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    A Tennis Reporter on Familiar Grounds

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    Matthew Futterman, a Sports journalist, reflects on his many years attending, and later, covering, the Grand Slam tournament in Flushing, Queens.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.As a reporter who covers tennis for The New York Times, I am often asked which of the four Grand Slam tournaments — the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon or the U.S. Open — is my favorite.I admit I’m biased, as I’ve lived in New York most of my life. But my answer has never wavered: the U.S. Open.I’ve been coming to the tournament since 1978; I was a 9-year-old tennis-head who grew up in Westchester County during the American tennis boom. The tournament had just moved from the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills to what is now the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.I remember scant details about that first tournament. My parents took my two brothers and me. We sat way up in the red bleachers of Louis Armstrong Stadium, the venue’s main arena. It was hot and breezy, as it often is when you’re a stone’s throw from Flushing Bay. Roscoe Tanner was playing. He could serve the ball 150 miles an hour in spite of racket technology that is now considered ancient.The coolest thing about that stadium, which was later renovated, and then torn down and replaced, was that if you climbed to the top of the bleachers, you could lean over a railing and watch the action on the Grandstand court about 150 feet below. It seemed incredibly unsafe. But it was also awesome in the way that so much of New York in the 1970s and ’80s was — it felt dangerous and wonderful all at once.One year, my brother and I snagged seats a few rows up from the court on the Grandstand and watched Vitas Gerulaitis win an epic match in an early round. Gerulaitis, who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1994, was one of the great New Yorkers, a Long Island boy with shoulder-length blond curly hair. The little bandbox of a stadium was teeming with fans screaming their lungs out for him.Like Gerulaitis, John McEnroe, another tennis great, grew up playing at the Port Washington Tennis Academy on Long Island. I knew people who knew them. An older cousin used to tell me stories of leaving Studio 54 at 2 a.m., just as Gerulaitis and his posse, which sometimes included Bjorn Borg, were entering the club. New York felt like the center of the tennis universe.In my 30s, I became a sportswriter and eventually a specialist who mostly covers tennis and the Olympics. Most people think I have one of the world’s greatest jobs. They’re not wrong. I typically spend about three months a year on the road, covering the major tennis tournaments and a handful of other sporting events. The two weeks when I get to sleep in my own bed in Manhattan and cover the U.S. Open are extra special.All the Grand Slams are great in their own ways, with many wonderful people, including new and longtime volunteers, who make them possible.I’m not sure any nation’s fans relish sport as much as the Aussies. The French Open has those beautiful red clay courts. Wimbledon has the tradition, but there is also the Royal Box, where princes and queens sit. But monarchies aren’t really my thing.Matthew Futterman at the U.S. Open, his annual pilgrimage.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe U.S. Open is how I think tennis should be: welcoming, with limited emphasis on staid decorum. The tournament is largely removed from its reputation as an elitist sport for the rich.We have Billie Jean King, Arthur Ashe, the Williams Sisters, Frances Tiafoe, Coco Gauff and many others to thank for that. It also helps that the country’s signature tennis event happens in a public park, rather than a private club.The stadiums aren’t hallowed grounds but utilitarian concrete boxes. Yes, there are some fancier, corporate enclaves and very pricey cocktails, but there is a lot about the space that signals inclusion; the complex is named for King, a woman who proudly identifies as lesbian, and its main stadium honors Ashe, a Black man and civil rights activist. Look around the grounds on a busy day and the place somewhat resembles the city that hosts it.Shortly after the tournament ends, you can reserve a time and play with your buddies on those same courts. I’ve hit plenty of balls there. I’ve watched one of my kids practice and play matches there. Try doing that at the All England Club.This year’s tournament is steaming toward the finish. So many of the big names have played deep into the tournament: Djokovic. Alcaraz. Gauff. I will be in the lower bowl, about 10 rows up from the court, for the men’s and women’s finals — two of my favorite days of the year — though the other 12 days of the tournament are sometimes even better.Shortly after the tournament ends, I will be shifting to The Athletic, the sports website that The Times owns, which will take over the traditional sports coverage for the company this month.I don’t know how many years I’ve attended the Open since 1978. Most would be a very safe bet, including in 2020, after New York had become a hot spot for the coronavirus, when I was one of a tiny handful of journalists permitted on site for the Open. It was like reporting from the surface of the moon.Thankfully, at The Athletic, I’ll continue to do what I do, including, of course, covering those other Slams and the U.S. Open every year, chasing the stories of agony and ecstasy that this beautiful and cruel sport always produces.Tennis, anyone? More

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      Thousands of Bylines to His Name, and One That’s Not

