essayist:

by David Foster Wallace

Right now in the National Tennis Center s special Stadium—a towering sextagon whose N S E and W sides have exterior banners saying WELCOME TO THE 1995 U.S. OPEN—A USTA Event —right now a whole inland sea of sunglasses and hats in the Stadium is rising to applaud as Pete Sampras and the Australian Mark Philippoussis are coming out on court as scheduled to labor. The two are coming out with their big bright athletic bags and their grim-looking Security escorts. The applause-acoustics are deafening. From down here near the court looking up the Stadium looks to be shaped like a huge wedding cake and once past the gentler foothills of the box seats the aluminum stands seem to rise away on all sides almost vertically so vertiginously steep that a misstep on any of the upper stairs looks like it would be certain and hideous death. The umpire sits in what looks like a lifeguard chair with little metal stirrups out front for his shoes wearing a headset-mike and Ray-Bans and holding what’s either a clipboard or a laptop. The DecoTurf court is a rectangle of off-green marked out by the well-known configuration of very white lines inside a bigger rectangle of off-green; and as the players cross the whole thing E-W to their canvas chairs photographers and cameramen converge and cluster on them like flies clustering on what flies like—the players ignore them in the way that only people who are very used to cameras can ignore cameras. The crowd is still up and applauding a pastel mass of 20 000+. A woman in a floppy straw hat three seats over from me is talking on a cellular phone; the man next to her is trying to applaud while holding a box of popcorn and is losing a lot of popcorn over the box s starboard side. The scoreboards up over the Stadium’s N and S rims are flashing pointillist-neon ads for Evian water. Sampras poor-postured and chestless smiling shyly at the ground his powder-blue shorts swimming down around his knees looks a little like a kid wearing his father’s clothes.