U.S. Open's outer practice courts lure the general public

Josh Lichtenstein and Daniel Silberg came because they couldn’t get U.S. Open tickets. Sean Mahoney waited for his son, a ballboy working the matches inside at the Open. Conor McKeon dropped by after playing a round of golf at the nearby Pitch & Putt and stayed to watch, entranced.

They had come this week to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center’s 12 outer practice courts, so outer they are not actually in the tennis center but adjacent to it. They are a quarter mile east of Arthur Ashe Stadium’s pomp, in the liminal zone between tournament grounds and Flushing Meadows Corona Park that appeared to be occupied this week chiefly by Jehovah’s Witnesses, NYPD Counterterrorism officers and doubles specialists.

“It’s a lot calmer than inside,” said McKeon, 39, a Bedford-Stuyvesant teacher, on Wednesday. He did not know the players toiling in front of him and said that was fine. “I enjoy watching people work. Practicing is the work. It’s the same thing they’ll do in Florida. In two weeks, they’ll be doing the same thing . . . It’s just pure, actual tennis.”

Practice on the outer courts is free to watch and the players are so close you can hear them breathe. That intimacy is almost unimaginable for any other professional sport. It is roughly as if NFL teams, in the games leading up to and including the Super Bowl, decided to invite into their practice facilities everyone who wanted to come.

But what McKeon called “actual tennis” is not the stuff that is pulling some 70,000 people daily into the tournament grounds this week and that drew three million, roughly, to their television screens for last year’s finals. Tennis without a scoreline is mostly repetition, drama-free.

On Thursday on these courts the 6-7 American Christopher Eubanks, who lost in qualifying but is working as a TV commentator , bombed kick serves that seemed to accelerate upon landing to rebound practically over the head of his partner across the net.

Germans Kevin Krawletz and Tim Puetz, who are, respectively, the world’s 7th and 8th best men’s doubles players, hit serves and returns before an audience whose numbers never exceeded six and for a time was only one. WTA number 11 Anna Navarro caused no stir when she took a court with a team of five, including a male hitter, maybe because almost no one was left to be stirred.

Navarro and her partner hit down the middle for a metronomic 10 minutes at a cadence that proceeded from languid to bashing. Then they did a drill where they aimed for cross court targets. Then he hit nothing but slices. When they took a break, a woman from Navarro’s team used a smartphone to video her sitting in a chair and drinking water.

Over the course of a three-week Open, Christine Stromberg, the tournament’s Director of Player Operations and Services, oversees the scheduling of somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 hour-long practice sessions.

Where a player practices has to do with the time they want to practice and the phasing of the tournament’s many draws, among other factors, but the marquee players are often scheduled on match courts not in use or on courts P1-5. P1-5 in the shadow of Ashe with bleacher seating where Roger Federer, warming up in the twilight of his career, once drew crowds that rivalled or surpassed those for an actual contest.

There is “a little bit of priority to who the fans want to see,” Stromberg said. “Everybody would prefer to play on a match court, that’s everybody’s preference, or P1-5, because it’s closer . . . It’s just the surroundings, getting used to being on the actual courts you’re going to play on.”

P6-17 are distant but they are resurfaced every summer to the same specifications as those inside the tennis center. Players assigned there get the same perks as those practicing inside the tennis center: two cans of new balls per day, unlimited used balls for drilling, towels, post-practice smoothies. In at least one regard the outer courts may be superior, because a warmup area with physio tables and stretching mats is right next to the courts, not a short walk away, as is the case for the inner courts.

Noah Rubin, the former touring pro from Rockville Centre, once ranked as high as 125 and now executive director of tennis for Hudson River Tennis Club and Southampton’s Racquet Lounge, has practiced on Ps both 1-5 and 6-17.

He has a soft spot for the outer courts. “You kind of feel engulfed in the New York scene,” he said. “You’re not surrounded by the Honey Deuces and finance bros. This is, for the most part, the everyday New Yorker. At certain times, it felt like people accidentally stumbled on the U.S. Open, like this was their normal travel route and they found their way there.”