Roger Federer

The No. 1 seed, Wimbledon and Australian Open victor, recently accorded metaphysical significance by novelist David Foster Wallace, the impeccable Swiss arrives at Flushing Meadows seeking a third consecutive Open title. If not for a loss to Nadal in the French Open final, we’d all be talking calendar-year Grand Slam, but three out of four isn’t too shabby. Federer has shown some vulnerability this year, notably on high, nastily top-spun balls to his backhand; he hasn’t really gotten into a serving groove yet on hard courts; and Britain’s Andy Murray bounced him out of a lead-up tournament in Cincinnati in the second round. Still, he’s the clear favorite. A dream final would pit him against Nadal in a French-Wimbly rematch.

Rafael Nadal

For the Spanish sensation, the U.S. Open represents his second-best chance, after the French, to capture a Slam. His murderously effective topspin and obscene quickness should see him easily into the second week, and his competitive fervor—not to mention his desire to get a third crack at Federer—could carry him all the way to the finals. Wimbledon showed that he has been developing his forehand into a point-ending weapon, but depending on how the seedings go, No. 2 Nadal could have to get through both James Blake and a suddenly resurgent Andy Roddick. Nadal’s results in the U.S. Open Series leading up to our national championships have been unremarkable, but with the format switching to a grueling best of five sets, he will strive to break opponents down physically and mentally.

Andy Roddick

With his win two weeks ago in Cincinnati after more or less two years of wandering in the wilderness, A-Rod has announced that, even though his ranking has dropped him to the bottom of the Top 10, he continues to be a force to reckon with. The 2003 Open champ has, in an unexpected move that caught everyone’s attention, added Jimmy Connors as a part-time coach, a move that appears to have restored Roddick’s swaggering aggressiveness (as opposed to last year’s freaky, AWOL “mojo” of the Am-Ex ads). He’s back to pounding his first serve, then pouncing on any weak returns, crushing them with his brutal forehand. He’s even starting to attack the net more frequently. It isn’t pretty and never has been, but it makes him the most dangerous man in the draw, as well as a good bet for a run to the semifinals, especially if the USTA delivers slick courts.

Andy Murray

Out of basically nowhere, this moody Scottish kid has abruptly popped up on the tennis radar after beating Federer in Cincinnati—becoming the only other player besides Nadal to notch a win over the Great One this year, but more importantly exposing Federer’s troubled serving by breaking the Swiss seven times in two sets. Onlookers credit “Winning Ugly” coach Brad Gilbert, who was hired by the Brits earlier this year to do something with this arrogant, sullen but deceptively talented teenager. Murray has a unique capacity to make just about everyone he plays look and feel uncomfortable—he’s the professional equivalent of the club-level “pusher,” flubbing the ball around before slipping in a drop shot or a crackerjack backhand down-the-line winner. The last time a prospect entered the Open with Gilbert newly in his corner, that prospect’s name was Andy Roddick, and he won the whole shebang.

James Blake

After starting out the hard-court season impressively, Blake has struggled of late. He’s still the top-ranked American, however, and in returning to New York he will once again enjoy the fanatical support of his “J. Block” cheering section. Far and away the most dangerous hard-court player on Planet Earth, Blake has the kind of foot speed that keeps him in points, a missile-like flat forehand that he can pound for winners from anywhere on the court, and a backhand that’s no longer a liability. Regrettably, he’s shown flashes of his old mental weakness since Wimbledon, this time around based on his inability to maintain his intensity and, when pressed, to take his game into higher gear. At 26, he’s smack in the middle of his prime, so if he hopes to bring home the one Slam that he has a realistic shot at winning, he needs to dig deep on the Open’s hard courts.

Women to Watch

Amélie Mauresmo

She finally got the monkey off her back at Wimbledon and enters the U.S. Open as the world No. 1. There’s a bit of a Federer-Nadal thing happening on the women’s side this year between Mauresmo and Justine Henin-Hardenne; the two have faced each other in a pair of finals (Henin-Hardenne controversially retired at the Australian Open, leading some to argue that Mauresmo’s first Slam win wasn’t truly earned). Niggling injuries have kept her out of action since Wimbledon, and with her big, attacking game, she may have to fight through a few early-round matches to find her form. However, her record in the Slams is the best of any woman in the draw, and if she can get the crowds behind her and avoid any physical problems, she should glide into the second week and make it to the quarters at least.

Justin Henin-Hardenne

The hard-bitten, ferociously competitive little Belgian will be alone in holding up the honor of her small nation among the top women at this year’s Open, as 2005 champ Kim Clijsters won’t be able to defend due to a worrisome wrist injury. The world rankings have her at No. 3, but everyone knows that she’s been the second-best player, behind Mauresmo, in this year’s Slams, getting to the finals at both the Australian and Wimbledon. Her outsized game, centered on her technically perfect backhand, allows her to compete on any surface. She won the Open in 2003 and has to be seen as Mauresmo’s and Sharapova’s main competition, but a long layoff post-Wimbledon could leave her vulnerable to a first-week upset.

Maria Sharapova

The swanlike Russian has, over the past year or so, begun to bulk up. This seems to have messed up her timing, although it’s probably added some volume to her incessant shrieking after every shot. She’s trying to add more variety to her game, but for the most part she employs a simple strategy: hit hard and, if that doesn’t work, hit harder. This approach has, in the case of Jennifer Capriati and Lindsay Davenport, yielded Slams in the past. Unfortunately, it seems to be wearing Sharapova out—she withdrew from a U.S. Open warm-up tournament, citing exhaustion. Any physical weariness against a Mauresmo or Henin-Hardenne will take Sharapova out of the running this year.

Martina Hingis

She’s back! No kidding—by making a final two weeks ago, even though she lost, Hingis re-entered the Top 10. Her comeback has been a disorienting experience for many of the players she has faced. As women’s pro tennis has become more and more a power game, a style of play based on all-court positional gambits has become rare. This year, Hingis has made plenty of otherwise successful women look foolish. Of course, unlike most other women these days, she still lacks a point-ending weapon, but she has managed to avoid being blown off the court. Her serve is a touch beefier than it was before she retired, and her overall court sense remains wizardly. Thus far, 2006 has been all about rebuilding her confidence. Now that she’s proven she can hang with the big girls, the stage is set for a semifinal run.

Serena Williams

Serena is in the midst of a comeback, and her results so far have been shockingly good, at least on hard courts: In consecutive lead-up tournaments to the U.S. Open this year, she has made the semis both times. The X factor with her game is fitness: One-week tournaments seem to wear her out, such that she has done herself in with unforced errors. Even if she can make it through Week 1 at the Open, she may not have enough in the tank to survive Week 2. Her position in the draw is another issue; she won’t be seeded, so she’ll be facing tough competition much earlier. However, that could make trouble for the seeds: The last person you want to play in the first or second round is a two-time champ who can rip the fuzz off the ball.

So it’s actually a big deal—a shocking occurrence, in fact—when the citizens of this vast anti-metropolis are, almost to a one, ensnared by the same story. It happens once or twice a decade (the Rodney King riots, O.J., the Ovitz meltdown, Shaq and Kobe). For the past few months, the story has been that of the Ferrari Crash.

Ferrari Crash: That’s what it’s being called, a strangely brassy vernacular peg that has brought high concept down to the level of laconic sunrise banter over soy lattes and carrot muffins. The facts: In the dawning hours of Feb. 21, an ultra-rare, flamboyantly red, terribly exotic Ferrari Enzo—one of only 400 ever built (it’s a million-dollar ride)—was making abundant use of the 660-horsepower output by its V12 engine when, at an estimated 162 miles per hour, it struck a bump on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, became briefly airborne (yes, Ferraris can fly), then struck a power pole and was sheared in half. The only thing missing was a fiery explosion followed by pounding theme music.

