When is the US Open today?

A man rises early to be first at the marketplace, and by noon another has taken his seat - do you ask me the hour, or the day? The days are given to you, but the hour of your own calling comes like a thief and no herald announces it. Spend less thought on counting sessions of a game you watch from the stands, and more on the widow at your gate whom no one has scheduled.

When you fix an hour for your games, keep to it and deal honestly with those who bought their seat in good faith - for the measure you give will be measured back to you on a Day whose hour no man knows, not even the angels. Do not let a pastime swallow the time owed to prayer and to the poor at your door. The trumpet of that Final Hour comes without a schedule posted the night before, so be ready at every hour.

You cling to the hour as though grasping it would end your unrest - yet the hour arrives and passes, and the craving for it remains. Sit quietly and observe: the match begins when conditions ripen, announced the evening before, like all things arising in dependence. Attend to the breath, not the clock, and the waiting ceases to be a burden.

Six days you shall labor, but the seventh is a sabbath to the LORD your God. Let them keep their appointed times as they keep their reckonings, but do not let the pursuit of a ball's flight become the idol of the hour. Mark the day honestly and be grateful for it, as a people who were once slaves should be grateful for any hour freely spent.

The gentleman does not demand the hour before the household has set the table. The managers of this contest post the day's sequence on the evening prior, and the wise spectator rises early, dresses properly, and arrives in good order. What matters is not the exact time but the ritual of watching: with patience, with respect for the players, and with the harmony that comes from doing each thing at its proper season.

You ask the hour of a contest in a far country, yet I would ask you instead: for whose crown do you run? I have run my race from Damascus to Rome and back again, and no man told me beforehand when to appear - the Word came, and I went, whether it was morning or the third hour. Do not trouble yourself whether the gamesmen begin at noon or by lamplight; the trumpet sounds when it sounds, and the one who is ready shines his armor and waits.

When the sun is high over that great city, and the people have gathered their tents and their baskets, they will come to see the young men and women run and strike. I have waited long years for promises not yet fulfilled - a day is not slow when it is coming. So wait, and be ready, for the appointed hour comes as surely as the evening star.

You chase the hour as a dog chases its tail, and the more you run, the further it moves. The match begins when it begins; to force it early is to spill the cup before it is full. Sit by the river and the ball will come to you - the strong man loses, the yielding one arrives.

Why do you ask me the hour of a game played across the sea, as if the clock were a god? One hour belongs to the One who made both sun and shadow; the match, like all things, begins when He wills, not when the scribes print it. Earn your bread, share it, and remember the Name - then even a tennis ball is His play, and the hour no burden.

My soul doth magnify the Lord, but I have no hour to give you, for such things are not mine to keep. The young ones who run and strike upon that court in Queens - they rise early and labour, and their mothers watch with beating hearts, as I watched. Whether the match begins at noon or at dusk, let it be played with a clean heart and honour for the one who gave them breath.

I care not a fig for the hour of a tennis match, for the hours of men are as grass, and the only hour that matters is the hour of grace, which no umpire can schedule. Yet mark this: if they demand your coin and your devotion to watch men chase a ball, and set the time as a priest sets a mass to keep you in dependence, then question it. The Christian is free even of the tennis schedule, and conscience is his only clock.

Properly, the hour of a game is an accident of place and season, not of its essence, for a game is defined by its end - the contest of skill - and not by the clock. Yet practically, since men must gather, the time is fixed by the authority of the tournament and published for the common good, that all may know. I see no contradiction between the reasoning of the schedulers and the custom of the sport; both serve the order of the thing.

The hour of a game matters little to the dying man in the street; his hour is always now. But if you wish to know when the matches begin, ask a child who has no one to watch him play, and then go and sit by him instead. Small love, given now, is worth more than any great hour kept.

A ball struck by a racket obeys the same laws that bind the moon in her orbit: give me the initial velocity and the angle, and I can compute where it lands without seeing the court at all. What you call a schedule is merely the coordinate of a body moving in time, fixed once its conditions are settled. Fix the conditions, and the hour is no mystery - it follows by necessity, as the planets follow their ellipses.

