When Everything Smelled Like Tennis

“It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones truly able to see, articulate and animate the experience of the gift we are denied.” — David Foster Wallace, String Theory

Last year, as the summer came to an end, all we could do was talk about tennis. You opened TikTok and you’d see fan edits and recaps. Twitter was an endless scroll of highlight reels and clips of post-game press conferences. Daily headlines, whether in print or online, offered insights, predictions, and assessments. Those lucky enough to snag tickets shared photos and videos on Instagram from the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, sipping on cocktails, celebrity spotting, and sweating in their pristine court-side whites. Here in New York, bars held viewings of each day’s slate of matches for those who couldn’t tune in at home. I’d come into work and immediately launch into discussions about the games with my coworkers. For two weeks, the U.S. Open raged on, somehow for not long enough and also endlessly so.

I had always been ambivalent about professional tennis, watching it when my parents had the TV on, but there was something different about the 2023 U.S. Open. For the first time in recent memory, younger viewers were tuning in to cheer on a new generation of tennis players: Coco Gauff, Ben Shelton, Aryna Sabalenka, Frances Tiafoe, and Sloan Stephens, just to name a few. Perhaps, this was no surprise given tennis’s surge in popularity during the pandemic (the USTA observed a 33% increase in tennis…