Holy Jerry Bruckheimer! If only there had been a chopper in the vicinity!

Remarkably (or not, if—as the L.A. Times’ Chris Lee pointed out—you consider how the safety-obsessed speed freaks of Turin engineered their baby), the Enzo’s owner, a Swedish expat video-game entrepreneur and (alleged) former gangster named Bo Stefan Eriksson, walked away from the wreckage with nothing more than a bloody lip.

Now this is where it gets good: What rouses the standard-issue Angeleno from his hedonistic coma—even the complete totaling of one of the planet’s rarest automobiles would barely elicit a “Dude, who crashed that car?” without a compelling back-story—is the intersection of the town’s favorite tropes. You’ve got a fast car, easy money and a criminal. It’s perfect.

And downright bizarre. When the authorities appeared, Mr. Eriksson, whose blood-alcohol level was later determined to be over the legal limit (and before 7 a.m.), maintained that the Enzo had been driven by a German known only as “Dietrich,” who post-crash had fled into the hills above the P.C.H. Eventually, it was revealed that Mr. Eriksson had brought the Enzo to California illegally, along with another black Enzo and Mercedes SLR McLaren (all three cars were leased, with banks in England holding the paper, and the banks didn’t know that Mr. Eriksson had decided to cross water with them). Meanwhile, Mr. Eriksson’s business venture, Gizmondo, a portable video-cum-cell-phone system that was supposed to be a GameBoy for the MySpace generation, had recently flatlined, after registering a burn rate that seemed derived from the example of a Third World oil despot.

This is tabloid enough, in a city with no true tabloids. But then the plot congealed into a yeasty, seductive brew. Mr. Eriksson claimed to be affiliated with a private police force, commissioned by the San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority, to provide security for a company that transports disabled people in vans. Mr. Eriksson’s business partner was involved with lawless firearms purchases. Two men who identified themselves as Homeland Security agents were among the first to arrive at the crash site.

The Los Angeles Times, a few months into the official police investigation, revealed that Mr. Eriksson had blown through untold millions, practically daring the Southland to wake up and see what a genre-redefining con man he really was.

“Dietrich” never emerged from the Malibu hills, but, in quintessential L.A. fashion, his identity developed into ironic shorthand for the tale. A T-shirt was created with the question “ … Dietrich?” printed on it, along with an image of half a red Ferrari Enzo being carted away on a flatbed truck. I myself have taken, when something dramatic yet cryptic takes place (mysterious rumblings above my apartment, the Clippers making the playoffs), to muttering a Ferrari Crash–inspired koan: “Ah, yes, that’s so very Dietrich.”

What really makes Ferrari Crash and its convoluted medium-wattage nefariousness so perfectly L.A. is just how simultaneously over the top yet feeble the various elements (apart from the Ferrari itself) actually are. I’m reminded of the curiously timed revelation from the Bush administration that an Al Qaeda plot to fly an airliner into the U.S. Bank Tower in downtown L.A. had been thwarted. I wasn’t sure the average resident of Hollywood or Hancock Park knew that there was such a structure in their fair city, much less that the spire in the far-distant east side of the polity was the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Better to target Trader Joe’s and cut off the supply of Two Buck Chuck.

It was inevitable that Mr. Eriksson and his accomplices would get caught. What’s dazzling is the progression of his go-for-broke fraudulence. It’s as if he knew that, for the most part, Los Angeles is deeply unimpressed by ordinary failure. Failure is the coin of the realm in these parts. You really have to do better than getting caught bleeding and naked at the Chateau Marmont with four Vuitton trunks full of counterfeit euros and six pounds of cocaine, a case of mezcal, early numbers for the weekend box, Katie Holmes’ passport, a letter of introduction to Hugo Chávez, a syringe signed by Barry Bonds and a baby monkey kidnapped from the controversially renovated city zoo.

No, you need a line of credit larger than the G.N.P. of Morocco, a past that would impress the Kray brothers, a killer-app video-game gadget and something to drive like Danica Patrick when the SLR is in the shop. And, oh yeah, be Swedish.

So sorry you couldn’t land the part or close on the Neutra or tickle the ivories with Jessica Biel. Come back after you’ve dodged Interpol, secured major financing and shredded the Enzo. Skoal, brother!

Joan Didion famously characterized Los Angeles as a land of last resort, where the final, crumbling precipice awaits the pale stragglers who arrive in haggard flight from other screw-ups, hopeful, ever hopeful. If it doesn’t work out here, where do you go? And when it doesn’t, why not go out with a furious bang?

Bo Stefan Eriksson seems to have embraced this insight and developed a sixth sense regarding his ultimate audience. Every spectacularly misjudged yet pathetically sordid move he made intensified his legend. The High Speed Swede made sure that he scripted his Pacific flameout to perfection, complete with enough twists, subplots and secondary characters—not to mention the right set of wheels—to guarantee immortality.

At least as it’s judged west of La Brea, between breakfast and power yoga, while waiting for the marine layer to burn off. Ferrari Crash: our story for springtime. Nothing to get excited about. Gosh, it’s been raining a lot! I’m either gonna lease the Cayenne or a Prius. Let’s go buy sunscreen. Cute dog. Yeah, it’s definitely a bubble … definitely a bubble ….

Vroom! Screech! KA-POW!!! Run away!

Let me have a bite of your spider roll. Sigh. It’s getting late. Hey Dietrich, pass the wasabi.

So it’s actually a big deal—a shocking occurrence, in fact—when the citizens of this vast anti-metropolis are, almost to a one, ensnared by the same story. It happens once or twice a decade (the Rodney King riots, O.J., the Ovitz meltdown, Shaq and Kobe). For the past few months, the story has been that of the Ferrari Crash.

Ferrari Crash: That’s what it’s being called, a strangely brassy vernacular peg that has brought high concept down to the level of laconic sunrise banter over soy lattes and carrot muffins. The facts: In the dawning hours of Feb. 21, an ultra-rare, flamboyantly red, terribly exotic Ferrari Enzo—one of only 400 ever built (it’s a million-dollar ride)—was making abundant use of the 660-horsepower output by its V12 engine when, at an estimated 162 miles per hour, it struck a bump on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, became briefly airborne (yes, Ferraris can fly), then struck a power pole and was sheared in half. The only thing missing was a fiery explosion followed by pounding theme music.

Holy Jerry Bruckheimer! If only there had been a chopper in the vicinity!

Remarkably (or not, if—as the L.A. Times’ Chris Lee pointed out—you consider how the safety-obsessed speed freaks of Turin engineered their baby), the Enzo’s owner, a Swedish expat video-game entrepreneur and (alleged) former gangster named Bo Stefan Eriksson, walked away from the wreckage with nothing more than a bloody lip.

Now this is where it gets good: What rouses the standard-issue Angeleno from his hedonistic coma—even the complete totaling of one of the planet’s rarest automobiles would barely elicit a “Dude, who crashed that car?” without a compelling back-story—is the intersection of the town’s favorite tropes. You’ve got a fast car, easy money and a criminal. It’s perfect.

And downright bizarre. When the authorities appeared, Mr. Eriksson, whose blood-alcohol level was later determined to be over the legal limit (and before 7 a.m.), maintained that the Enzo had been driven by a German known only as “Dietrich,” who post-crash had fled into the hills above the P.C.H. Eventually, it was revealed that Mr. Eriksson had brought the Enzo to California illegally, along with another black Enzo and Mercedes SLR McLaren (all three cars were leased, with banks in England holding the paper, and the banks didn’t know that Mr. Eriksson had decided to cross water with them). Meanwhile, Mr. Eriksson’s business venture, Gizmondo, a portable video-cum-cell-phone system that was supposed to be a GameBoy for the MySpace generation, had recently flatlined, after registering a burn rate that seemed derived from the example of a Third World oil despot.

