This year I decided to stop worrying and learn to love the U.S. Open again. Not that I don’t enjoy most aspects of it. I’ve been to the tournament as a fan or journalist every year since 1983, and I’d miss it if I couldn’t keep that streak alive. At the same time, zig-zagging through the crowds at Flushing Meadows—it’s basically USTA law that more tickets must be printed and sold each year—for 15 or 16 straight days is an agitating experience. When people ask me what my favorite Grand Slam is, I don’t even think about the Open. Chalk it up to reverse hometown bias: If it’s in the next borough over, how great can it be?

But this time I vowed to see it from an outsider’s perspective, to see the way that it differs, for better or worse, from the other two Slams I’ve attended, Wimbledon and the French Open. For the most part, it’s worked. Yes, there are people everywhere at the Open; they come at you from all directions at all times. Yes, the lines are long; you can walk in circles for half an hour and not see more than a few stray points of tennis. And yes, the commerce is relentless; it’s easier to rotate your way from food zone to T-shirt kiosk to wine bar than it is to actually get into any court. But you could say the same for the French and Wimbledon. It’s just that in Europe, the scale is smaller and the commerce hidden behind a half-transparent screen of “tradition”—i.e., culture as commerce.

So what does make the Open the Open? Here are a few thoughts, after a week of unscientific investigation, about what we have that they don’t have. Aside from that fight guy, of course—talk about "only in New York."

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Manhattan
Wimbledon, in its little hillside village, is cut off from London. Roland Garros is inside Paris. Flushing Meadows’ relation to “the city,” as we borough people humbly refer to Manhattan, is somewhere in between: Flushing has the urban energy, without any of Manhattan’s rigidly majestic design.

On most days, I travel to the tournament by subway or train. Last Wednesday, though, I took the player bus from the Waldorf-Astoria in midtown. Waiting under the Lexington Avenue entrance at 10:00 A.M., I felt like a tourist in my own town. The sun, as it always does as it crosses Manhattan in the morning, cast the east side of Lex in bright light and the west in total shade. In between, New York’s haphazard  soundtrack rolled quietly on. Strangers and tourists from all over the world crossed paths on the sidewalks. A car horn honked around the next corner. The hotel’s black-suited valet walked quickly out to the street, stuck his fingers in his mouth, and whistled for a cab. It swerved with a squeak of its tires toward the curb and stopped. It felt like the calmest place in the world.

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Americans
What’s the character of an American? I’m honestly not sure. The French are, what, dramatic? The British are, what, reticent? We must be something more than just “straightforward” or “unsophisticated” or “money-grubbing,” right? I know there was a very good and generous description of us by Gordon Forbes in A Handful of Summers, but I can’t remember what it was.

Judging by one conversation overhead in the Grandstand, Americans seem to be inveterate and perhaps annoying askers of questions. Here is a sample of that conversation, between a woman from the Midwest, who is with her husband, and a woman from England sitting, solo, next to her.

“So you were married, never married?” the midwesterner asked.

A little while later:

“Are you dating someone now?”

A little while after that:

“Let me ask you, do you think you’d ever get a facelift?”

The British woman got up and left a few minutes later.

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New Yorkers
The British are polite fans. The French are passionate and unified. New Yorkers? We tend to let our individual thoughts be known, good and bad. We tend to take on a personal relationship with the player. An example:

Richard Gasquet, every time he wins a point against Nikolay Davydenko on the Grandstand, makes sure he gets the same ball back from the ball boy. It can hold up play, and Gasquet is winning a lot of points, so there are quite a few brief delays. Finally, a fan, a fan with a strong New York accent, a fan who presumably doesn’t go to a whole lot of Gasquet matches, a fan who is only a few feet away from the Frenchman, has decided that he can’t take it anymore. He yells, with pointed venom, “It’s just a goddamn tennis ball!”

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Security—or Lack Thereof
To get into the third-largest-court at the French Open, the Bullring, you must pass an usher guarding a door, walk through a small room, and then pass another usher guarding another door. To get into any press area at Wimbledon, you must pass someone dressed in a quasi-military uniform. To get into the press section in the Grandstand at the Open, you must find a badge—it could probably be from a physicians’ convention in Chicago in 1992—and hang it around your neck. Hence, this area fills up quickly. Two days ago, there was one seat left, the one next to mine. When the umpire called “time” after a changeover, there were still about a dozen people walking around. The umpire finally said, “Take any seat.” A man behind me pointed at the seat next to mine and started to walk down to it. He was stopped by an usher, who said, “Badges only.”

