THE U.S. OPEN IS A RIOT, BUT EJECT A PLAYER WHO ASKS IF THE CHAIR UMPIRE IS “A MAN”
Stop tantalizing New Yorkers who already are too rowdy and drunk, a message for Greg Allensworth — who didn’t toss Daniil Medvedev for insulting him often after a photographer walked onto the court
The subway stop is a reminder that the U.S. Open is not Wimbledon or the French Open or the Australian Open. Or even the Memphis Open, which no longer exists. A visitor leaves the train at Willets Point and is immediately consumed by big-bug babble atop the wooden walk rumblings. Where do people with money in their pockets find some trouble? Which courts? Where are the bars? Where is the rumbling?
Where is New York?
None of that should have mattered to chair umpire Greg Allensworth. He was tortured Sunday night by Daniil Medvedev, who has too many “i”s in his first name and too many problems concerning his rage. For six minutes that wasted the time of normal people — none of whom were in the stands at Louis Armstrong Stadium, in a match that ended Monday morning — the Russian should have been ejected from the first round of the tournament. A meltdown is a meltdown. Meet insanity.
For starters, France’s Benjamin Bonzi was ready to eliminate the 13th seed on match point in the third set. Oddly, a photographer on the court thought it was time to go home and interrupted play. Bonzi missed his first serve before Allensworth scolded the lensman and awarded another first serve. Medvedev — down 6-3, 7-5 — went berserk.
“Are you a man? Are you a man? Why are you shaking?” he said to Allensworth. “What’s wrong, huh? The guy wants to leave. He gets paid by the match, not by the hour.”
He should have been tossed from the building. He wasn’t, allowing a wicked rant against the umpire involving a fellow pro. “Reilly Opelka was right. What did Reilly Opelka say? What did Opelka say?” Medvedev said. Well, in February, when Allensworth penalized him for swearing at a fan, Opelka said he was “the worst ump on tour” and “shouldn’t have a job or should be sidelined for about four weeks, maybe learn a thing or two.”
Again, Medvedev should have been tossed into the alley with the rats. Again, it did not happen, and suddenly, after preparing to leave the tennis center, the New York crazies saw themselves as another chapter in a Billy Joel song catalog. They began to chant, “Second serve! Second serve!” — and blew off Allensworth when he asked them to hush. Medvedev was thrilled and blew kisses at the umpire. “They did the work. I didn’t do anything,” he said of the fans. “The crowd did what they did without me asking them too much, and it was fun to witness.”
It was not fun for the rest of us to see Bonzi lose the third set and the fourth set, 0-6. Medvedev was the bad guy and didn’t deserve to win. He played a psycho game and was winning until, finally, Bonzi won the fifth set, 6-4. The good guy won.
“I mean, the rule is the rule. The guy went on the court between two serves,” Bonzi said. “I mean, it's not my call to say first serve. And I think, yes, Daniil started it, and he put oil on the fire.”
But Bonzi avoided the burn job. “It was kind of crazy, this match. For me, it’s like my best victory ever,” he said. “I maybe got some new fans but also some non-fans. It was wild, a crazy scenario. I never experienced something like that. It was so difficult to play. So noisy during points, between points. I tried to stay calm, and at the end, I gave all I had.”
At its nuttiest, New York made no sense to him. He joins the rest of us. “Every time I went on the line to serve, everyone was booing. I felt I didn't do anything bad in the match to, like, receive this treatment, and I didn't want to serve in those conditions,” Bonzi said. "So, I was waiting.” Before winning and advancing.
No one is shocked Medvedev didn’t apologize. “I was not upset with the photographer. I was upset with the decision,” he said. “The delay from the photographer was probably four seconds and a half. I'm not sure it's enough for a (first) serve.”
What prompted the Opelka mope, Daniil? “I’m getting big fine enough, so if I speak, I'm in big trouble, so I'm not going to speak,” he said. “Everyone knows what I talked about when I said Reilly. Reilly got fined big-time for this, so I'm going to get a big fine, too.”
He also broke his racket after the match, a repeat of 2019, when he threw a racket at umpire Damien Dumusois and slipped a middle finger. This time, the credential of the photographer was revoked. Of course, Selcuk Acar claimed he was told the match had stopped. “I’m a victim and totally innocent,” he said. “This incident has already turned into a lynching, and although I’m innocent, I’ve suffered greatly. If there’s a camera there, if it’s monitored, it will show that I returned to the official twice and didn’t enter.”
A lynching, he said. The U.S. Tennis Association called him a liar. “The Chair Umpire also instructed the photographer to immediately sit down, and these instructions were also disregarded,” a spokesperson said. “The photographer’s credential was revoked.”
All of this could have been avoided if Allensworth had acted like a New Yorker, pointed to his rear end and mooned Medvedev. It was that kind of launch at the Open, when Barbara Krejcikova couldn’t find her racket vibration dampener Monday. “The dampener was playing a game with us, so were we all looking for it, and I’m happy we found it,” the former Wimbledon and French Open champion said.
The trains and planes always have created a ruckus. Now, the players know they must pour themselves into the muck. “Wimbledon, for example, it’s proper, it’s elegant, it’s elevated. People are definitely more quiet and respectful,” Emma Navarro told the Associated Press. “U.S. Open, it feels a bit more casual. Casually rowdy, I would call it.”
Or casually blitzed.
“I’m not a big fan of the smell of weed when you walk around,” Casper Ruud said. “Every corner of every street, you smell it.”
In every corner of Flushing Meadows, too. Should we test the photog?
And Daniil?
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.