This is tabloid enough, in a city with no true tabloids. But then the plot congealed into a yeasty, seductive brew. Mr. Eriksson claimed to be affiliated with a private police force, commissioned by the San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority, to provide security for a company that transports disabled people in vans. Mr. Eriksson’s business partner was involved with lawless firearms purchases. Two men who identified themselves as Homeland Security agents were among the first to arrive at the crash site.

The Los Angeles Times, a few months into the official police investigation, revealed that Mr. Eriksson had blown through untold millions, practically daring the Southland to wake up and see what a genre-redefining con man he really was.

“Dietrich” never emerged from the Malibu hills, but, in quintessential L.A. fashion, his identity developed into ironic shorthand for the tale. A T-shirt was created with the question “ … Dietrich?” printed on it, along with an image of half a red Ferrari Enzo being carted away on a flatbed truck. I myself have taken, when something dramatic yet cryptic takes place (mysterious rumblings above my apartment, the Clippers making the playoffs), to muttering a Ferrari Crash–inspired koan: “Ah, yes, that’s so very Dietrich.”

What really makes Ferrari Crash and its convoluted medium-wattage nefariousness so perfectly L.A. is just how simultaneously over the top yet feeble the various elements (apart from the Ferrari itself) actually are. I’m reminded of the curiously timed revelation from the Bush administration that an Al Qaeda plot to fly an airliner into the U.S. Bank Tower in downtown L.A. had been thwarted. I wasn’t sure the average resident of Hollywood or Hancock Park knew that there was such a structure in their fair city, much less that the spire in the far-distant east side of the polity was the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Better to target Trader Joe’s and cut off the supply of Two Buck Chuck.

It was inevitable that Mr. Eriksson and his accomplices would get caught. What’s dazzling is the progression of his go-for-broke fraudulence. It’s as if he knew that, for the most part, Los Angeles is deeply unimpressed by ordinary failure. Failure is the coin of the realm in these parts. You really have to do better than getting caught bleeding and naked at the Chateau Marmont with four Vuitton trunks full of counterfeit euros and six pounds of cocaine, a case of mezcal, early numbers for the weekend box, Katie Holmes’ passport, a letter of introduction to Hugo Chávez, a syringe signed by Barry Bonds and a baby monkey kidnapped from the controversially renovated city zoo.

No, you need a line of credit larger than the G.N.P. of Morocco, a past that would impress the Kray brothers, a killer-app video-game gadget and something to drive like Danica Patrick when the SLR is in the shop. And, oh yeah, be Swedish.

So sorry you couldn’t land the part or close on the Neutra or tickle the ivories with Jessica Biel. Come back after you’ve dodged Interpol, secured major financing and shredded the Enzo. Skoal, brother!

Joan Didion famously characterized Los Angeles as a land of last resort, where the final, crumbling precipice awaits the pale stragglers who arrive in haggard flight from other screw-ups, hopeful, ever hopeful. If it doesn’t work out here, where do you go? And when it doesn’t, why not go out with a furious bang?

Bo Stefan Eriksson seems to have embraced this insight and developed a sixth sense regarding his ultimate audience. Every spectacularly misjudged yet pathetically sordid move he made intensified his legend. The High Speed Swede made sure that he scripted his Pacific flameout to perfection, complete with enough twists, subplots and secondary characters—not to mention the right set of wheels—to guarantee immortality.

At least as it’s judged west of La Brea, between breakfast and power yoga, while waiting for the marine layer to burn off. Ferrari Crash: our story for springtime. Nothing to get excited about. Gosh, it’s been raining a lot! I’m either gonna lease the Cayenne or a Prius. Let’s go buy sunscreen. Cute dog. Yeah, it’s definitely a bubble … definitely a bubble ….

Vroom! Screech! KA-POW!!! Run away!

Let me have a bite of your spider roll. Sigh. It’s getting late. Hey Dietrich, pass the wasabi.

The crowd oohed and aahed as Ms. Davenport hit flat forehands, deep backhands and punchy volleys that bruised the court’s white lines. But it was when she brandished that red racquet high above her head that shivers shot through my stomach, just around the spot where she socked me with a serve so many years ago.

On a scorching summer day in 1994, when I was a teenager, I stood in the corner of a U.S. Open court in Flushing, Queens, clad in blue Fila short-shorts, my hands folded behind my back in that St. Sebastian–like ball-boy pose. That’s when Ms. Davenport pounded one of her monstrous shots deep into my solar plexus. She took no notice of the windless wheeze coming from the corner, next to the potted plant. Since then, I have not exactly been her No. 1 fan.

But as she signed oversized tennis balls with a black Sharpee in New Haven, Ms. Davenport made good on her reputation as the most down-to-earth woman in a playing field crowded with star-struck American divas, androgynous Europeans and Russian nymphs.

“I’m sorry,” said the 29-year-old Californian, sounding more like a freckled, broad-shouldered soccer mom than the athlete who held the top rank in women’s tennis for much of the year.

Indeed, much has changed in tennis since our last painful meeting, when Ms. Davenport was a bruising 6-foot-2 teenager trying to prove herself against giants like Steffi Graf and Monica Seles.

“A new era of players has dawned,” said Ms. Davenport, all grown up now with an investment-banker husband, nagging injuries and a history of retirement talk. “When I first started, it was the Steffi show. Now we have more players that transcend the sport.”

Clearly, Ms. Davenport was referring to rivals Maria Sharapova, with her new perfume line, and Serena Williams, modeling silky black swimsuits in Sports Illustrated. And there is no more appropriate showcase for the new flashy, fashion-driven face of women’s tennis than the U.S. Open, a tournament that over the last decade has developed an achingly tacky taste for sparkle over substance. The tournament has gone from an intimate, grassy affair in Forest Hills, the main event for America’s genteel, white-collar and often whitewashed classes, to an odd mix of sporting event and consumer carnival.

“From West Side to here, it wasn’t just a country-club event anymore,” said Tim Curry, a U.S. Open spokesman, as he walked the grounds’ sprawling food court. “It’s grown to more than just a tennis tournament …. It’s a New York happening.”

Some things, however, never change— especially when it comes to ball boys with good arms and quick legs plucked from local high schools for one last summer job. On a recent Friday night, as Hispanic kids practiced line-dance steps outside the Open’s gates and the lights from neighboring Shea Stadium lit the iron sky, a small pack of ball boys joked around in the parking lot, waiting for their parents to pick them up from practice.

They lasciviously inferred how they “wouldn’t mind” being on court with the Russian beauty Sharapova and talked about selling their official Ralph Lauren sweatshirts, which provide free entrance, for hundreds of dollars on eBay.

“It’s only two weeks, and they want money,” said Johnny Jorquera, a 16-year-old student at Stuyvesant High School, speaking of his less virtuous colleagues.

When I was a ball boy in the U.S. Open, from 1991 through 1995, we’d play Chinese poker for bottles of beer and prey on the ball girls who best filled their skirts and sweaters. We signed tennis balls scarred by any old player’s racquet string with Andre Agassi’s scrawl, and then sold the counterfeit goods at ridiculous prices. We compiled the food tickets issued to us every morning and bartered for $8 bottles of Evian at wholesale prices and—throats raw from smoking Newport cigarettes—we’d hawk them at discount to parched spectators.

And just as I hated Ms. Davenport for her low blow, the current ball boys and court attendants have their own players to suffer. Raffi Wartanian, a 21-year-old court attendant who has been supplying cold drinks and warm towels to players at the Open for seven years, once had a run-in with a washed-up American named Jeff Tarango.

“After a rain delay, I gave him the last towel. He wanted two more,” he said. “Next thing I know, there’s a racquet flying in my direction. I was like, ‘Jeez!’”

Back in the parking lot, Mr. Jorquera diplomatically noted that it’s rare for the top players to snap like that.

