Itinerary: U.S. Open tennis, New York

One of the things I love most about traveling is the possibility of your travels coinciding with something you weren’t expecting. Yes, I structure most, if not all, of my trips around watching the “big four” North American sports, but sometimes you wind up with the opportunity to go see something that wasn’t part of the original plan — to go off the beaten path and discover something that you didn’t care for much before but, with the chance to experience it, you start to warm up to. That was how Mrs. Fan and I, having traveled to New York with the intention of watching football and more football, wound up spending a day with the tennisheads at the U.S. Open earlier this month.

(Before I go any further, I feel I need to get this confession out of the way: I’m not much of a tennis fan. Really, I’m not much of a fan of individual sports. I think the reason why is that it’s hard for me to get behind individuals because it means you have to like their personality and/or their background in order to support them, whereas when you support a team it typically doesn’t matter who’s playing for it and whether you like the players personally or not. At least that’s my experience. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the sport — I just don’t follow it as fervently as I do the major team sports. The reason I bring this up is that if you’re a tennis diehard, you’ll probably spot some naïveté in my observations, and I freely admit that there are things I saw during this visit that were weird to me but probably normal to others. But that’s why we go out and do new things, for the feeling of discovery, right?)

Because the U.S. Open is in New York and thus very accessible, it’s very easy to “stumble upon.” And now that I’ve done so, I sure wish I had done it sooner. I’ve been in New York multiple times while the U.S. Open was in progress, and not once did I decide to drop in on a whim. But this year, the logistics of our trip left us with a free Friday afternoon, so about a week beforehand we made the commitment to go (meaning, we bought tickets). And if I I get the chance again, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

Let’s make a weekend out of it

Here at The Itinerant Fan, we love going to sporting events (well, duh!). But what we love more than that is going somewhere and getting to see multiple sporting events over the course of a few days, otherwise known as the classic sports weekend. Part of it is about maximizing the enjoyment level of a particular trip, and part of it — for me, admittedly — is about getting to events and venues so that I can add them to “the list.”

For the first time in two years, I’ve got a legitimate sports weekend ahead of me. This weekend I’ll be in New York/New Jersey, and you can find me at the Meadowlands on Saturday and Sunday; first up is the USC-Syracuse game at MetLife Stadium, and then I’ll be opening up the NFL season with the New York Jets when they take on Buffalo. (Mrs. Fan and MongerTron will be my partners in event attendance for both games.) No, I didn’t take a couple extra days off to make it a Meadowlands trifecta and see the Giants-Cowboys season opener today — though, yeah, I briefly thought about how cool that would be. But I will be in town on Friday, and though I’m not much of a tennis fan, I saw that the U.S. Open would still be going on, and added that to the weekend agenda. (The Mets are at home Friday night, but I’m taking a pass on that. Besides, I took in a game at Citi Field last year. It’s the new Yankee Stadium that I need to get into sometime.)

Still, three sporting events in three days? Yeah, I can’t wait. See you soon, New York.