Growing Up with the Legg Mason Tennis Classic

One of the many advantages of growing up in a city like Washington, DC is the professional sports. The Redskins, Wizards (née Bullets), Capitals, and Orioles (and now Nationals) allowed me to see some of the great athletes of the 1990s in person. From Roger Clemens to Michael Jordan, from Wayne Gretzky to Brett Favre, I got to see some pretty amazing sports.

While plenty of American cities have several professional sports franchises, very few have hosted professional tennis tournaments. Fewer still have hosted an event that’s remained in the city for close to forty years, as Washington has. Washington’s tennis tournament was the second professional tennis tournament in the United States, preceded only by the U.S. Open. The tournament was held in Washington at the insistance of Arthur Ashe, who trained in Washington often.

Not knowing any of this history, I happily accompanied my dad to a session or two of the Legg Mason Tennis Classic every year in the mid-1990s. We would usually go to a couple of the quarterfinals during the Friday day session, as my dad could get Fridays off of work.

Andre Agassi and Michael Chang were the big draws at the tournament back then, and both of them won the tournament a handful of times. Agassi was always the fan favorite, and rewarded those fans by playing the tournament for fifteen consecutive years, from 1990 to 2004. I remember being disappointed that Pete Sampras never played in Washington, even though he was born in the District. Why Pete never showed was never officially explained, although Andre’s lurking had to have been a repellant.

In 1996, I won a radio call-in trivia contest where the prize was tickets to a Legg Mason session of my choice. Happy to take advantage of the situation, I chose tickets to the final session, for the singles final. In that match, Michael Chang beat Wayne Ferreira 6-2, 6-4. I remember it being a pretty good match, and I remember being mesmerized by how much Wayne’s surname looked like “Ferrari.”

That would be the last time we went to the Legg Mason for some time. We started deferring our tennis experience until later in the calendar, when we would drive up the Jersey Turnpike, hop on a PATH train, then a 1 train, then a 7 train, disembarking at Flushing Meadows. The Open felt so much more important than the Legg Mason ever did, as all the big names were always there. The women being there as well was also a big plus. We went to the middle weekend of the Open in 1998 and 1999, seeing (among other matches) Rios d. Kroslak, Seles d. Sugiyama, Hingis d. Dechy, and Novotna d. Spirlea (the year after the Spirlea bump incident, which made for a very pro-Novotna crowd).

We then decided to just go up for Super Saturday (Men’s Semis and Women’s Finals) in 2000 (Safin d. Martin, Sampras d. Hewitt, V. Williams d. Davenport) 2001 (Hewitt d. Kafelnikov, Sampras d. Safin, V. Williams d. S. Williams) and 2002 (Sampras d. Schalken, Agassi d. Hewitt, S. Williams d. V. Williams). I also saw the men’s final in 2001, in which Hewitt thrashed Sampras. Perhaps what was most notable about these matches was that none of them was very close. The only match that wasn’t won in straight sets was Agassi’s victory over Hewitt, in which Hewitt managed to eke out the third before Agassi closed it out in four.

For a variety of reasons which I don’t honestly remember, we didn’t go up to the open for the next few years, nor did we go to Legg Mason. I watched plenty of tennis on television, but none in person. With the NHL lockout of 2004-2005, I shifted my sports loyalties more firmly to tennis. Last year, 2006, was the first time after that that I was in town for the tournament since my full-blown immersion into tennis following. I went to all but one session, and loved every second of it. I’ll go into my time at the 2006 tournament in nauseating detail in my next entry.