Presenting Another Courtside Opinion

NEW YORK — If you had tickets for the Thursday day session at the U.S. Open, you were aggravated, soaked to the skin and several paychecks behind from those five hours you spent looking at the latest in combustible Nike bike shorts.

If you arrived by limousine in time to sip the last happy-hour Bloody Mary in a $100,000 corporate suite for the night session, you probably didn’t care too much. But if you paid top dollar for Section 303, Row Z, seat 1 on Thursday night, you were in tennis nirvana.

Rain at the National Tennis Center on Thursday pushed back the start of play until 4 p.m. on the stadium court--later on the others--postponing dozens of doubles matches and moving the remainder around the grounds late into the evening on several courts.

As you entered the grounds for the night session, you were promised an average card on Arthur Ashe Stadium--Martina Hingis against Denisa Chladkova, a Czechmate she dispatched, 6-2, 6-3, at Wimbledon less than two months ago, and the unseeded matchup of doubles specialist Jonas Bjorkman against comeback kid Todd Martin. But with the rain came a veritable smorgasbord of tennis under the lights, for all tastes. Better still, you didn’t need to be in the nosebleeds to see it.

Pete Sampras still was playing on Stadium Two by the time you arrived. Granted, he was playing a 32-year-old German ranked No. 338 in the world, with a 2-2 record in 1997 and whose last U.S. Open appearance was in 1991. Still, it was Pete Sampras, numero uno supremo of men’s tennis. And you could actually get up fairly close to see him.

Then, if you hurried, you could catch Gustavo Kuerten taking on big-serving Dutchman Sjeng Schalken on Court 18. Or former Wimbledon champion Conchita Martinez playing on Court 11. Or even the Williams sisters playing mirror-image doubles together on lucky (?) court 13. Or the best doubles players in the world, the Woodies (Mark Woodforde and Todd Woodbridge), Olympic gold medalists on Court 9.

The court maintenance crew were impressively diligent in drying off the Decoturf courts for play, not once but twice during the day. They do it the old fashioned way: Dozens of them down on their hands and knees, literally drying the court off with soaking wet white towels. Diligent, even though they knew that a few sprinkles would put all their hard work to waste and force them to start over again.

But even more impressive were the stadium cleaning crew. By the time the last raindrop fell around 3:30 p.m., they already had dried off the hundreds of white plastic tables and chairs surrounding the food court. There are many things about the U.S. Open that are overpriced and under-delivered.

But at least they understand that if you’re going to pay big money for a ticket, not to mention $8 for a hamburger or a tiny glass of champagne, $9 for a program, or $65 for a pink polyester shirt nobody in their right mind would wear in polite company, at least you deserve a dry fanny while you enjoy it.

And the best part is, this isn’t Wimbledon, where rain washed out play for the better part of five consecutive days. The forecast through Labor Day weekend is good enough that no millionaire tennis player will complain about having to play matches two days in a row, for heaven’s sake.