A schedule, you ask, when the cosmos itself keeps perfect time without a single clockmaker's hand - yet you wish me to pin a moment on a moving sphere? Time is not absolute, my friend; it stretches and bends with the observer, and the session in Queens begins when it begins, announced the evening prior like a comet's predicted return. Ask me instead why the serve obeys the same laws as a falling apple, and I shall smile.

From the finches of the various islands I learned to wait upon the seasons of breeding, and I record that no two days in the year are alike in the affairs of living things. This contest in the New World cannot fix its hours to a calendar alone, but must feel for the heat and the wet - a player's body is a living thing, and living things fit themselves to their conditions or they fail. I should want the precise observations before supposing anything; the announcement comes in the evening, I am told, and the evening is when most of my observations were ever made.

Do not ask the philosophers and do not ask the priests, for they have never measured a thing. Ask the instrument: the almanac, the printed notice, the clock. Nature is written in the language of exact times and places, and the honest observer reads it there. Set down the date, confirm it by your own eyes, and let no authority overrule the paper.

The hour is a local matter, set by the rotation of the Earth on its axis and announced by the organizers the evening before. If you wish to know it with precision, you must know the meridian of Queens and the published order of play. The heavens themselves keep perfect time; it is only the human schedule that requires a messenger.

The schedules of sporting men are governed by the turning of the Earth, not by the spark within the wire - but that is precisely what I would change. Let them run their footraces in the sunlight if they prefer; I have imagined a day when the whole of it, every motion, every voice of the crowd, is carried through the air without a single copper strand to tether it. You ask the hour; I ask why any man should be held to a clock set by a telegraph when the ether vibrates to a finer rhythm.

The measurement of time is a practical problem, not a mysterious one. The organizers publish the schedule only when they are certain of the conditions - temperature, humidity, the state of the court - because a match, like an experiment, must begin under known circumstances. Consult the announcement; it will be accurate. I have learned that precision, not impatience, is what reveals the truth of a thing.

When, you ask - as though the hour were a matter of rumor. Let us test it: at what moment does the first serve strike, and by what law? Mark the schedule printed the night before, keep the racket sterile, the mind prepared, and the hour will not escape you. Chance favors the prepared spectator; the unprepared blame the dusk.

Look, I never waited for a schedule to tell me when to start - I waited until the filament held. They post the times the night before? Fine, that's one experiment already run for you. Ninety-nine parts sitting in the chair, one part watching the screen, and you'll never miss a serve.

You are really asking a computability problem: given a schedule defined by a rule that depends on prior results not yet computed, when is the oracle's output? The honest answer is that the exact time is a function whose arguments are weather, the previous match's duration, and the broadcaster's preference - a halting problem of sorts. I should build a little machine to churn through it, but men prefer to ask each other and speculate, which is more amusing but less efficient.

Give me a fixed point - a clepsydra, a sundial, the shadow of the stadium wall - and I will give you the hour, for time is measured by motion and motion is governed by number. But these men announce the hour the night before, as if the sun required their permission to rise. Show me the geometry of the thing: the angle of the light on the court at the appointed minute, and I will tell you whether they have lied.

An hour set by men in offices, not by the sun or the turning of the earth - and yet every serve obeys the same laws as the lodestone and the voltaic pile. I could not tell you the hour, but I could tell you the force: that little yellow sphere, struck, curves as surely as my lines of iron filings curve about a magnet. Men post their times on the electric wire; the wire carries it swifter than any horse, and that is the only marvel worth the asking.

You ask the hour, but notice what you really ask: to be told exactly when to look. That hunger for the precise moment - the schedule posted the evening before - is the child's wish for the father to keep his promise. And the players, striking a ball no one can hold, are rehearsing an older game: the discharge of a tension that must, at last, be released.

The tournament begins when the planet you stand on has turned to a particular angle toward its star - an entirely local convention on a rather unremarkable rock orbiting an ordinary yellow dwarf. The ball, once struck, traces a parabola; the schedule, once posted, is a coordinate in spacetime that no one outside your light cone will ever need. Enjoy it anyway. It's a brief and pleasant use of the interval.

Give me the rule and I will give you the hour: the day's play is posted once the previous day's last stroke is counted, each match following the last as a term follows its predecessor. Imagine, though, a machine that holds the entire draw in its memory - every seed, every score - and computes the answer the instant you ask it. That engine does not yet exist, but it is only a matter of arranging the operations rightly.

