THERE have been other big farewells at the U.S. Open, of course. Pete Sampras gave us one of the greatest goodbyes in the history of professional sport four years ago, winning one of the most improbable Open titles ever, then climbing into the stands, kissing his wife, hugging the whole sport while he was at it.
Chris Evert’s adieu may not have come in victory, though it seemed no less triumphant.
That was Sept 5, 1989, and it came in the quarterfinals, following a loss to Zina Garrison, but it was just as feelgood a moment as Sampras’.
They were both splendid champions who seemed to take special satisfaction in having been at their very best for New York City, for the Open, for a very long time.
We’re going to get another of these forever photo-ops some time in the next two weeks.
We’re going to get Andre Agassi – who came to us a shaggy bad boy yet departs as perhaps the most altruistic and generous athlete of this or any other generation – giving us a few more sets at Flushing Meadows, maybe a few more matches when it will sound like thunder even in the sunny, 90-degree heat of Queens.
Whenever goodbye happens – whether it’s two weeks from now, in what would be an unfathomable Hickory High-type march to the championship match, whether it’s after his first-round date with Romanian Andrei Pavel, whether it’s sometime in between – it will be long, and it will be emotional, and there will be laughter and tears and the crackling of thousands of flashbulbs, trying to freeze the moment.
But there will be something different about this goodbye, something a little more bittersweet, with a few more tinges of melancholy thrown in there. Because when Agassi walks away for good, surely it will feel as if he’s taking something with him besides one of the great and colorful careers in the history of American tennis.
For now, it will seem like he’s taking the Open with him, too.
Or at least the Open as we’ve come to know it, as we’ve come to expect it. That’s been a part of the New York summer forever, of course, going back to Forest Hills, going back to the West Side Tennis Club. Still, it was when the Open first moved across the street from Shea Stadium in 1978, when the big matches first started to fill Louis Armstrong Stadium, and later Arthur Ashe Stadium, that tennis truly began to feel like a varsity sport around here.
Especially the men’s draw. In ’78, Jimmy Connors was in his prime, and so was Bjorn Borg, and John McEnroe was just about to explode for good, and even the ancillary players, the Vitas Gerulaitises and Guillermo Vilases and Roscoe Tanners were enough to keep the stands filled with bodies and electricity. That generation begat a newer one a few years later – Boris Becker, Mats Wilander, Ivan Lendl, Stefan Edberg – that kept regenerating the buzz, kept renewing the electricity. And that generation, of course, begat another – Agassi, Sampras, Jim Courier, Patrick Rafter – that tried to kick the kinetic spirit of the event into outer space.
Now, Sampras has been gone four long years. Rafter and Courier have been gone even longer. And when Agassi goes, the Open is going to seem like a very strange, very quiet, and very – let’s be honest – dull place to be, comparatively speaking. Couple that with the demise of the Williams sisters in the women’s bracket, along with a string of impossible-todistinguish (save, of course, for Maria Sharapova) contenders, and it’s difficult to tell just where the Open is headed in the next few years.
That’s not to say that the tennis won’t be terrific. It will be. It’s possible that Roger Federer may be the Tiger Woods of tennis, only better, because he’s going to be pushed the next few years by Rafael Nadal. But good as they are, they aren’t showmen. They don’t capture crowds’ imaginations, not yet. If Andy Roddick could ever get back to a championship level, certainly he could plug the lights back in. If James Blake – who would seem to be the obvious heir apparent to Agassi, in both talent and crowd appeal – can break through, that would be even better.
For tennis’ sake, for the Open’s sake, that needs to happen. Because without them, and without Agassi, the Open is in danger of going back to where it was in the decades before the advent of open tennis – a splendid showcase of elite tennis players that tennis fans will enjoy, but an event that will make the casual fan’s eyes glaze over.
That won’t cheapen the title any. It won’t make the event any less prestigious. Just different. For 26 years, no matter how good or bad the Mets were doing in any given summer, you always knew that Flushing Meadows would crackle with life, and pulse with magic, for two weeks a year. The Open was always an event you had to keep your eye on, every day, because something might happen you’d never seen before, and might never see again. It wasn’t that you wanted to see it; you had to see it.
Andre Agassi didn’t invent that part of the game, he simply inherited it. A worthy heir has yet to emerge. For tennis’ sake, and for the Open’s, let’s hope that happens before he finally does say goodbye.
The Open means too much to New York to let it ever pass by us in silence.
Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail is michael.vaccaro@ nypost.com. His Yankees-Red Sox book, “Emperors and Idiots,” is available in paperback at bookstores everywhere.
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VAC’S WHACKS
When Tiger Woods is playing as he did at Medinah last week, the rest of the field looks about as inspired, and inspiring, as the NL wild-card race.
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* In the third circle of hell, flames lick the bottom of your feet, Lucifer speaks in tongues, and the only show available on television is “Ultimate Road Trip” on YES.
* You’d be amazed how many people outside of New York think Derek Jeter is nothing but a creation of the New York hype machine. Winning the MVP this year – which, if the season ended today, he should – won’t change those simpleton minds, but it would be a tangible reward for a player who’s always best been defined by intangibles.