“They know they’re being watched closely,” he said.

Anthony M. Williams, a corpulent 17-year-old who goes to the Beacon School, seemed less concerned about how the players treated him and more interested in his compensation.

Noting that the pay had climbed to $9, up from $7.75 last year and a lowly $5 and change when I worked the courts, Mr. Williams said, “The only green I’m after ain’t on the court, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Inside the gates on Friday, workers scrambled to fix the loose wires hanging from the ceilings of Arthur Ashe Stadium and replace the pantheon of posters in its corridors with more recent champions. Outside, barefoot court attendants cleaned center court with high-powered water hoses.

The court, like all the others at the Open this year, was blue.

“It’s copyrighted as ‘U.S. Open blue,’” Mr. Curry said.

Open officials said that the navy blue courts increased visibility for both players and the fans watching at home on TV. The change is also intended to boost television ratings for the smaller American tournaments in this year’s new U.S. Open Series, which are all played on identically hued courts and create what one Open official called “a consistent television package for tennis.”

But not everyone was so thrilled about the bluing of the Open.

“I don’t like them,” said veteran tennis commentator Bud Collins, who is usually not so prudish when it comes to loud colors. “It’s showbiz. The green seemed to be a suitable color for tennis for over a century. It’s a gimmick.”

Outside the stadium, there are other new additions. Ralph Lauren, the official clothier of the Open’s umpires and ball boys, has opened its own onsite outlet, decorated with white tennis balls and silver trophies, selling stacks of white V-neck sweaters. J.P. Morgan and Chase have their names plastered on all the backstops. Evian, “your natural source of youth” (and ball-boy cash flows), has scores of stands. Silver monoliths topped with Citizen clocks shoot like stalks out of the food court’s garden.

To temper all this blatant consumerism, the Open has added faux folksy touches à la Camden Yards. One is a new scoreboard, manually updated by workers on ladders; another is a new rule that lets spectators keep balls launched into the stands. In another borrowing from baseball, there will be a tennis version of the Yankees’ Monument Park, with bronze plaques celebrating the Open’s Hall of Fame. (This year’s inductees are Ivan Lendl and Maureen Connolly.)

Only steps away, however, two square fountains, made by the creators of the Bellagio Casino, will supply a dancing water show to give the Open what Mr. Curry called a “little Vegas feel to it.”

The Las Vegas ambiance will surely not only suit Andre Agassi, who grew up there and is playing his 20th Open this year, but also the starlets of the women’s game, like Ms. Sharapova.

The first Russian to win Wimbledon, the 18-year-old with corn-silk hair knocked Ms. Davenport out of the No. 1 ranking on Monday, Aug. 22, and looks down from billboards and out of fashion magazines. On Aug. 28, Ms. Sharapova will launch her own fragrance with a big “tea party” featuring D.J. Mark Ronson, in which hands will come out of bushes spraying passersby like a shrubbery of Avon ladies. Guests will include Andy Roddick, who also has his own fragrance on the way.

“It’s supposed to convey her presence and who she is. She’s a big celebrity,” said Jassi Lekach, a spokeswoman for Parlux Fragrances, which created the perfume. “There are very few tennis stars that are also stars off the courts. She loves to dress up and go to parties. Her on-court outfit was the highest-selling that Nike ever had. She loves the color pink.”

It’s against the glossy Sharapova—and catsuit-clad Serena Williams—that Ms. Davenport stands out most.

“She’s not posing for swimsuits and launching perfumes,” said Jon Wertheim, who covers tennis for Sports Illustrated. “She’s like the den mother.”

On the practice court in New Haven, Ms. Davenport would take breathers between points to rest her feet up on the net and shoot the breeze with her hitting partners, joking about their abs. Her dark hair is simply highlighted with lighter brown; her teeth are tinged yellow.

“I feel like I portray myself like I am. I see myself as a good, honest person—a family person,” said Ms. Davenport, who married in Hawaii. “I don’t like photo shoots, and a lot of the other players do. They can do them.”

But unlike her flash-in-the-pan compatriot Anna Kournikova, Ms. Sharapova actually wins matches. Russian dominance, which was the story of women’s tennis last year when Russia claimed three of the top five players, has nevertheless lost its hold.

“I don’t think it’s a great year for Russia,” said Elena Dementieva, a 23-year-old Russian who holds the world’s sixth rank. “People know how to play against us. They aren’t surprised anymore.”

That will open the field up this year.

“What’s so good about women’s tennis is that you can’t definitely say who is going to win the Open,” said tennis coach Nick Bolletieri. “There are eight or 10 players. I think it makes it quite interesting—the depth is pretty damn good.”

But injuries have rendered the bench pretty damn thin, and many players have begun to complain about an unrealistically demanding schedule. Critics talk instead about how strides in racquet technology and conditioning have markedly increased the women’s power (some women hit serves in excess of 115 m.p.h.) and resulted in too much wear and tear. Many of the women’s top seeds have sat out significant portions of the season.

That has made it all the more difficult to pick a favorite in next week’s Open. Besides Ms. Davenport and Ms. Sharapova, who have seesawed on the world’s first ranking, one name that often pops up among experts is 22-year-old Kim Clijsters, the fourth-ranked woman in the world, who was an Open finalist two years ago. The feisty, pockmarked Belgian is the only top seed who has been consistently playing, and playing well. On Sunday, she won her third title in four weeks in Canada’s hard-court Rogers Cup.

The opponent she dispatched in the final, Justine Henin-Hardenne, 23, also from Belgium, is often called the best all-around player in women’s tennis, and is dangerous if healthy. Ms. Dementieva, who lounged around New Haven in a sky blue velour jumpsuit, also has a shot.

Serena Williams has played only a few matches since Wimbledon, is overweight and has been more interested in her reality show, Venus and Serena: For Real, than her game. Her sister, Venus, is in good form after her Wimbledon win and her foray into interior design. Russian Svetlana Kuznetsova, the 20-year-old winner of last year’s Open, is still in the thick of it. France’s Amelie Mauresmo, 26, often cracks under Grand Slam pressure.

“She is a very fine tennis player,” said Mr. Collins of the Terminator-chinned French woman. “But she has problems in the head.”

Ms. Davenport, who has won three Grand Slam titles, hurt her back in July’s epic Wimbledon loss to Venus Williams, and on Sunday she used bending down to pick up stray balls as an excuse to stretch out her back. She said this tournament, which began Monday, would give her a good indication of how she would stand up to the Open’s competition, and commotion.

One certainty is that Ms. Davenport has a new rapport with her ball boys. She thanks them after matches and even has a personal relationship with some of her fetchers.

“There’s one guy, he does all my matches,” said Ms. Davenport. “One time when I lost in the semis, I was just sitting there really bummed out—I knew I was going to need surgery on my foot. He just came to the chair and gave me a big hug. I got a lot of questions about that, but it was really sweet.”

Yes. But an apology will suffice for this ball boy.

It’s true, you can now buy first-growth Bordeaux from Costco. Thank the
much-discussed wine boom of the past few decades—the emergence of the idea that
wine is something every American should enjoy—for changing everything. But also
thank the fanatically savvy and majestically well-informed wine consumers who
have sprung up over the last decade, led by their hedonistic Virgil in matters
of the vine, a hefty former lawyer from Maryland who has insured his
miraculously sensitive nose for a million bucks.

We’re talking about Robert M. Parker Jr. here, the marathon force behind The Wine
Advocate, a newsletter published for a devoted subscribership of energetic wine
geeks—some of whom also lead the planet in net worth. (In recent years, Mr.
Parker has also begun to preside over a Web site, eRobertParker.com, and he has
produced numerous large and profitable books.) He’s an extraordinarily
controversial figure. Adored by his admirers, vilified by detractors, when it
comes to Robert Parker, there is no gray area.

