I went to the US Open. The influencer outrage is overblown

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 28: Influencer Morgan Riddle looks on during the Men's Singles First Round match between Taylor Fritz and Steve Johnson on Day One of the 2023 US Open at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on August 28, 2023 in the Flushing neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York City. | Getty Images I’ve been going to the US Open in some capacity since I was five years old. What started I’m sure as me playing with a Transformers toy in a New York City hotel room while others watched tennis eventually became an annual trip to see some of the best players and matches the sport had to offer in the 2010s and now the 2020s. I’m 23 years old now, old enough to order a Honey Deuce, so while I have a somewhat limited view on the passing of the ages, I have still seen a lot of tennis at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center — so we shall approach this from the only perspective I have: resident Gen-Z sports cultural critic. The in-person experience at the US Open has come under some fire this year after keywords like “weed smell” and “influencer overload” started hitting on the algorithms that drive editorial decisions. A number of thinkpieces have been written about if the ring lights and (one) marijuana-smelling fan have finally overrun the traditionally polite sport of tennis and its necessarily dainty spectators. Is it the end times? Well, I was at the US Open this weekend and did not notice the kind of oppressive fan/influencer atmosphere I read about going in. It felt like the US Open, an event that has always had overpriced T-shirts, crowded grounds, and louder-than-elsewhere fans. It wasn’t any louder, more crowded or more nickel-and-dimey than last year or the year before. It felt, and this may shock you, like sports. These critiques of the US Open crowd etiquette are, in my view, driven largely by the buzz words that drive media decision-making. In a culture driven by primarily by outrage and saying can you believe that? while shaking your head in disapproval, stories of influencers taking over the US Open sell like hotcakes. But the US Open granted credentials to 100 influencers/content creators, not like … 10,000 of them. Had I not read on the internet of the “chaos” wrought by these supposed leeches, I would not have even realized they were there. People have always filmed important points at the US Open — I have done that for years. My grandfather (not an influencer) also does that. I acknowledge my severely limited view of this issue/non-issue — I was there for one single session, and acknowledge that others with a more complete view may feel the repulsion that I did not. Someone with far better knowledge than myself, ESPN’s D’Arcy Maine, reported on this story with the shrewd headline: “Separating fact from fiction: The US Open influencer controversy.” The piece showed the tension that exists between angry tennis traditionalists and the USTA, who is legitimately trying to grow tennis in the United States. Yes, it boosts their product, but it also improves the long-term outlook of a sport I care very much about. I’m also something of a radical in the tennis-crowd-etiquette world, of course, since I wrote something titled “Tennis should have no crowd noise rules at the US Open” three weeks ago. But my Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd did not have a single smidgen of the apocalyptic impoliteness I’ve been reading about. There are certainly rude individuals who have interrupted matches — bringing a ring light to a match is ridiculous and, yeah, smoking weed at any sporting event (whether it’s the Wimbledon Final or the Super Bowl) is not considerate to anyone around you. But in terms of population-wide changes? My experience was very standard. The tournament is, however, increasingly expensive. The main critique of this year’s live experience I will grant is a runaway train of ticket prices. There’s not one reason for this change, documented well in this piece by Matthew Futterman, but the US Open is very much angling itself toward its luxury guests through its renovation of Arthur Ashe Stadium. Grounds passes have ridden an unregulated resale market to the moon and are now prohibitively expensive. There’s not one fix for this problem, and rich New Yorkers who do not care what they have to pay to get in will keep driving the market beyond what is perceived as reasonable if demand for live events continues to grow. One possible improvement (if not actually a solution to ticket prices), and one I’ve thought about for years but never actually published (world premiere of this take), is that the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center is too small. There are a number of choke points on the grounds that make a sold-out day session feel like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It would be difficult to change the position of the courts, but the size of the corridors between them is an issue. Perhaps we don’t need the big fountains (I love fountains as much as the next guy, but come on) in the middle of the only true open space on the grounds. The US Open’s main problem, right now, is this ladder-pulling rhetoric that makes young people like me less likely to engage with it. Contrary to popular belief, 23-year-old tennis fans do not want to be able to smoke weed courtside at matches while wearing a GoPro ring-light helmet while live-vlogging the whole thing. We just want to feel like we’re part of the sport, which will require reform to ticket infrastructure but also fewer media circuses about if youth culture is trampling all over the tournament. It isn’t, at least not from what I saw. Young people give the tournament its special energy, and implying that energy is somehow malicious or ruining the sport would be a disaster for the US Open and tennis as a whole. This rhetoric has consequences. Wimbledon will apparently “take a stand” against influencers in their latest attempt to ensure that only A-listers and old-money aristocrats can find a seat at Centre Court. “Influencer,” though, is a pejorative, and trying to freeze out modern media from your tournament is bad for business and for the product. And when I could detect no traces of this overpowering influencer death spiral? It’s also unnecessary.

Read it at SB Nation ↗

← Front page