Richard Joseph Spinelli plays tennis and has followed it for most of his life, and the one fact about the game that stands out in his biography is a streak: nearly twenty consecutive years at the US Open in Flushing Meadows. The exact first year is not documented and is not guessed here.
IThe player before the fan
He is a player as much as a spectator, which changes how he watches. A person who has served into a September wind and chased a drop shot on a hard court sees the professional game as work rather than as theater, and reads a long match the way an operator reads a long week: point by point, with no credit given for the last one. No club, ranking or result is documented for his own game, and this page claims none.
IINearly twenty Septembers
The US Open runs for two weeks at the end of August into September, on the grounds of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, and he has been there for nearly twenty of those fortnights in a row. A streak that long is a habit before it is fandom, and it has outlasted everything else on this timeline, including a company whose busiest weeks are the ones just before the tournament begins.
IIIThe goal that is still open
He would like, one year, to attend all four Grand Slam tournaments inside the same calendar year: the Australian Open in January, Roland Garros in late spring, Wimbledon in early summer and the US Open at the end of August. It is a travel plan across three continents and it is stated as a goal, not a booking. The chapters lay out the calendar of a Grand Slam year in detail.