Mr. Parker and his ascent are the subject of Elin McCoy’s well-researched if
under-scintillating hybrid biography, The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert
M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste. That title is a land grab of
the sort that would impress any Napa Valley wine burgher. Yes, Mr. Parker is
the biggest deal in booze. Unfortunately, Ms. McCoy, wine columnist for
Bloomberg, confuses volume with insight. In attempting to offer both a learned
perspective on Mr. Parker’s monumental influence and deliver an ecce homo on
“the God of wine,” she does a fine job of mapping Mr. Parker’s career against
the democratization of wine in the 1970’s and 80’s. She also captures the
essence of American taste—we like our wines rich and fruity—as it evolved in
that period. But she never tells us whether we should trust Mr. Parker
(although she more than suggests that many others don’t). And, ultimately, she
fails to drill down into the core of Mr. Parker’s character and personality.

Why, after a visit to France with his soon-to-be wife, Pat, would this rural
underachiever have decided to so obsessively devote himself to the vineyard
madness that he would spend the next three decades sipping, spitting, making
notes on and—most importantly—scoring thousands of wines?

It’s not a faint query. By anointing himself the Holy See of wine tasters, Mr.
Parker has become the most powerful critic in the history of criticism
(emphasis on critic—Mr. Parker is famous for detesting the whole toffy idea of
wine “writers,” whom he considers, not without some justification, to be a band
of freeloading hacks illicitly enmeshed in the trade). Ruskin pondering Turner
was small potatoes compared to Mr. Parker’s brooding consideration of a glass
of Château Haut-Brion. Yes, wine is a consumer product. But wine is also a
cultural product, every bit as fraught with significance—especially for the
French—as a national-treasure painting or the latest bit of celluloid from
Martin Scorsese. As many have lately bemoaned, however, critics in most fields
have been rendered powerless by the forces of capitalism. Not so Mr. Parker,
whose rise perfectly coincided with the emergence of an international wine
market. He is in fact the first true critical child of contemporary capitalism,
the American baby boomer who saw an opening and seized it.

Ms. McCoy gives us the essential Parker timeline. The epiphany in France at age 20;
the scruffy early years, grinding out legal details for Farm Credit Banks in
Baltimore; the overspending on his new hobby; the first tentative steps toward
publishing The Wine Advocate, inspired by the crusading example of Ralph Nader;
the creation of the buyer-friendly 100-point scale; the triumphant thumbs-up
call on the 1982 vintage in Bordeaux, now considered to be a modern benchmark;
the decline of the snooty, pre-Parker generation of Europhile critics; the
duels with Marvin Shanken, publisher of the competing Wine Spectator magazine
(my onetime employer); the storied tasting jaunts to France and snits with
various winemakers; and the seemingly inexorable emergence of Maximum Bob, the
Emperor of Wine, a figure of such monumental import that “[t]here will never be
another.”

But come on, really. Does the Emperor have clothes? The fact is, Mr. Parker has
three things going for him: He loves wine and has bonded this love with his
adoration for his wife (you still get the sense that he’s doing it all for
Pat); he’s a member of a lucky wine-drinking generation (by now, top wines have
been priced well out of reach of country lawyers, due to Mr. Parker’s impact);
and he is, as the French philosopher and journalist Bernard Henri-Lévy has
characterized George W. Bush, an almost definitive example of the “provincial
narcissist,” a willful rube who’s convinced he has the stuff to play in the big
leagues. But he doesn’t just want to play: He wants to transform it into a
league of his own.

Ms. McCoy settles for driving home the well-worn point that what made Mr. Parker so
immediately attractive to a newly moneyed generation of insecure American wine
consumers was that he’s “a regular guy.” He was not some pinstriped English
sophisticate who judged wine the way an Oxford don would study enjambment in
Milton. He was a big sloppy dude who lived reclusively in a house inherited
from his wife’s parents, where he plowed through the output of the world’s
greatest vineyards, as beagles snoozed at his feet and Neil Young warbled
through the stereo. Yeah! Take that, Michael Broadbent.

But understanding the Parker phenomenon demands some deeper insight. He hated being
a lawyer, and although you get the sense that he was competent, you also feel
that he thought he was a little too grand for that scene. Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr.
Parker doesn’t have a list of failures in his past (unless you count a dust-up
involving a French employee who fell into a fraud scandal a few years ago).
What he does have is a stunning set of cojones. At some point, he decided that
he wasn’t Bob Parker, bumpkin attorney and passionate amateur oenophile, but
rather Robert M. Parker Jr., the one man on Earth who tells the truth about
wine.

Mr. Parker is supposedly a modest person who still goes to work every day because
he loves what he does. But I just don’t buy it. I think Mr. Parker sits alone
in his tasting chamber and daily sips at the source of his chief addiction: the
glorification of the palate of Bob. Each new pour is a small reflecting pool in
which Mr. Parker can gaze upon the possessor of a self-declared talent.

I’ve always considered the Parker mythology to be equal parts hysterical
over-devotion and rampant opportunism. In the early 80’s, American wine
drinkers needed somebody who could make it easy for them. And the trade, after
a decade in the doldrums, needed a marketer. Mr. Parker was ideally suited to
both roles. The instantly familiar 100-point scale was genius (as Ms. McCoy
rightly points out) and will be used long after Bob Parker has gone to that
great vineyard in the sky.

But honestly. This is just one man! Wine, which was often dreadful in the years
before the boom took hold, would have improved without him; there was just too
much talent out there. What he did was make it O.K. to spend a lot of money on
wine (a habit that he now routinely attacks in The Wine Advocate, decrying the
high cost of the beverage). As his reputation grew, he became an essential
guide for the deep-pocketed debutante. Fortunately for everyone else, he
empowered a redistribution of wealth that benefited winemakers worldwide. Two
Buck Chuck, the quaffable $1.99 budget wines sold at Trader Joe’s grocery
stores, would have been impossible without Maximum Bob enthusing over Château
Pétrus. By renewing faith in the elite, he enabled vastly improved wines to be
sold to the masses.

In the end, it doesn’t matter much if Mr. Parker’s unique pathology is a force for
good or evil. The market has voted. When he’s gone, what will we do without Bob
Parker to tell us what to drink? Well, we’re human, aren’t we? We’ll just keep
drinking.

Matthew DeBord is the author of The New York Book of Wine, and Wine Country USA, both
from Rizzoli.

And forget Forest Hills. Not that there are 75 fans who still remember the sweet, storied and intimate suburban Queens club that stood as a living symbol of the game's bosky yesterdays, hosting the U.S. Nationals (the tournament became the Open in 1968) from 1924 until 1977, when Flushing Meadows landed in the midst of American tennis like that colossal alien ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind .

There were many complaints about the National Tennis Center then, and there are many now. Forget them. Suck them up. Make your snail-like way out to Flushing, savoring the Zen of being a mere particle amid the throng. Bring your own refreshments. Resign yourself to that $40-minimum ducat, the grounds pass, and be a happy groundling. You could spend a lot more and see a lot less. There's a lot of great tennis to be viewed here, as intimately as the game ought to be viewed-which is to say, right smack next to it-on the outside courts.

Wander where the crowds aren't. Witness the awesome skill and determination of the latest Russian teenager, girl or boy, gutting it out on Court 14. Delight in the finesse and vast, cumulative tennis wisdom of the seniors-the Sherwood Stewarts and Marty Riessens and Cliff Drysdales and Eddie Dibbses. Or, if you crave bigger, newer names, camp out by the practice courts. Last year, I stuck my nose into the chain-link fence and watched in mildly horrified fascination as Andy Roddick, just a couple of feet away, hit tennis balls harder than I have ever seen a human being hit tennis balls in my life (and I've been watching human beings, on the tour and off, hit tennis balls since the balls were white). Patrick McEnroe, Roddick's Davis Cup coach, was warming him up on Practice Court 1, gamely slicing and floating back the balls that Roddick kept smiting with distorting power. There was a brick utility shed behind McEnroe's baseline, and when Roddick began to serve, for an instant I literally feared for the structural integrity of that shed.