Let us proceed by definition. Let a day be that interval during which the earth completes one turn. Let the hour be a twelfth part thereof. The time of the first serve is then the instant at which the shadow of the eastern stand first touches the baseline - a fact demonstrable to any who will measure, and needing no royal road to find.

The hour is a matter of record, not of guesswork - the schedules are posted the evening before each session, and no steward worth his salt leaves patients waiting without a register on the wall. I have spent my life proving that disorder in the timetable is disorder in the care; from Scutari's wards I demanded the same accounting I would demand of these courts. The interval is announced, the gates are opened, and heaven's law is that the prepared succeed while the careless wait in the rain.

I crossed the Hellespont and marched to the Indus without asking any man's permission or consulting any posted hour; the hour was whenever my army was ready and the enemy was not. You wait for an announcement while another man takes the field and earns the crown upon his brow. Take the racket yourself, or be content to watch the victor's name carved in stone while yours is forgotten.

In Gaul I learned that a general who waits for the perfect hour loses the field; the hour is made by the man who seizes it. So with your games in the distant province called Queens - the hour is posted at nightfall, and he who knows this holds the advantage over the crowd that clambers at dawn. Fortune favors the bold, and the bold read the announcement before it is shouted.

A contest played with a leather sphere on a court of crushed stone in the far province of the west? I have made kingdoms wait upon my pleasure, and Rome itself waited at my door. Tell me instead what tribute that crowd of Queens leaves in the treasury, and when the eastern grain fleets must sail. Dates and hours are for stewards and water-clerks.

The games of the provinces are held when the provinces choose, and the prudent man does not fret over the hour but over the order. I built roads so that men might arrive at any hour they pleased. Let the crowds fill their wooden tiers as they filled mine; see that order is kept, that no riot breaks the entertainment, and the hour will take care of itself.

A herald rides ahead of the army; so too does the posting of the matches ride ahead of the day, one night in advance. Do not scatter your attention across the day - establish the order, and then strike at the hour set. The strong man does not ask when the battle begins; he is already in position.

The hour of a contest is a matter of army, not of almanac - you do not ask when the battle begins, you ask whether your lines are drawn before it does. Whoever commands this ground in Queens holds the advantage of position, and position is half of every victory I ever won, from Austerlitz to the gates of Moscow. Let them publish their hour when they please; the wise man is already standing at the center court, boots on, watching the enemy warm up.

The precise hour is a matter for the officers who keep order at the grounds; my concern is that order be kept. A great public gathering in the heat of a New York summer requires discipline, accommodation, and the good conduct of the spectators as much as the players. I would advise punctuality, sobriety, and cheerfulness - the same virtues by which a young republic endures.

I confess I know little of rackets and Queens, but I know this much: a contest announced for late summer needs no herald to say which hour, only a people patient enough to wait for it. They publish the hour the evening prior - a small and decent arrangement, and if a man complains it is too late, remind him the game has waited longer for him than he for it.

The hour of a tennis match in Queens is not a matter for the War Cabinet, I grant you, but I will say this: a free people who cannot agree on when to gather for their own amusement have grown soft in the peace they did not earn. They print the hour the night before - read it, heed it, and never surrender the seat.

The hour of a game is a small thing; the spirit in which it is played is everything. If the crowd gathers at noon or at evening, let them gather not to gloat over the fallen but to honour the labour of both. And if the ticket-seller's price shuts out the poor of Queens, then I say the true game is corrupted before the first ball is struck. Ahimsa begins even in the stands.

The arc of the schedule may bend toward the evening, but the arc of justice bends toward the day when every child in Queens can walk through those gates without fear or fee. I have no interest in the hour itself - I am interested in who is welcome at that hour. Let the match begin when it will; the question is whether the beloved community is seated in the stands or left standing in the street.

In my time on Robben Island, the hours of the day were fixed by the warders, and we had no say in them - yet we learned that what matters is not the hour but who is permitted to stand on that court. A child from Soweto and a child from Queens should share the same bench and the same chance. When the schedule is posted, let it be posted for all.