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      A sports reporter reflects on his 30-year career and the mistake that started it all.It was the day after Christmas in 1991, and as a young journalist, I received quite a gift: my first byline in The New York Times.There was one — and only one — downside: They misspelled my name.I use “they” because as I leave The Times’s Sports desk this month to become a full-time author, I still don’t know who got it wrong or how the mix-up happened. That is because I never asked for a correction. At 26, I had just fulfilled a childhood dream and was new in the freelance reporting rotation. Rightly or wrongly, I had no desire to make waves or do anything other than write more Times articles.Thirty-two years later, the mishap seems, above all, amusing. There was no changing the misspelling, anyway. There was no online version to fix; The Times did not launch its website until 1996. There was no way to update a page after it printed. Had The Times published a correction, it would not have changed the fact that my surname was spelled “Clary” instead of “Clarey” in the Dec. 26, 1991, newspaper.Mr. Clarey’s surname was misspelled “Clary” on his first New York Times article.The New York TimesThe error, I should note, did not stop my proud parents from sending copies of the article to a fair share of their Christmas card list. Though I remember feeling a certain sense of disappointment — akin to getting an indelible smudge on a pair of shoes, fresh out of the box — I also saw the incident as a reminder that nobody was perfect in my chosen profession. Certainly not me, and not even The Times.It will humble you, this business, and that is surely a good thing. Today, the scoop might be yours, but tomorrow, it will be your competitor’s. Stop hustling for long, and you will pay the price. Start relying on memory instead of double-checking the facts, and you will soon screw up.There were many nights when I was startled out of sleep by my subconscious, which had somehow registered that a fact was wrong in an article I had filed a few hours earlier; that Roger Federer actually won his first Wimbledon in 2003, not 2002. (Maybe I did not ask for a correction that December, but I’ve had my own share of corrections over the years.)Yet however flawed we, and journalism, may be, this churning, round-the-clock quest to get things right remains a worthy endeavor, especially when a powerful person does not want us to look into those things.It can also be, if you’ll allow me a moment of complete candor, a hell of a lot of fun.In 1991, I took a big chance: I left a solid staff job at The San Diego Union and moved to Paris to marry a Frenchwoman. I had very little in the bank, no matter the exchange rate, and spoke the kind of French that only an American mother could love.My hope was to write about international sports. There were a few what-have-we-done moments as I searched for freelance work, but it was above all a heady time. We were in love and starting anew; I was conjugating verbs and riding my bike around Paris, rolling by the Eiffel Tower and, in an age without quite so many rules, riding circles around the glass pyramid of the Louvre at midnight.It was a late night, too, when the phone in our apartment rang. I was surprised to find Bill Brink from The Times’s Sports desk on the other end of the line. He asked, in a hushed voice (I swear it was hushed), if I might be able to get to Germany on short notice to report an article on Paul and Isabelle Duchesnay, a brother-sister team of ice dancers poised to be one of the biggest draws of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Albertville, France.(Unbeknownst to me, Barry Lorge, my former boss in San Diego, had sent a letter about my move to Neil Amdur, then The Times’s Sports editor.)I don’t recall exactly what I said on the phone, but I do remember shouting “Yeeeeessssss!” in a thoroughly undignified fashion after I hung up.Off I went. I took the night train to Oberstdorf, Germany, reporter’s notebooks, ballpoint pens and a micro-cassette recorder in tow. There was not much sleep to be had in the sleeper car, but no matter. As with many a fulfilling journey, the anticipation was every bit as sweet as the trip itself.I spent a day with the Duchesnays, learning about their choreography and the Olympic pressure. I filed the article, and in a few days it was published, “By Christopher Clary” sitting under the headline.I have filed several thousand more articles over the past 30-plus years — under the right name. I have written about soccer from Cameroon, badminton from Indonesia, skiing from Switzerland, yachting from New Zealand, golf from Scotland and bullfighting from Spain. I have covered 14 Olympic Games, 10 Ryder Cups, nine world track and field championships, six soccer World Cups, five America’s Cups, one Masters and a whole lot of tennis tournaments. As I leave The Times, I am grateful not only for the passport stamps, but also for the people who have crossed my path in so many places, including The Times’s newsroom.As a parting gift, and in the true spirit of our daily quest to get things right, perhaps the time has finally come to correct that first byline. More

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      Sugar Rodgers Is Rewriting Her Life Story Through the W.N.B.A.