And that wasn't all. Three courts down, as if in some strange double vision, John McEnroe was practicing with 1987 Wimbledon champ Pat Cash. You could literally shift the focus of your eyes back and forth and witness the past and present of men's tennis. (Although Johnny Mac, by the looks of the fury he was investing in an ostensibly meaningless match, wasn't exactly shuffling off gently into posterity.)

Still, there are many tennis lovers who aren't so thrilled with the game's present. The pro game, especially on the men's side, continues to struggle for cultural clout and TV market share: Ratings for this year's double- who??? Wimbledon final between Swiss Roger Federer and Aussie Mark Philippoussis were the lowest ever recorded, even worse than last year's cratering numbers for the equally American-free Lleyton Hewitt–David Nalbandian final.

Yet even though the ranks of recreational players (always an index of tennis' general health) remain thin compared with the glory days of the mid-70's to the mid-80's, the Big Circus at Flushing Meadows has gotten bigger than ever, a huge moneymaker for the United States Tennis Association and a commercial bonanza for CBS Sports ….

Until, possibly, right now.

Oh, the USTA will be O.K. The Open, after all, is "The Show," it's New York-more people stream across that boardwalk every year, most of them (one suspects) as interested in the spectacle on the grounds as in the matches on the courts. Television, though, is another story. This is the year, you see, of No Serena and No Pete. The first year since 1971 when neither defending champion is returning to defend. A year when, due to Serena Williams' knee surgery, an all-Williams women's final, the biggest (one hesitates to say the only) real attention-getter in professional tennis, is an impossibility. A year when, following Pete Sampras' all-but-official retirement, there are but two Americans-the ancient Andre Agassi, 33, playing his 18th(!) Open, and hot young gun Roddick, who will turn 21 in the middle of the tournament-among the top 20 men's seeds.

And while the big cheeses at CBS Sports are devoutly praying for an Agassi-Roddick final, both players face a minefield of very tough, very hungry and very non-marquee foreign opponents, players such as the fifth-seeded Argentinean Guillermo Coria; his countryman, the above-mentioned 13th-seededNalbandian;the Spaniards Juan Carlos Ferrero (seeded third) and Carlos Moya (seventh); and that always riveting German, Rainer Schuettler (eighth).

On the women's side, with Serena out and Venus nursing a pulled abdominal muscle and a waning interest in tennis, the most likely final-for a million dollars! on Saturday night!-is a replay of the French Open final between those two crazy Belgians, Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne.

One pictures the CBS Sports guys banging their heads against their office walls, smoke coming out of their ears.

Tennis as media event has a few problems. Nowadays, beyond the Williams sisters, the game's star power largely depends on the stars the players hang out with-à la Andy Roddick's relationship with Mandy Moore, or Mark Philippoussis' with Tara Reid, or Jennifer Capriati's with Matthew Perry.

The chief problem is that a star system in any sport requires continuity. And again, beyond the Williamses, tennis has virtually none. The problem goes right back to Andy Roddick's brick-busting strokes.

While Roddick is one of the very hardest hitters on the tour (American up-and-comer James Blake has said that even when he knows where A-Rod is going to put that 140-mile-per-hour serve, he can't necessarily do anything about it), he is much more the rule than the exception. Space-age equipment and incessant conditioning have turned the game, both the men's and the women's, into a whaling exhibition. Recreational players find it harder and harder to identify with all that speed. The game is more two-dimensional, less fun to watch. And the ever-greater pace (both of the game itself and the tournament schedule) means more physical and mental stress on the players, and-especially on the men's side, where the depth of talent is far greater than on the women's-ever less continuity of excellence.

There are just too many strong players whanging the ball at each other, and oftener than not, the first guy to make a mistake goes down. And oftener than not, the last guy standing is a different guy than last week.

It used to be so different.

Time was, a single player-a Connors or a Borg or a McEnroe or a Lendl-could dominate the tour for months, even years at a time. Those days are gone. When Roger Federer won Wimbledon this year, he was the seventh player to win the last seven Grand Slam tournaments (the Australian, French and U.S. Opens, plus Wimbledon).

Tennis fans are less piqued by the variety than just plain bewildered. These days, you need a scorecard to tell all those Spaniards and Frenchmen and Belgians apart. Wham! Slam! Carlos who??? Sebastien wha??? It's hard not to wax nostalgic for the dynasty days, the golden kings of yesteryear.

We had faces then.

(Actually, the sublimely gifted, second-seeded Federer, with his close-set dark eyes and little scowling mouth, has a face-he looks a lot like Quentin Tarantino. Unfortunately, though, while he plays like an angel, he has the personality of a bowl of Cream of Wheat. And the 6-foot-4, eighth-seeded Philippoussis-they call him "Scud" for his supersonic serve-seems to have a dark, looming menace gathered between those dark eyebrows, but that's where the menace stays.)

Former French star Yannick Noah blames the supposed lack of color among today's men on excessively strict code-of-conduct rules. Maybe. It's hard, sometimes, not to miss the days when Jimmy Connors-even as he closed in on 40, for Chrissake!-could turn the stadium at Flushing, through the force of his tennis, bad-boy charm and sheer guts, into his own personal Nuremberg rally, whipping the New York fans (we were always, it seemed, thrilled to be whipped) into a slavering frenzy. Those steaming late-summer-night matches were wild. They were fun.

On the other hand, it's easy to forget what an absolute boor Connors (or, not just to pick on Jimmy, Johnny Mac or Ilie Nastase) could be, how mortifyingly and unimaginatively obscene. It made you miss good old Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall-total gents on the court and, oh yes, both a bit of a bore, personality-wise.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

But even if the great Australian champs of yesteryear-Rocket and Rosewall and Tony Roche and John Newcombe and Lew Hoad-weren't charismatic, their tennis, back in the wood-racquet days when everyone had a different style, was. The Aussies also had a delightful habit of unwinding with a beer or eight and occasionally breaking up the furniture. Today's players are so deep into their relentless training regimens, and the ceaseless grind of the tour, that apart from the very occasional drug scandal, it's hard for any spicy bad behavior to emerge, let alone a dominant figure.

There are exceptions.

Lleyton Hewitt really seemed to be going somewhere for a while. Not only did the feisty little Aussie hold a virtual hammerlock on World No. 1 throughout 2001 and 2002, he also managed to put off a good many people with his cocky demeanor. There was that wonderfully bad incident at the 2001 Open when Hewitt, during a match against the African-American James Blake, appeared to make a racist remark to a black linesman-accusing him, in effect, of favoring his ethnic fellow-and then slimily refused to 'fess up to it afterward. (John McEnroe, from his CBS commentator's chair, harrumphed at great length about Hewitt-inadvertently gathering the younger man into the select Superbrat fold by conveniently forgetting that he, McEnroe, had done precisely the same thing himself with an Indian linesman during a 1981 Wimbledon doubles match against the Indian Amritraj brothers.)

Then Hewitt mysteriously imploded.

Or perhaps not so mysteriously. After the men's tour's governing body, the Association of Tennis Professionals, fined him $35,000 for failing to show up at a press conference during last year's Masters Tournament in Cincinnati, Hewitt took it into his head to sue the A.T.P. this past June, shortly before heading to Wimbledon and blowing up in the first round. Also coincidentally-or not-Hewitt hasn't won a tournament in the past six months, and has won only seven matches in five tournaments since firing his coach, for unexplained reasons, in May. He has also suffered from a mysterious respiratory virus. And last week, back in Cincinnati (historically the tune-up for the Open), he lost in the first round to Belgian Xavier Malisse. Hewitt's ranking has dropped to No. 6.

