Lucy, Kate, their mom, Judy and I met at the ticket window outside the tennis grounds around 9:45 am. After collecting our tickets, we gathered around and took some pictures with Andy’s birthday book (pictures to be uploaded soon). As we were doing that, a representative from WFAN radio interviewed Lucy and myself about the security and food prices at the Open. Once that was done, we headed towards the line to get into the tennis grounds.

Due to strict rules, Kate and Judy had to go check Kate’s backpack into a white storage tent. It was a bit silly but rules are rules! While Lucy and I waited for them to arrive, we stood near Grandstand stadium checking out the order of play for the day and also got a bit wet in the drizzle. Kate and Judy arrived soon and off we went towards our first day adventures.

Right away we called Scot Hirschfield, one of Andy’s agents so we could hand over the birthday messages from ar.com to him. The first interesting match on the schedule was at Louis Armstrong stadium between Carlos Moya of Spain and Brian Baker of the US. We only stayed for the first set, which Brian won in a tiebreak because the heat was unbearable. We headed out to the practice courts and saw Lleyton Hewitt, Todd Martin, Daniela Huntukova, Jennifer Capriati and Tommy Haas hit for a while. As I struggled to get a good Tommy Haas picture, Scot called and told us he was at the tennis center. We met him and handed the birthday book to him, which he later gave to Andy on behalf of the entire ar.com family.

Since we were all hungry, we decided to take a lunch break and donated some serious cash to the US Open food court. While eating we enjoyed some tennis action on the big screen TVs and saw Greg Rusedski lose a tough 5-set match. We then went over to court 17 to cheer a local boy for my Brit buddies, Alex Bogdanovic. At first we were the only ones cheering out loud but soon the crowd joined in and the whole place was buzzing. Although he lost a 5-set heartbreaker to Alex Calatrava, Bogdanovic fought until the end and gave us something good to cheer for.

With the main match we wanted to watch out of the way, we headed over to the practice courts one more time and almost got plowed down by Rafael Nadal. Who knows what he was running toward but he sure was in some kind of hurry. At the practice courts we saw John McEnroe and Robby Ginepri hit for a while and then headed out to court 6 to watch another exciting finish between Igor Andreev and Fernando Verdasco. There we also met up with Scot again, and said hello to Ken Myerson, another one of Andy’s agents. He was very sweet and his friend, Ben showed us an article about ar.com in the latest edition of Tennis Week. Mikhail Youzhny was standing right next to me for 10 minutes while I had no clue and by the time I mustered up the courage to ask him for a picture, he was gone. Ah, better luck next time. We also saw Rafael Nadal again and Kate asked him for a picture in some very good Spanish!

It had been a long day in the horrible, burning sun and we needed another break. We got some refreshments from the food court and enjoyed some quiet-time catching up. After that, I headed home while the rest of the gang went into Ashe stadium to see the night matches. It was a pretty good overall and now we’re looking forward to seeing Andy play tonight.

Go Andy!

You can contact Swar at swar@andyroddick.com