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      Rodgers used basketball, and later her writing skills, to forge a brighter path after a painful childhood. The former All-Star is now an assistant coach for the Las Vegas Aces.For much of Sugar Rodgers’ life, her job was survival: staying alive, healthy and out of jail in her Suffolk, Va., neighborhood, where the pop of bullets nearby forced her inside and away from the basketball hoop she loved.When many eighth graders were buckling down on schoolwork and extracurricular activities, or skipping school to hang out with friends, Rodgers was truant for other reasons: to babysit her nephew while his mother was at work, or to feed and bathe her bedridden mother, who was dying of lupus.“‘What goes on in this house stays in this house,’ ” Rodgers said her mother told her. “So, I couldn’t reach out and ask people for help and do certain things because that always stemmed in the back of my mind.”Still, Rodgers said, she finished eighth grade on time by doing extra assignments, and stayed on track academically throughout high school. She was recruited to play basketball at Georgetown, and graduated as the career scoring leader. The Minnesota Lynx selected her in the second round of the 2013 W.N.B.A. draft, and she helped them win a championship that year.She played the next five seasons with the Liberty, where she became an All-Star and won the Sixth Woman of the Year Award in 2017. Now, after two seasons playing with the Las Vegas Aces, Rodgers has matriculated into the coaching ranks as an assistant for the team.Rodgers ended her time at Georgetown as the school’s career scoring leader.Jessica Hill/Associated Press“I’m just going to bring whatever it is that they need me to do,” Rodgers said. “Just like as a player — whatever they needed me to do, I did. Whatever sacrifices they needed me to make, I did those, for the betterment of the team. And I’m willing to do that as a coach as well.”A recent graduate of Georgetown’s masters’ program in sports industry management and the author of “They Better Call Me Sugar,” a young adult memoir about her childhood, Rodgers, 31, spoke to The New York Times about her childhood, the sanctity of writing and the perspective she brings to the sideline.This interview and has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Your parents forced you to stay back in second grade. How did that impact your education journey?My mom said, like, “You’ll be fine. This is where you belong because you’re not learning at the pace that they are pushing at.”As a kid, you don’t look at it that way. You just look at it, like, “All my friends are going to be in the next grade and I’m going to get picked on because I was left behind.” And in my mind, like, it’s a reminder that I have failed, and because of that failure, I just have been, like: “I can’t fail again. I can’t fail again.”I’ve always tried to put myself in a position to be successful, so using basketball as a tool to get out of my situation, that’s what I’ve done.How did you find time while playing in the W.N.B.A. to pursue a master’s degree at Georgetown?When I wasn’t in the gym working on my game, I was at home working on my degree. It was a little bit of a struggle, especially because I started in 2019 during the playoffs. Can you imagine? I’m just starting school, and we’re in the playoffs, and just having to find that balance in between the two. I really wanted to go back to school, so I know it’s something I really wanted to accomplish and I just made time. I just made it work, whether it was some nights I stayed up a little bit later, or I got up a little bit earlier.Do you feel a shift is happening to include more women and women of color in W.N.B.A. head coaching and front office roles? And how did you know you were ready to move from center court to the sidelines?For me, I do see it changing. I do see more African American women are, you know, coming on the sidelines and taking it, especially former players. I also think for me, I just woke up and didn’t want to work out anymore. So, I just knew mentally, spiritually and physically it was time for me to look into something else.I actually kind of wanted to retire like two years ago.“It’s some things that I can say to players because I’ve actually been through it,” Rodgers said of coaching.Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesWhat made you postpone your retirement and go to Las Vegas and play for your old coach Bill Laimbeer again?Once the Liberty decided to trade me, I was like, at this point, a little exhausted with basketball and how long I had been playing. Mentally, it was having an impact on me and I wanted to just be able to take a break from basketball.Bill and them, they traded for me. So, I was like, yeah, I’ll come out. They’d be a great organization.It seems that the Liberty’s move in 2017 from Madison Square Garden to the Westchester County Center in White Plains was a low point for the franchise. Would you agree?It was just, like, ‘Oh man, oh man.’ Like, a lot of people is not going to commute that far. You know, the die-hard fans are going to come, but we had a great fan base here in the city. I think that was kind of the devastating part of it, not being able to play in front of our fans and keep them coming back to the games and excited about the seasons.Fast-forward to 2021, and the Liberty is a very different franchise, with a new owner in Joseph Tsai, a new arena in Brooklyn’s Barclays and a hot start to the season. To what do you attribute this massive turnaround?I think they have a great owner. I think it started there when they were like, OK, we’re going to go play in the Barclays, and we’re going to treat you like A-1 class athletes. And that put them in a position to be able to get players to come play in New York.Throughout “They Better Call Me Sugar,” you write about your mother wanting you to put golf first and basketball second, or not at all. As an adult looking back, do you have an understanding of why she held this view?I just know golf was her thing, and maybe because back when she played basketball, there wasn’t opportunities for women. Because my mom was a basketball player, but way back in the day, it wasn’t opportunities like how it was for men. But now, looking at it, the W.N.B.A. is 25 years old. And just to be a part of that, it shows the W.N.B.A., can grow, the salaries can get there. It just takes one step at a time.How did you begin writing about your childhood, and has writing been a source of healing for you?When I was at Georgetown, I had a coach who suggested that I go to therapy and I’m just like, I’m not going to therapy. It’s for white people. But I was just ignorant to the fact because therapy, it’s taboo in the African American community.I really didn’t like talking, and I went to therapy and I wouldn’t talk and I remember [the therapist] was like, “Well, just write it down.” And I would just write these stories and he would read them when I came in, because I didn’t like to talk. And, you know, I was like, man, these stories could become a book. It can help somebody in a situation that’s like mine or worse than mine.Writing is therapeutic for me.What do you feel like you bring that’s unique to coaching?I just bring life experience in itself. There’s some things that you can’t teach that I just bring naturally. It’s some things that I can say to players because I’ve actually been through it.You get a lot of coaches who players cannot relate to, and I think sometimes you need that balance on the coaching staff. But if you have players who cannot relate, those players don’t fit because they feel like nobody understands them. And I just feel like I bring a lot. More