#INTHEAIREVERYWHERE
Wednesday September 16, 2026
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#INTHEAIREVERYWHERE |
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| Vol. 25 No. 40 | Wednesday September 16, 2026 |
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US Open In The Rearview |
Here we talk about a great sporting event that just ended in a park between LaGuardia and Kennedy International Airport, the 142nd USA open tennis tournament Early August on the drive to work, I watched a bright green tennis ball pop out of a park, bounce once, and roll right into the street like it owned the place. And I thought, yep, that’s it. In New York City, if you live and work in Queens like me, you don’t get to ignore the US Open. You just don’t. It’s funny how a tiny thing like that can flip a switch. Because once those balls started flying, the whole city started shifting gears. The US Open isn’t only a huge sporting event. It’s one of New York’s unofficial calendar pages turning August like the city is stretching out in the heat. Then suddenly Flushing Meadows wakes up, the matches arrive, and you can feel late summer start to move toward fall. And now right behind it, the rest of September is lining up. Back-to-school energy. The Jewish High Holy Days . It’s like the city has gone from lounging to marching. That’s the pace. Flushing Meadows Park carries history. It once held the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. Now it hosted this loud, global, high-pressure tennis circus that brings in enormous money for New York year after year. It’s wild to think of it as a circus, but it is. Massive crowds, media, sponsorships, the whole thing. It’s not small business, either. Not even close. The tournament ran from late August and just ended on September 13. The event is credited with about 1.2 billion dollars in annual revenue for the city. But here’s the twist. Even with all that size and shine, sometimes I catch myself wondering what got lost as it got bigger. Because before my work shifted into air cargo, we used to cover sporting events, including the Open matches, back when it was at Forest Hills and run by the West Side Tennis Club. We even covered it for entertainment press back in the day. And that version of the event, it felt . . . human. For one thing, you could roam. You’d wander from match to match (38 separate tennis courts at West Side Tennis Club) with a drink in your hand. And not a plastic cup either, real glass. There were multiple matches going at once, and the atmosphere was relaxed and social until the instant the points started. Then it was deadly serious. All the time you were face-to-face literally with the players. Legends—Billie Jean King. Arthur Ashe. Chris Evert. Jimmy Connors. Poncho Gonzalez. Lew Hoad. Tony Traybert. You’d see them around and talk between sets, like this was a neighborhood gathering that just happened to include the best athletes on earth. That’s hard to imagine now. Today it feels like athletes move through sealed tunnels and security layers. Then there were the characters on the courts and in the stands. We’d bump into Alan King constantly. Comedian, razor-sharp mind. Always with a big cigar. Sometimes he’d shuffle around in these burgundy satin slippers, and on them, embroidered in letters, were A and K, one on each shoe. You didn’t even need a program to know he was in the building. Now the show lives at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The branding alone reminds you how much history is tied to this event: Billie Jean King. Arthur Ashe. Names that aren’t just champions, they’re symbols. Which makes the bigger question even more interesting: with tennis so huge now, does everyone really remember how deep the story goes? Check your memory. This tournament didn’t start in New York at all. It began more than a century ago in Rhode Island, then moved to Forest Hills in 1915. Sometimes it feels like people know the current stars, but the earlier chapters don’t get enough daylight. We covered tennis from about 1960 to 1977, and I can’t help wondering if we witnessed one of the sport’s golden periods. The athletes today are brilliant, they absolutely are, but that older era had this balance of greatness and accessibility that’s rare.
That purpose-built 1920s stadium at the West Side Tennis Club (it’s still there) held about 14,000 people and had this quiet grandeur. Names of the US Open champions were etched onto the columns supporting the stands. You’d look up and see history literally carved into the place. Don Budge. Althea Gibson, who shattered the color barrier in pro tennis. Lew Hoad from Australia. So many others. In memory, that place played like the tennis version of walking into Yankee Stadium and reading plaques. Forest Hills made the sport feel bigger than a match. It made it feel like a story you could step into, and for a moment, you belonged to it. But now in 2026 after all the waxing nostalgic, we have to acknowledge that the story keeps adding chapters. When you talk legends, you’ve got Serena, Evert, Connors, Sampras, Federer. Records, rivalries, eras defined by who could hold the line under pressure in New York. This present wave included Alexander Zverev, Novak Djokovic, and Ben Shelton with Zverev overcoming Shelton in the final. On the women’s side Elena Rybakina defeated two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka in the final, with names like Iga Swiatek Coco Gauff, Elena Rybakina, and Mirra Andreeva. The roster was both the present and the next era arriving at once. So here we go around again singing a song of tennis and the joy of New York City in late summer, early Fall. New York in mid-September is a beautiful thing. And yet we're still thinking about etched names on columns and real glasses in the stands. because both things can be true. The US Open today is a powerhouse, but the older version, the Forest Hills version, had this charm that doesn’t need to compete with the present to be worth remembering. Maybe that’s the real tradition: not that the tournament stays the same, but that it marks change. Summer into fall. Past into future. Legends into new contenders. So if you were in Queens, where the biggest airports serving the greatest city in the world are, it started with a tennis ball bouncing into the street, and before you knew it, for most of September a sizeable number of people in the city were taking a deep breath while listening for the next serve. |
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Publisher-Geoffrey Arend • Managing
Editor-Flossie Arend • Editor Emeritus-Richard Malkin |
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US Open pictured in 1949 in the horseshoe stadium of the West Side Tennis Club in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens in New York City. 
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