A parting shot
Believe it or not, old National Tennis Centre will be missed
By STEVE SIMMONS -- Toronto Sun
You don't have a farewell party for a dump and expect the creme de la creme to be your featured guests.
In a way, that's what has happened this week at Canadian Open, no matter what they're calling it these days.
This is the short goodbye, the last of the Opens at this facility deemed inadequate by almost anyone you ask. This is good-riddance week at the National Tennis Centre, the mistake without a lake, this tin can of a stadium that long ago outlived its usefulness.
Or so the story goes.
Everyone in the tiny world that is tennis is excited about the shiny new Rexall Centre. Just ask them. They have brochures, DVDs and all kinds of debt. It is supposed to save tennis and the world, in no particular order, and take a sport already set up for the elite and make it more elite.
But allow me for a moment to get sentimental. This may have been a dump but it was our dump.
It was the place I first learned and experienced the magnificence that big-time tennis can be. The fact the seats didn't have backs of them didn't seem to matter. That was Bjorn Borg we were watching and he was playing John McEnroe on centre court and just a few days earlier he played a Toronto kid named Steve Rogul on the very same court.
Imagine, a kid you grew up with was playing Bjorn Borg and he was hanging in there?
That was in the summer of 1979. The week I discovered that television did no justice to tennis, and that the game up close was probably the best-kept secret in Toronto sports.
It has remained something of a secret all these years later. The court is a different colour. The grounds have been expanded. Not all of the seats make you run for the chiropractor.
The ice cream bars are still amazing. And the same people, it seems, are here every year: If they aren't the same, they sure look the same and dress the same.
This was the place where one week a year the best in the world arrived. Last summer, it was bringing the family to see Pete Sampras, certainly for the last time. In other years, it may have been Ivan Lendl, who like Borg and McEnroe and Boris Becker, all won tournaments here. Andre Agassi won twice.
When you get a chance to view history, the comfort of your seat doesn't necessarily matter.
At this stadium not good enough, Jennifer Capriati wore a Bart Simpson T-shirt on the court at age 15 and was a champion that same week. Who among the greats didn't win here? Chris Evert did and Tracy Austin and Martina Navratilova and Martina Hingis. They all did.
This is the place where Serena Williams stopped being the other Williams sister. And the place where Monica Seles first played and won after the shocking stabbing that changed her life and career. She won the Canadian Open that emotional year, came back two years later and won again.
A dump, in all its simplicity, can still have value.
Especially at this time in Toronto's strange sporting history. There are the Argos, dying to play in a place this cosy and this intimate, crushed by the stark emptiness of the unsold seats at the SkyDome. And there are the Blue Jays, wishing they had another place to call home. Smaller seems better in Toronto sports right now.
Not here though. You can buy your tickets for the new stadium now and they come with valet parking and a VIP lounge pass and identification signage, whatever that may be. And yes, at a price.
Yesterday, I sat in the very last row, far as you can be from centre court, and it doesn't seem all that far from the action. You can almost reach out and touch the players from there. You can hear them grunt and argue calls from the last row. The new stadium will be full of corporate boxes and more toys for those who want to pay to play.
It just won't feel like this.
It won't feel like home.