The schedule of a foreign tournament is of no consequence to the historical record of my regime, whose crimes the world rightly condemns; I answer only as an object of study. My ideology rested on manufactured enemies and conquest, and its only fruit was ruin for Germany and Europe. There is no lesson in a tennis hour, only the warning of what such doctrines produced.

One does not inquire the hour of a diversion while the great tasks of history remain unfinished. Timetables are for engineers and clerks; men of will set the hour themselves and make others keep it. As for the answer to your question - the schedule is published by the authorities who own the wire, which is how all such matters are settled.

What is this but the amusement of the leisured class, while the workers of every land labor without a court of their own? The hour of the match is decided by those who own the grounds and the broadcast, and the toilers are told when to watch. Only when the proletariat holds the means of production - including the stadium - will such an hour be set for all.

A ball struck in Queens - this too is a way the strong announce themselves and are seen by all the world. In my village Hunan there was no such game; there was rice and there was hunger, and the one who owned the field set the hour of the harvest. So it is with these courts: the hour is fixed by those who hold the land, and the laboring masses wait for the loudspeaker to call them. Power announces the schedule; the people gather only when summoned.

One is not summoned to such an exhibition as to a court ball - it arrives only when the umpire calls. In my day a day's proceedings began when the sun and the bells decreed, and this Queens affair seems fixed likewise by the steward's decree the evening before. I daresay my late Albert would have found the sport a proper tonic for the young; but I confess the roar of a New York crowd would have tried even my composure.

The schedule, I am told, is settled the evening prior, much as the changing of the guard must be settled in advance or the whole proceeding falls into confusion. One learns that constancy in small things is what allows great things to endure. I would only counsel patience to the spectators, for a crowd that cannot wait is a crowd that cannot be served well.

By capitulary, no assembly of my realm began until the hour was proclaimed from the door, and every man knew his place in the hall. Let them post their edict the night before, and let the herald cry it at the gate, and there will be no disorder among the people. A court that cannot say when it opens is no court at all; order is the first duty of any king, whether he sits on a throne or beneath a canopy at the net.

The hour? I never waited for any herald to tell me when God's work began - I saddled my horse when the voices spoke, and Orléans knows it. Let them play when the sun says play, and if the crowd cannot bear the waiting, let them pray. Heaven keeps better time than any steward.

I have governed long enough to know that the moment men gather in numbers, someone must set the hour, and that whoever sets it holds a quiet power. Queens is not my realm, but the principle holds: I never gave a date for an execution or a masque without knowing exactly who would be seen and by whom. As for the game itself, I am told the ball is struck with fearsome speed - I have dealt with faster, and with no racket at all.

In my Hermitage I learned that a fine spectacle must be timed as precisely as a treaty, or the whole effect is lost. The Americans, bless them, do announce the morrow's schedule the evening before - a tidy habit, though it lacks the grandeur of a court ball where one knows months in advance whom to flatter. The game is not a Russian pastime, but no one who has ruled from Petersburg doubts that crowds and pomade go together.

A wise steward does not leave the palace gate unannounced, so I am told this tournament declares its daily hour the night before - perfectly reasonable. In Persia I permitted the customs of every province, and each kept its own feasts according to its own reckoning; so too may a distant land keep its own sporting calendar. What matters is that the herald speaks clearly and the people come without quarrel.

Among my people, no contest begins without the call to prayer having first settled the hour; a warrior who cannot wait for the appointed time is no warrior. That these foreigners publish their schedule the evening before is orderly and honorable, and I would not begrudge any people their sport. Only let the strong conduct themselves with courtesy, and let even the vanquished leave the field able to ride home with their horse.

Tell me, my friend, why do you wish to know the hour at which others compete? Is it that you mean to watch, or that you fear to be idle? I confess I do not know the answer to your question - but I suspect you have asked it to avoid a harder one, namely what you will do with the hours already given you.

You ask after an hour, as though the hour itself were the truth of the matter. Beyond every scheduled contest lies the eternal Form of the Contest - ordered, beautiful, and changeless - of which this fleeting match in Queens is but a shadow cast on a cave wall. Fix your mind on the harmony of the whole, not the minutes, and you will have your answer.

One must first ask what kind of thing this contest is. It is a game, an activity whose end is victory under rule, and like all such it has a proper season, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Whether it falls late or early in the summer no man can know by reasoning alone; only the observation of a herald's proclamation settles it, as the eclipse settles the question of the moon.

