The U.S. Open tennis championship is one of New York’s premier cultural events, attracting upscale crowds despite the controlled chaos of spectators at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, Queens. But this year, Norwegian pro Casper Ruud has complained about the pervasive and decidedly down-market smell of marijuana: “For me, this is the worst thing about New York. The smell is everywhere, even here on the courts . . . we have to accept it, but it’s not my favorite smell. It’s quite annoying to be playing, tired, and just meters away, someone is smoking marijuana.”
Ruud is not the first to raise the issue. Several players, including Nick Kyrgios, Maria Sakkari, and Alexandr Zverev have complained about the ubiquitous weed smell. Zverev compared Court 17 in Flushing to “Snoop Dogg’s living room.” And tennis legend Novak Djokovic has added, “You can smell it everywhere, from practice to matches . . . I’m not a fan of that smell, actually that stench.”
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Ever since the West Side Tennis Club of Forest Hills prevailed over the forces of Newport, Rhode Island, in a contentious fight in 1915 to bring the Open Championship to New York, the event has attracted a well-heeled audience of celebrities and professionals from the country club set, as well as a cross section of enthusiasts from the general public. Former mayor David Dinkins was a USTA board member who famously rerouted flights out of La Guardia Airport to avoid disrupting the matches. Alcohol is served at the Tennis Center, while smoking and vaping are barred, though staff smell the smoke just as the players do and are uncertain how to handle it. (“What do I do?” one asked. “I was not given direction.”)
Tennis functions in spite of the proximity of fans to the playing surface. The arrangement works partly because spectators are generally well behaved and even respond to verbal rebukes from umpires or a stern “quiet, please” over the intercom in the United States and Britian or “silence, s’il vous plait” in Paris. The noise and sometimes-raucous New York crowds are special challenges of this major tournament for players, but marijuana smoke is another matter.
New York City residents are well aware of the constant aroma of pot throughout the city. Since the drug was legalized for recreational use in 2021, users have begun openly smoking in public, in ways that most cigarette smokers were conditioned out of years ago, when smoking in public places was banned. Though the move met some initial opposition, it proved successful largely because people complained about being forced to consume air polluted by others. Plus, everyone soon noticed that smoke-free environments are more pleasant.
Unlike nicotine smokers, who usually concede that their habit may be unpleasant to others, pot smokers react with indignation to any suggestion that they keep theirs to themselves. Popular culture invariably treats pot smoking as amusing and harmless to everyone, even the users. That’s not the reality on the ground. Disorder compounds, and it’s no coincidence that notorious areas of civic breakdown like San Francisco’s Tenderloin District or Los Angeles’s Skid Row sit in a haze of marijuana smoke, an essential ingredient in the miasma of despair and hopelessness of these places. Yet the smell is not confined to such areas: the decriminalization and normalization of public consumption of cannabis means that one encounters its odor everywhere from suburban grocery store parking lots to leafy bedroom communities.
In old photos of Madison Square Garden or the Village Vanguard, the layer of smoke from cigarettes and cigars hovers about musicians playing precision wind instruments or boxers gasping for oxygen in the ring. It makes for great atmospheric imagery, but the modern viewer marvels at how such a thing was ever permitted. Cigarette smoking is still legal today, of course. You just don’t smell it everywhere.
In arguing to legalize marijuana consumption, pot smokers asked for the right to be left alone to enjoy the drug in peace. Yet they seem not to have grasped their obligation to those with whom they share public air. We’re all subjected to their habit, whether we like it or not—even if we’re trying to return a 75 mph forehand.
Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images