On Wednesday, my wife and I watched a U.S. Open tennis match in Arthur Ashe Stadium. You have never seen anything like it, unless you have been lucky enough to see an ant wrestle with a crumb. That’s what it looked like from our cheap seats. Obviously I am exaggerating, because the tennis match involved two players, not one. Two ants wrestling with crumbs is obviously twice as good as one.
We left after a few minutes because my wife got dizzy from the height (really).
You might wonder why I didn’t invest some of my Dilbert money in better tickets. Well, that’s a long story involving my sloth, ignorance, poor memory, wishful thinking, bad timing, and a few other personality defects that I might be intentionally forgetting. Apparently I will not be in charge of “ticket getting” for our next event.
On Monday night, however, we had good tickets, thanks to a friend of a friend. But we also had a spare set of ant-with-crumb tickets I had purchased before the better ones became available. The bad tickets were $36 apiece, and it was a Roger Federer match, so we figured we could just sell them to some ticketless fan on the way in. No point in wasting good ant-with-crumb tickets.
This created a dilemma.
Scalping is a crime within 1,500 feet of the entrance, as the signs clearly proclaimed. But we aren’t so good at estimating distance. We walked until we were approaching the Pennsylvania border, just to be on the safe side, and were surprised that no one was there waiting to buy ant-with-crumb tickets. But maybe we walked in the wrong direction, we thought. Perhaps there was a mob of ticketless people closer to Vermont. But by then we were exhausted and unsure we could even make it back to the entrance without a helicopter rescue. Eventually we decided we had a good reason to waste perfectly good tickets.
We found our seats in the loge section, behind a young man with an exceptional head. When he sat upright, we had a perfect view of the court. But when he leaned forward, as he preferred to do, his head seemed to grow to the size of a sperm whale, obscuring half of the court. We marveled at the impossibility of it all, and discussed our options.
One option involved moving to other seats and hoping the rightful owners didn’t show up. This didn’t work for me because I knew I would be feeling like a criminal all night. It was bad enough that I almost scalped tickets within the gravitational field of Earth; I couldn’t handle being a seat trespasser too.
The other option was to ask the young man to sit up straight for the entire match. But how reasonable is that? I decided it was better than trespassing. I tapped on his shoulder and explained the situation, leaving out the colorful “head like a sperm whale” descriptor. The young man readily agreed to sit upright, and did.
This created a new problem.
I like to lean forward when I watch tennis matches. But I couldn’t because I had just asked the guy with the sperm whale head not to. Let me tell you, when you can’t lean forward in your seat, that’s when you want it the most. It was forbidden fruit. I became obsessed with trying to find moments when the guy in front of me was unlikely to turn sideways and notice me with his peripheral vision. I think Roger Federer won the match, but that’s not the part I will remember for the rest of my life. I’ll only remember the day I couldn’t lean forward with impunity. I suspect the guy with the sperm whale head will also remember the day a stranger told him there was only one acceptable way to sit in his seat.
Anyway, I wish someone would just invent some sort of device that would display sporting events while you sat on your own couch. I think it would catch on.