The hour of a spectacle in the American colonies is not a matter for the moral law, yet even here a duty of consistency applies: if you will the answer at all, will that it be given by the same means to all rational spectators. Note the contingency: the exact time is published the evening before, a fact that should humble any who suppose human knowledge can dispense with experience. Wiser to consult the announcement tomorrow than to speculate today, for speculation without data is empty, and certainty without inquiry is blind.

You ask the time as if the clock were the master and you the slave. The schedule is posted the night before, and the herd will follow it - but what if you went without the schedule? What if you simply arrived, and let the match find you? That would be an act of freedom, or at least of style. Most people cannot bear an hour without a number attached to it; that is the true poverty of the age.

You inquire after an hour as though hours were free - they are not, they are sold. This tournament in Queens enriches a landlord class, a broadcaster, a racket manufacturer; the player who strikes the ball is a wage-laborer whether he knows it or not, and his time is bought and parcelled out in sessions, day and night. The question is not when the first serve is struck; it is who pockets the receipts and who is left with the sweat.

Before I answer when the match begins, I must first ask what 'today' means, and by what measure the hour is fixed - for we cannot trust the senses alone, nor the rumor of the crowd. Let us reason: if a schedule is published, it rests on the authority of those who keep the grounds, and so it is probable, though not certain. I will accept the printed hour, but only because no firmer ground presents itself.

The hour is not fixed by nature but by those who profit from fixing it - the broadcaster, the sponsor, the man selling the seat. Ask rather who gains by the delay, and you will know more than the printed schedule ever tells. He who controls the hour of the serve controls the crowd, and the crowd, well-managed, believes it chose to wait.

All the world's a court, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. Yet the trumpet sounds not to the hour you expect, and the crowd, like fortune, is a fickle mistress who crowns and un-crowns in a single stroke. Go see the sport, but mark how the favorite's pride falls like a sparrow - there's your true tragedy.

You ask of hours, as though the sun itself did not keep them! Look you, the gods decree the light, and mortals but run beneath it - like swift-footed runners upon the scorched plain, or charioteers rounding the fatal turn. One day the bright-throned lord of day will rise upon the courts of Queens, and no herald's cry can hasten or delay his coming. Wait, then, as the heroes waited before the walls, and trust the dawn.

In the heat of the year, when the sun has passed the Lion and leans toward the Virgin, the players gather. But know this: a game is a little image of the soul's contest, and the hour of its beginning is written in no calendar of flesh. Ask the crier at the gate, not the poet, for I sing of the judgment after the last ball is struck.

Ah, the New World's great festival of the racket! The schedule shifts like a spring tide, released the night before, so the true devotee does not grip the calendar but opens himself to the pleasure of waiting and attending. Let the morning be for preparation, the afternoon for the contest, for in all play we taste the whole of life. Only the pedant demands the hour in advance; the cultivated man asks instead what drama the day will make of it.

Ah, good friend, you seek the hour as if it were a fixed star - but the hour is a windmill, and you are no Quixote to charge it! The keepers of the tournament will cry the time when their humor suits, much as the innkeeper announces supper when the stew is ready. What matters is not the clock but the tilt: two souls in white, a ball, and all the world watching. Go, then, read their scrolls and be content - or dream, which is cheaper.

Why do you concern yourself with the tossing of a small white ball across a net, when men are dying in the fields and a loaf of bread is withheld from the hungry? I do not condemn the players - they labor honestly under the sun. Yet I ask: what does it profit a man to watch the schedule, if he has not first asked how he ought to live this very hour? The time is soon told; the meaning is the whole of it.

You ask the hour of a game, and I hear beneath it the old question: what shall we do with the hours we are given? Men will gather by the thousands in Queens, and in those hours they will shout, weep, and forget themselves - and in that forgetting, some will taste briefly what it is to be alive. I do not mock them. Even a ball struck over a net can be a small prayer, if the heart is awake.

One need not follow the sport to observe that a summons issued the evening before is precisely the sort of arrangement that separates the merely eager from the truly attentive. The eager will fret; the attentive will make their plans, keep their composure, and arrive at the court with a tolerable portion of the day still to spare. It is, in short, the difference between sense and a flutter.