 “But they just said, ‘take any seat.’”

“Except that one,” the usher answered.

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Night Sessions
This, of course, is the Open’s greatest invention, one that has added a whole universe of glitz and energy—and, yeah, cash—to the traditional Grand Slam since it’s advent in 1975. Thirty-five years later, the French and Wimbledon have not matched it. There are few more awesome sights in tennis than the titanic cruch of bodies that masses in front of the gates to Ashe Stadium waiting to enter for the night session.

On many days, I watch the night matches from home. I walk out past that titanic crush of glitzy humanity, and see it passing me, person by person by person by person, the other way as I head for the train. It can seem like every good-looking, well-dressed person in New York—or every obnoxious yuppie, depending on how you look at these things—has found his or her way onto the grounds. It’s a fabulous sight, and a weirdly lonely feeling, to pass all of them by.

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The 7 Train
You can stay in the Wimbledon village, and in the district near Roland Garros. But only hardened New York veterans who have seen it all stay outside Manhattan. The easiest, if not the quickest or most comfortable, way to get from there to Flushing is the stop-and-start 7 train. I wouldn’t recommend the 7, exactly, especially on the way back to Manhattan, which can be an unpleasant way to end a long day. The one benefit of the trip’s length is that you time to do all sorts of things as you rattle your way above the no-frills, never-ending neighborhoods of Queens. Over the first half of the trip, I may read a couple chapters of a book. (During one Open years ago I took out all of Henry Esmond; it seems to have been the most memorable part of the two weeks). This year it’s been the memoirs of former Herald tennis writer Al Laney. It’s a must-read for anyone with a shred of interest in the tennis of the 20s, 30s, and 40s. Then when I’ve had enough of Tilden and Lenglen, I can put the book away and listen to music for a while. This week I've been sampling two very New York performers. One is Sonny Rollins, whose bright, bouncing Tenor Madness is  the musical equivalent of walking up a set of subway steps and right into the middle of the rolling crowds on a Manhattan street. I read once where Rollins used to walk out to the middle of the Brooklyn bridge at night and wail away on his horn. I liked to think about him out there when I walked across the bridge, until, a few years later, I discovered that it hadn’t been the Brooklyn Bridge at all, but the Williamsburg Bridge where he played. The one time I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge after that, I forgot to think about Sonny Rollins.

After Sonny comes another group of dyed in the wool New Yorkers, the Velvet Underground. They’re usually assicoated with drugs and “decadence,” but the song that hits me today is a version of their gentlest love song, “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” With Lou Reed singing, rather than Nico the tuneless Teutonic, the song swings and swaggers. And contrary to the decadent reputation, it's as acutely and simply romantic as rock songs get:

I’ll be you mirror
Reflect what you are
In case you don’t know

The doors open, the headphones comes off, and the relentless walk down the boardwalk and toward the stadium begins.

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A Rocket
When you sit high in the stands at Wimbledon, you can see the spire of the ancient St. Mary’s Church rising at the top of the hill. When you sit high in Suzanne Lenglen stadium in Paris, you can see the top of the Eiffel Tower. When you climb the steps of tiny Court 7 at the Open, you can see, just above the trees at the edge of the grounds, a rusting model rocket from the 1964 World’s Fair. It’s a symbol of a UN-influenced version of globalization long out of fashion, one that viewed the future with collective optimism.

Tennis has offered a very different version of globalization over the last four decades. It might roughly be described as the transition from the ITF to IMG, from the amateur and hierarchical British sports empire, dominated by amateur officials, to the money-oriented and democratic American sports empire, dominated by global talent agencies. The switchover happened in 1968, the year when the World’s Fair of four years before had begun to pretty creaky and naive. Below me on Court 6 and 7 are four tennis players, one from Lithuania, one from Austria, one from the Netherlands, and one from the Czech Republic. The fans, though, are from the USA. They’re chanting and bellowing. It’s a side court, and the players are as un-American as they get. But the fans at the Open are into it, like nowhere else.