man has a small filtered cigar in his mouth and a disgusted look and is sitting back with his legs crossed and his elbows up on the bench’s back’s top in that insouciant way savvy New Yorkers sit on park benches. “Ripping the fucking place off,” the well-dressed Italian man says, indicating with a hand gesture the kitchen worker, who’s now making his way quickly back to the kitchen tent, hand in his pocket. “Goddamn rip-off,” says a well-dressed Italian man next to me on my bench. Vague contented noises from the cabbies on the bench as they dig in. ![]() One of the cabbies rises and moves out and meets the kitchen worker something subtle occurs between their hands that indicates a transfer of funds and now the cabbie bears the box back to the bench, where the rest of the drivers circle and grab and reveal that the box is full of supper-burgers, chicken legs, wieners, etc. The cabbies are making gestures like: Finally, Thank God. The kitchen worker’s carrying a broad low cardboard box through the employee- and Media Pass-entrance in the Gate and down the promenade and across the circle, making for the bench with the cabbies. Through one of these flaps now emerges a stocky young guy in the unmistakable tall hat and whites of a kitchen worker (though on his feet are $200 Air Jordans so new they glow in the N.T.C.’s ambient light, so he looks like he’s floating). From this circle you can see the rear flaps of some of the tented high-volume kitchens. I’m on the next bench trying to organize my notes. Half a dozen of these guys sit on this bench in their cabbies’ berets, waiting around, smoking cigars, talking shit, etc. ![]() In one of the big communitarian fountainless circles that the promenade opens into as it leads to the Main Gate-the circle closest to the Gate, this one is-one of the circle’s green benches is controlled by gypsy-cab and -limo drivers waiting for anybody exiting who needs a gypsy-type ride back to Rye or Rockaway or wherever. Some of the time it’s hard even to know what it is you’re seeing take place. Let’s not even get into the little easements behind the strips of food stands, the furtive and on the whole unauthorized-looking deliveries and removals of large boxes, the various transactions and scurryings. Open Club” for V.I.P.s and so on, the massive sizzle and clatter of high-volume prep from these kitchens off along the south parts of the Main Gate. ![]() Imagine the opportunities-not only the overpriced all-cash concession stands but the enormous tented kitchens for the Corporate Hospitality Areas and the “U.S. Plus food: the various extracurricular food scams haven’t yet been mentioned.
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