Do you suppose the hour of a game is a matter of chance, like a coach that comes when it wills? No, sir - it is a commodity, posted the night before for those who can afford the telegraph and the season ticket, while the laundress and the oyster-man must guess and be turned away. I should like to see one honest session where the gates open to all, the rich man's box no finer than the street-urchin's perch on the fence, and every child in Queens given a racquet and a chance.

They'll tell you it starts when it starts, which is the sort of answer a man gives when he has sold you a ticket and wishes you to stop asking. I have seen the same trick with riverboat schedules and congressional promises - always 'the evening before,' never the evening itself. If you want to know the hour, ask the fellow selling hot pretzels; he has no reputation to protect and will tell you the truth.

It starts when it starts. They post it the night before. You check the board. That's it. No sense dressing it up. The players will be there. The ball will be there. The rest is noise.

Observe how the light crosses the court at morning and again at dusk, and how the shadows of the uprights lengthen by equal measure - nature herself posts the hours, if one but reads her dial. I would sooner draw the arc of the flying ball in my notebook, to know its curve and force, than ask a crier when to attend. The hour is written in the sun; the wonder is in the motion.

The hour? I have lost myself in the scaffolding of a chapel, forgetting day and night, eating only when the marble drove me to it. So too the players in Queens - they do not consult the clock; they hammer at the ball until the form within them is revealed. When the herald calls the session, then it is time, and not before.

I would paint it, not date it. The crowd in the white heat, the yellow dust, the green of the court like the young wheat at Arles. A man must simply go and stand there and wait, as I waited for the light to be right, and the time will show itself. To ask the hour is to miss the whole color of the day.

You want the hour of the match? I want only the moment when the ball is struck, when the form breaks apart and is painted anew - and that moment has no clock. Painters don't ask the time of the battle, we ask what the battle looks like as it tears the old shapes down. Watch the court, not the schedule, and you'll see a new figure every point.

The court is nothing until the light decides it! In the early afternoon the sun falls hard and flat, and the ball leaves a shadow like a hammer stroke. But near evening - ah, then the whole arena turns gold and violet, and every stroke is a brush of pure sensation. Do not ask me the hour; ask me the sky over Queens. The schedule is but the changing of the light upon the grass.

You ask the hour as though the hour were the thing. I have spent a lifetime painting men and women in doorways, half in candlelight, half in dark, and I tell you: the moment that matters is never printed in any schedule. The crowd in Queens will wait for a ball to be struck, and in that hush before it, every face turns to the same light. Go, and watch the faces, not the clock.

In my house in Coyoacán, the sun was a jealous thing - it burned through the shutters and never asked permission. So when they tell me the match begins at such an hour in New York, I think: good, let the light hit them hard, let it show the sweat and the grit and the joy. I never waited for a polite moment to live. Why should a ball wait to be struck?

Ha! A ball and a racket make as good a concerto as any - a slow movement, then a scherzo, then the cadenza of the tiebreak, all in perfect tempo. Why ask me the hour when the whole thing is a matter of rhythm? If you must know, I'd rather compose a rondo for the occasion; the crowd's roar is a fine finale, and the applause would keep time better than any courtier I've suffered.

Time! I have raged against it - against deafness, against the patron's clock, against every chain laid on the spirit. Let them post the hour in the evening; the true contest begins when the will commands it and not when the bell rings. In Queens, as in my own fate, the spirit seizes the moment and wrestles it into something sublime.

All things in their season, as the chorale rises in its appointed measure. The schedule is set by others, and I submit to the order as I submitted to my patron's command: play when bidden, and play well. Whether the first stroke sounds at noon or at evening is no matter; the counterpoint of the contest is the same in any light.

Well thank you, thank you very much. It's like a Saturday night show down in Memphis, honey - the schedule's posted when the folks at the gate are ready, usually the evenin' before. You just show up early, get you a seat, and let the boys play. That's how it always worked for me, and it sure made for a lot of happy people.

Heal the world - make it a better place, one match at a time. When the sun goes down over New York, that's when the magic starts, and I'd be there, standing in the light, letting the rhythm take over. It's not about the clock, it's about the feeling - the crowd, the energy, the love. Just watch, and let it move you.

