The US Open first began in 1881. It was organised at different locations till 1968 when it was hosted at Forest Hills, New York. It moved onto Flushing Meadows, its worthy successor, a decade later.
A tournament with its unique tax-exempt bonds, housed in a sprawling campus encompassing 46 acres, the US Open is today replete with a grand stadium — rightly named after the US tennis legend, and the Open’s ‘first’ singles winner, at Flushing Meadows, Arthur Ashe. Flushing Meadows has a chronicle of its own. It was first described as a marshland dump in F Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel, The Great Gatsby. Aside from that, it was home to the World Fair in 1939 and 1964, and a temporary base for the UN.
Flushing Meadows — named originally after the jazz wizard Louis Armstrong — has its own ambience, a whoop-de-do too. It’s brash and, more often than not, enormously sweltering. Add to it a whopping turnout of over 400,000 strong annual attendance and its tumultuous cacophony, not to speak of the expansive blare of the flight path to the airport; you have something more than a highly orchestrated, boisterous, supercharged ‘rockabilly.’ It is this vitality that has catapulted the game into the modern era and, in the process, taken the Open away from the good, old ‘club’ atmosphere to public glitziness.
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