Which brings us to another problem.

Hmm … losing in the first round, to a Belgian? You see, Dr. Freud, Hewitt's girlfriend is World No. 1 (and No. 1 seed at the Open) Kim Clijsters. And-well, do we really need to mention her nationality once more?

It can't be easy for Hewitt to go to Flushing as the 13th seed when his girl is the belle of the ball. On the other hand, I have to say that his relationship with Clijsters makes me like him a lot better. Last year, in the Players' Lounge at the National Tennis Center, I saw the two of them sitting on a couch together and watching a big-screen TV just like an old married couple. And I've interviewed Clijsters, who is truly a nice girl, a sweet and unaffected young woman with a big athlete's body and a homely-cute, very Low Countries face. Hewitt could have easily gone for eye-candy-as we've seen, it's always close at hand in pro tennis-but elected not to. Maybe there's something to that lawsuit.

But speaking of Clijsters brings me back to the women. It has been noted far too often-by me among others-that the women's game is where the real excitement is in professional tennis these days. The translation for this is really that the Williams sisters are where the action is-and more and more, the translation for that is Serena, Serena, Serena. While the proverbial all-Williams final is a virtual lock in any tournament that finds both women healthy, Venus' attention seems, enigmatically, to be wandering these days.

Or maybe it's not so enigmatic, considering the ruthless physical and mental ordeal of her development as a player, and the fact that it was Richard Williams' decision, rather than his daughters', that they take up the sport in the first place. Maybe what's more puzzling is how Serena Williams maintains her zest for the game and her sparkling personality in the face of the tour's pressures and the open dislike and envy expressed by many of her fellow players. (Maybe she really does have a future in acting.)

But of course the problem with Serena this year is that, as Rod Argent and the Zombies sang, she's not there. And even though Venus is, it's not clear whether, with that straggling attention and without the comforting presence of her beloved little sister on the other side of the draw, she can once more summon the sheer stoicism that carried her and her injured abdominal muscle through Wimbledon.

Of course we'll root for her, sentimentally. As we'll pull for our old American big guns, third-seeded Lindsay Davenport and sixth-seeded Jennifer Capriati, writing off neither, even though ruthless logic tells us that both are ever so gently on the decline. Watching women's tennis also gives us the opportunity to twinkle at the occasional capable beauty in its midst, the chief avatar these days (now that Anna K. seems to have given up on ever winning a tournament) being the lissome Slovakian, ninth-seeded Daniela Hantuchova. But players and commentators keep talking about how thin Hantuchova looks: She's listed at 5-foot-11 and 123 pounds, yet that weight sounds optimistic-some have even muttered darkly about anorexia ….

No, at the end of the day, I have to tell you, those Belgian girls are going to be tough to beat. Little Justine Henin-Hardenne, with her implacable sliced groundstrokes and that Mammy Yokum squint, looks as if she'd just as soon shoot you down as shake your hand. She efficiently dismantled both Serena and Clijsters to win the French Open-though Serena then returned the favor at Wimbledon. That would've been a good revenge match at Flushing Meadows. It is, alas, not to be.

A couple of years ago I covered another Williams-challenged tournament, the season-ending Chase Championships at Madison Square Garden. Both sisters were absent, claiming injury, though there were those who grumbled that they were really just resting off a hard year.

It didn't matter to me, though. All the rest of the top players were there-including Kim Clijsters, just beginning her ascent-and the tennis was superb. I had never really witnessed the modern women's game so close-up before, and I was stunned at how hard they were hitting the ball-really not that much less hard than the men on the groundstrokes, the serve being the chief difference: The women top out at "only" 100 to 110 miles per hour, while the men can close in on 140. (Just try serving 100 miles per hour sometime, Mr. Macho Club Player.)

The final was a great match between Martina Hingis and Monica Seles: ice and fire, strategy and tenacity versus sheer, grunting power. It was miraculous to watch. And the Garden was half-empty.

Just a little thought for CBS Sports and the USTA when it comes to that million-dollar Saturday-night women's final at Flushing Meadows.

Stay tuned. Please.

Who is Kirstie? you ask. A noted public intellectual? A firebrand pundit? A feminist academic with a blistering intellect?

Not exactly. Kirstie was the unacknowledged star of To Live and Date in New York 2 , the second season of Metro TV's rather grim but compulsively watchable reality show, which ended last week. A 22-year-old vaguely employed English model, Kirstie ("Rhymes with 'thirsty,'" as she explained during one episode in her weary drawl) is the sort of girl New York perpetually attracts, but whose incisive take on our metropolis-and, for that matter, on the entire human comedy-is habitually ignored.

I mean, how smart can a model be, right? Much less a model who has given up modeling so she can do nothing more demanding than hang out and date a parade of short, rich guys? (Kirstie is, of course, quite tall--though not, she says, as skinny as she used to be.)

Into this stereotype is dropped Kirstie, like a lanky, slurring guerrilla specifically trained to dismantle cherished assumptions. Sure, sure, Kirstie and her yelping, chesty cohort in after-dark adventure, the incongruously named Dawn, have their mindless fun. They dump vodka and something blue into a blender before hitting the town. They slip in and out of cabs as if the pavement had long awaited the redemptive stab of their stilettos. They are ogled by an endless stream of beefy, nocturnal men and courted by the ones who can afford to fund Kirstie's transhemispheric lifestyle (she spends summers in New York, winters in Australia and Asia).

By comparison with To Live and Date 2 's other compelling figure, the talkative, neurotic, lemur-eyed Laurie, a sassy freelance writer slogging away in online-personals hell, Kirstie is outrageously successful on the sexual front. I doubt she's ever even seen the Internet, much less considered the possibility that it might be a place to meet men. All she really needs is a cell phone, a pack of cigarettes and something to lean against.

But unlike Laurie, who natters on thinly and unreflectively about her romantic failures, Kirstie's streamlined expectations promote a philosophical intensity about her place in the world, and about how life in this city works.

The other women whose travails were chronicled in To Live and Date 2 possess a chipper New York optimism that seems minted in the late 1990's. They contemplate their prospects with storybook assuredness that their dreams will come true.

Kirstie does not. And this is why I couldn't stop watching her-or, for that matter, fantasizing that Metro TV would see an Osbournes in the making and give Kirstie her own show. While Lori, a hard-bitten, divorced event-planner, struggles through a date with a cop; while curly-haired ditz Sarah hurls herself out of an airplane in a vain effort to skydive into love; while borderline schizophrenic Victoria … well, let's not get into Victoria; while all this is happening, Kirstie parties on a boat with Dawn and a clutch of chiseled Romeos, guzzling booze and sucking down Marlboros, boogying in the moonlight, fielding calls from frantic former paramours.

Once in a while, though, out of nowhere comes the patented thousand-yard Kirstie stare. It's like time stops as she considers her curtailed future, her haggard past. Twenty-two years old, and her limpid brown eyes are already full of marbled wisdom. The girl has seen things . You get the sense that if she and freelancer Laurie ever found themselves comparing notes, Kirstie would stare down at poor tremulous Laurie and tell her how it is, then maybe slap her hard and instruct her to go out and get very, very drunk and whore herself to the first halfway-rich-looking guy in the bar. Wake up hung-over and miserable the next day and immediately fly to Aruba for a recuperative week on the beach, with festive cocktails and late-night high jinks. "Whatever you do, darling," you can imagine Kirstie instructing Laurie, "Do not … uh … date any more men you meet on the … uh … Inter-fucking-net ."