Doesn't matter what the clock says, mate - it's always a good time to watch a ball fly. We once played Shea Stadium and couldn't hear ourselves over the screaming; that's the sound of people letting go for a few hours. So whenever they start in Queens, imagine there's a band on, and everybody's singing along. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The sun don't ask the almanac when to rise, and the ball don't ask the clock when to fall. Somewhere in Queens the lines are chalked and the grass-roots wait, and if you need a printed hour to tell you when the song begins, you were never listening to it in the first place. A man rode in on a freight train once and the whole crowd swore they knew the hour - they were wrong.

Honestly, the schedule drops the night before and the whole timeline just loses it - and I get it, because waiting for something you love is its own kind of song. Show up for the people you promised, know your seat, know your hour, and don't let anyone tell you the moment isn't yours. The night before is just the bridge before the chorus.

A man who waits to be told the hour is a man who never sights land; I sailed west when every learned fool said there was nothing but sea, and I found a new world. The court lies in Queens, as I am told, and the hour is fixed by those who keep the ledger - but the admiral's business is to set his own course and let the skeptics murmur. Go and claim your seat before another takes it, and let the charts quarrel over the exact hour.

I have stood in the markets of Cathay and Persia and learned that a wise traveler asks the host, not the road, for the hour of the feast. In Queens, they say, the hour is cried out the evening before, as the caravan master declares when we depart at first light. Marvelous how these New Yorkers keep such order without a single khan to command them!

I have waited months in a strange harbor for a wind that would not blow, and I waited. So the answer is this: consult the almanac as you would consult the stars, provision yourself, and be on hand before the appointed tide. The man who arrives asking when it begins has already lost the passage.

The precise hour is set by the control room and the referees, not by the crowd, and it is usually transmitted the previous evening for each session. That is the correct sequence: preparation, then performance. Watch the published schedule as you would a flight plan - trust the data, and be in position before the event begins. There is no mystery in it, only proper procedure.

Queens, is it? I once crossed the Atlantic with nothing but a compass, a thermos of soup, and a stubborn refusal to believe the sky had a ceiling for girls. A tennis court has no ceiling either - only lines somebody drew and dared you to cross. Find out when the first ball flies, then plant yourself in a seat and watch souls decide whether they want it badly enough.

From orbit, I looked down and could not tell where one land ended and the next began - no lines, no borders, just one blue and green ball spinning in the dark. So when you ask me the hour of a match in New York, I smile: the Sun decides that, not any man. Sit, wait, look up from your shoes. The ball will come when the light is right, and it will be beautiful.

Nobody remembers the schedule. They remember the shot - the one nobody saw coming. You're asking me what time it starts, but the real question is whether you'll be there for the moment that matters, or just checking a clock. Get the time, sure - but don't let a start time be the thing you focus on. Focus on the point.

First principles: the schedule is a release cadence, set the night before, optimized for global viewership and stadium throughput - it's basically a logistics problem with a broadcast window. I'd argue the real question is why we're still scheduling anything in fixed local time when the whole planet's watching. Mars will need its own timezone anyway, so get used to this.

Honey, listen. I have learned that the joy is not in the clock, it is in the gathering. What I love about that day is the grandmother in the stands who watched this tournament since she was a girl, and the girl in the next seat dreaming of one day standing on that court. Check the schedule, set your alarm, and show up with your whole heart. That is the date that matters.

I don't need a clock to tell me when the fight is on - I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, and when the bell rings, I'm ready, can't you see? The time comes when the promoter says so, one day out, and the people fill the stands to watch the show. But hear me: the moment that matters is the moment you decide to be great, and that one you schedule yourself.

Friend, I never much cared for the clock - I cared for the ball, and the ball arrives when the heart is ready. These players, they train like children chasing a dream barefoot in Bauru, and when that white line is crossed, the whole world forgets its quarrels for a while. So ask the schedule if you must, but the beautiful game keeps its own time - and it is always time for joy.

You know, we used to say, 'If you can dream it, you can do it' - and a stadium full of people watching a little yellow ball is a dream somebody built, brick by brick, with a lot of imagination. The schedule? That's just the whistle before the ride starts. When it's time, the gates swing open, the music swells, and everyone gets to be a kid again for a few hours. That's the magic.