Gotta love-love this ticket price!
A tennis fan scored a free, prime US Open ticket Thursday by waving a snarky sign ripping sore loser player Jeļena Ostapenko’s post-match meltdown.
Dahlia Lopez Ramsay needed a last-minute pass to the world-renowned tournament for her mom, so she whipped out sign proclaiming, “Will haunt Ostapenko’s dreams for a free ticket” — catching the eye of a couple who laughed and handed her a freebie.
“I thought that sign was hilarious and I had an extra ticket,” Allen Smith, 50, of Huntsville, Alabama, who gave her a pass to see top-tier matches at Louis Armstrong and Arthur Ashe stadiums, worth hundreds of dollars.
Ramsay’s sign skewered the Latvian tennis pro for accusing opponent Taylor Townsend of having “no class” and “no education” in a heated exchange after their second round match Wednesday.
Smith, who was attending the tournament with his wife, called the post-match argument Wednesday between the two tennis stars a shame.
“I thought it was unfortunate. We watched [Ostapenko] for years and she’s always clowning…she’s gotta be smarter than that,” he said of the post-game flip-out.
“I think that was horrible,” his wife added. “She was the classless one. She was just mad that she was losing.”
Ramsay, 39, of Sunset Park, said she came up with the idea for the sign Thursday morning and stood with it near the 7 train station in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park for about 45 minutes before scoring the ticket.
“When I woke up this morning I said perfect, something to riff off of,” Ramsay said as fans snapped photos of her sign.
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“I like the exercise of writing copy. Oh what would catch peoples attention, what would make them laugh, what would engender generosity.”
“What people are resonating with is the fact that the woman who behaved towards Taylor Townsend was unprofessional, inexcusable, unkind,” said Ramsay, who works in education, and said she has gotten free tickets four years in a row.
“It is pretty easy,” she said about getting into the US Open for free.
Ramsay said she wanted a free ticket for her mom, who is an “on the fence tennis fan.”
On Wednesday, Ostapenko and Townsend had a tense back-and-forth over the fact that after one of Townsend’s shots clipped the top of the net but remained in play, also known as a net cord.
Ostapenko told Townsend she had “no class” and “no education” after her opponent refused to apologize for the net cord.
“Today after the match I told my opponent that she was very disrespectful as she had a net ball in a very deciding moment and didn’t say sorry, but her answer was that she doesn’t have to say sorry at all,” Ostapenko later wrote on social media.
“There are some rules in tennis which most of the players follow and it was first time ever that this happened to me on tour. If she plays in her homeland it doesn’t mean that she can behave and do whatever she wants.”
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