Kirstie functioned on the show as a flagrant counterpoint to the serial whining and hapless schemes of the other single women. But in the process, she proved that she's actually lived a life, however brief, and learned from her experiences. The other women have barely gotten started, or have already given up. This is because they are, for the most part, normal. They have standard-issue fears and standard-issue dreams. Kirstie has neither. She's already exotic, and was probably considered freakishly beautiful from the time she was 12. Posing for nude photos, as she did in one episode-pretty much for her own pleasure, on a lark-didn't trouble her in the least. She owns what she's got-but she knows it's all she's got. Hers is a gruff realism, drained of all delusion.

But she also thinks of "dating" as it has nowadays become-a truly twisted and self-destructive practice, a fit subject for reality-show farce-as a scam, and refuses to confuse it with love.

That's deeply insightful, refreshing even. I certainly don't envy Kirstie her having been chewed up by the beauty business. It can't be pleasant, as she conveyed in one episode, to be made to feel that you're always too fat or too dumb. No wonder she quit so that she could devote herself to drift.

I do envy her attitude, however. For too many people, women especially, New York is a mirage, a city that thrives on its capacity to dazzle and beckon in spite of the harshness that everyone eventually discovers, beneath the glimmer, like a dead rat in the flower beds of Park Avenue.

Kirstie, by contrast, knows that New York is cruel. But she's not in town to be made to feel good; she's here to use the city in the same way that the city wants to use her. Meanwhile, smart, single women from the Upper West Side to Battery Park City slip deeper and deeper into cosmic denial. They lament the dearth of good men, nice guys. Ladies, listen: Most Manhattan men are shameless jerks on the hustle, coveting sex, money and power. They want women like Kirstie, who conveniently symbolizes all three.

And Kirstie will have them, if she wants. But she knows their game. And when she's finished with them, or they're finished with her, or however things happen on Kirstie's rarefied plane of socio-sexual transaction, they might be ready for something more … normal. But while you're waiting, before Kirstie and her cadre give up and go off to procreate, pay attention. These babes might get all the action, but they gather knowledge, too. Intelligence of a brutal sort-and it damages them, in the way that only seeking after truth can.

Seeing Kirstie in the flesh made me glad to know that she still walks among us. New Yorkers should be grateful to her. Her sacrifice, like Socrates' public martyrdom, enlightens us all.

Consider the evidence: The economy sucks. A certain spirit of sexual wantonness has seized the population. "Hooking up," on its face, sounds a lot like cruising, and that old line about getting laid now because we might not be here tomorrow, victims of a nuclear nightmare, actually seems more convincing than it did during the Brezhnev era.

Your one indispensable piece of technology is a … phone. It may be a cellular, but it's still just a phone. It does what phones have always done.

Let's not even talk about clothes. If the fashion biz ever tires of referencing shearling jackets, flared jeans, glam rock and old-school sneakers, it'll be front-page news, at least to the people who run Diesel and Puma.

But, of course, the real story has less to do with 70's style than 70's politics. Once again, we live in wartime. Let's not forget that Vietnam didn't end until 1975, five years into the Me Decade. Sesame Street hit the airwaves in 1969, the same year that Nixon authorized the secret bombings of Cambodia, effectively snuffing the peace-sign 60's and inaugurating a new decade of deception and conspiracy (the Summer of Love segues into The Parallax View , with a brief stopover at Hamburger Hill ).

For New Yorkers like me, in our mid-30's, this stuff is formative. My earliest political memory is one of a war being lost: that desperate helicopter evacuation during the fall of Saigon.

New Yorkers want to restore the 70's because they seem so much more benign than what we've seen so far of this new century. It makes sense that we'd seek refuge in the comfortingly manageable anxieties of the Me Decade, because in those days New York was cool but cuddly-tough, not terrifying. The city attracted a peculiar combination of mad striving and astonishing innocence.

People who chose to come here then-before Soho even had indoor plumbing, much less Louis Vuitton-were an intrepid, brave, foolhardy, romantic lot. If you'd come to Manhattan in the 70's, you went back home with some swagger. You could hack it, you could face the daily quagmire of living in a city drained of hope, but persevering. Sticking around was the ultimate act of defiance.

It took balls to live here. No other city tried as hard to break you, day after grinding day. In summertime, it was soggy and it reeked; in wintertime, it froze solid and everyone huddled inside, with four TV channels and a rotary-dial phone to pass the hours. In between, the entire population, as has been pointed out, got by on $10,000 a year, regardless of occupation. Thwarted ambition was the rule. Success operated according to a more bohemian definition.

I'll be the first to admit that, post-9/11, I've yearned more than once to set the Wayback Machine on the Ford administration. I never got along all that well with the crime-free, supermodel-thronged, paper-billionaire-spawning New York of the 90's. For me, the whole point in coming here was to grow some spikes. That's what New York invites, and that's the inverted romance of the place, its famously gritty allure.

Just my luck that, by the time I showed up in the late 1980's, all the filth and smut and invigorating grime was on the way out, replaced by a New Age of glistening prosperity characterized by innovative policing, Silicon Alley and Total Request Live . When all the hookers have disappeared from Times Square, replaced by mobs of milk-fed teenagers from suburban Milwaukee jockeying for a glimpse of Carson Daly, who needs guts to stick around?

Now, of course, to think we're reliving the 70's amounts to wishful thinking. The enveloping darkness, the gloom, the menace-it's all here with a vengeance this time. The local economy actually seems worse . We might have a hundred cable channels, but all anyone watches is CNN.

In the 70's, as New Yorkers nervously awaited news that the Red Brigades or the I.R.A. had popped a prime minister or offed a royal, they pondered their own scuzzed-out environs with a sort of prefab fatalism: Well, if it comes here, at least we've been readied by circumstances . New Yorkers were basket cases back then-the country's poster population for urban decay-but they were arrogant basket cases. Son of Sam couldn't shatter our egotism. The blackout of 1977 was an excuse to party.

So long, Me Decade. Hello, Them Decade.

Them , as in: Who are they? Why do they hate us? Why do they want us all dead?

Nobody has time for dedicated Me-ism now-not when you wake up to the news that another 150,000 troops have been deployed to Kuwait, that five dead servicemen were discovered in a shallow grave on the road to Baghdad, that challenging a tyrant a world away invites car bombs, not garlands. It's hard to concentrate on a disco revival when you lose sleep because a madman might have snuck a rogue nuke into the hold of a container ship bound for the Port of New Jersey.

Jokes are no solace. You can't create something like Saturday Night Live , that defining cultural product of the 70's, when the President of the United States doesn't take pratfalls, when he delivers instead trancelike speeches about why we must march to the Middle East to kill Them before they kill Us. A three-martini interlude at Elaine's will not gaily anesthetize you to the real-time videophoned horrors of techno-war against Them. Fear is sexy, but fear is also fear. Sex may be a liberating response to it, but you still have to think about their dirty bombs after your dirty talk.

The Me Decade advanced the cause of runaway self-love, an innocent response to shattered national self-esteem, as an antidote to paranoia. In the Them Decade, self-love has been replaced by self-preservation (inflatable kayak, anybody? Iodine pills? Where do you put the safe room in a studio apartment?) and self-destruction, of a sort not recommended during the recreationally intoxicated Me Decade. Could there be a worse time to ban smoking in bars? This is wartime, and we're trembling even without the nic fits. We need tobacco with our booze. We don't need it to feel better; we need it to stave off the nervous breakdown.

I can't even begin to tell you how much I long for the Technicolor rumble of a graffiti-encrusted No. 4 Train, or some real pornography enjoyed the old-fashioned way, in a booth that smells like bleach, not huddled in front of an iBook. That would be infinitely preferable to the war porn we're nightly beamed from the front. When the recent interminable winter's snow finally melted and the uncollected trash was revealed, I said, Thank God-this continues to be a stinking, filthy, rotten place where only the strong survive.

Well, we'd better be strong. The Me Decade is a fading memory, and yes, we all look back fondly on it. Thirty years from now, we won't miss the Them Decade, trust me on that.