Grand Slam United States Open tennis tournament will still be served up

Take it or leave it. That’s what the tennis players are facing after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo served the okay Tuesday to allow the Grand Slam United States Open tournament to be played starting in late August at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadow in the borough of Queens.

But without spectators as part of the reopening from shutdowns caused by thecoronavirus pandemic.

Says Cuomo: “You can watch it on TV and I’ll take that.”

The Australian Open on the hard courts has already been played. It led off the Grand Slam quartet. Wimbledon on the grass courts has been cancelled for the first time since World War II in 1945, and the French Open on clay has been rescheduled from May and currently slated to begin a week after the U.S. Open ends.

Now the key question becomes: Who will actually wind up competing on the blue-hard courts of what is the United States Tennis Association’s marquee event, one that it proposed to be accepted from Aug. 31 to Sept. 13. It will be a “bubble” setup with designated hotels, limited player entourages, and a facility closed to the hundreds of thousands of people who usually attend the star-spangled event and usually fill the stands, especially on the Arthur Ashe center court.

As for the players, some of the sports leading names, including defending champion RafaelNadal, along with No.1-ranked players NovakDjokovic among the men and Ash Bartyamong the women, have expressed reservations about heading somewhere that was a hot spot for the COVID-19 outbreak. Thee indoor tennis facility at the center in fact temporarily housed hundreds of hospital beds at the height of New York’s coronaviruscrisis.

Then there were others who expressed an eagerness to return to action. Both the ATPand WTA tours have been suspended since early March due to the virus. Normally, the U.S. Open is the fourth and final Grand Slam tournament of each season, but would now be the second major of 2020,  following the Australian Open that concluded in early February.

The top American in the world-wide rankings at No. 21, the 6-foot-8 Dan Isner, is happy for the announcement, for he wants to step back on the court.

“Well done for being so forward thinking in getting this done,” Isner says. “A great achievement. Players and fans alike are thrilled with this development. Time to get back on the courts.”

But another American, 125th ranked Mitchell Krueger, had an indifference to Isner‘s quote.

“I can find you about 140-plus players that are most certainly not thrilled with thisdevelppment,” Krueger says.

Other players are against the USTA’sdecision to eliminate qualifying rounds that normally provide low-ranked singles players a chance to earn a spot, and maybe extra money, in the field. And with prize money and hotel costs included, $6.6 million would have compensated players who would be in the qualifying field, and with a total of $60 million would be about $7 million less than in 2019. Another reduction that’s an issue is the men’s and women’s doubles that will be sliced in half, with 30 teams instead of 60 this time.

And Djokovic says that the restrictions that would be in place because of the virus would be extreme.

“Most of the players I’ve talked to,” he says, “were quite negative on whether they would go there.”

Djokovic adds that last month he hosted exhibition matches with packed stands in his home country of Serbia, where the government lifted most virus restrictions.

Cuomo, in turn in regard to his decision, says that as for New York, this is good news on the numbers and good news on the facts. and adds that this has been the lowest numbers of coronavirus-related hospitalizations since the outbreak began, and that we’d do things in the safest manner possible, migrating all potential risks.

“We can showcase tennis as the ideal social-distancing sport,” says Billie Jean King.