US Open ball persons plan to honor hospital workers
Sandra Lazo is a 34-year-old patient transport worker at Mount Sinai West in Manhattan in New York City and couldn’t tell you how long she went without a day off in the spring.
Was it four weeks? Five? Maybe seven?
Lazo didn’t count, and didn’t complain. She kept getting up at 4:15 a.m. in her apartment in North Bergen, New Jersey, and reporting for duty at 6, one shift running into another, piling up like, well, fatality numbers in the worst pandemic in a hundred years.
Her work entailed transporting patients wherever they needed to go: from the ER to intensive care, from one floor to another. Transporters refer to moving a patient as a job. The job she dreaded the most was taking COVID-19 victims down to the morgue.
“I’ve never seen so many bodies in my life,” Lazo told USA TODAY Sports. “I won’t lie. It was scary.”
Sandra Lazo is one of the thousands of front-line workers who provided care and service to tens of thousands of COVID-19 patients in New York City, the global epicenter of the virus, with a death toll approaching 33,000. With the start Monday of the U.S. Open tennis tournament, David Lauren, chief innovation officer for Ralph Lauren, his father’s company, wanted to find a way to honor health care workers who helped the city.
That’s why you’ll see the names of front-line workers on the backs of all 135 ball persons at the 2020 Open, outfitted, per usual, in Ralph Lauren uniforms.
“We like to tell stories and do things that have powerful messages,” Lauren said. “And we just felt like, ‘This is not a moment for Polo players and stripes. This is a moment for saluting heroes.’ ”
Like most everything else, the ball person operation is very different at this year’s tournament. The full complement of 280 ball persons has been reduced to 135. Normally, six ball persons work a match; this year only the three show courts will have six (the field courts will have three). Ball persons will be wearing a Polo mask on the court and are forbidden to hand players towels, water or anything else. The age restriction has been pushed from 14 to 18.
All 135 workers to be honored are part of the Mount Sinai network, the Open’s official health system/hospital. Wearing a shirt with “Lazo” stitched on the back will be Alejandro Varela, 22, a recent graduate of City College of New York.
“I’m very proud to be wearing her name,” Varela said. “I think I can speak for everyone at the U.S. Open and the ball people crew when I say we are paying a great homage to the workers who take care of us and dive headfirst into the unknown.”
It’s hard to imagine someone whose life has been more affected by the coronavirus than Lazo’s. Her father, a handyman who lives in Queens, got COVID-19 in March. So did her two siblings. Her mother started suffering from severe body aches and a headache and lost her sense of taste and smell. She, too, had the virus. Things were bad, and got much worse when her mother’s oxygen intake plummeted and she needed to go to the ER.
Lazo got permission from her boss to go get her mother. She wore a full set of personal protective equipment, including two masks, and drove to Queens, where she changed into another set of PPE, got her mother into the car and drove her to Mount Sinai.
“I was afraid if she went to a hospital in Queens I would never see her again,” said Lazo, whose mother recovered (though she still has no sense of smell).
Lazo never knew what the next day would bring. At the peak in April, when New York State had two days with more than 11,500 new cases, hospitals all over the city were turned over completely to the treatment of COVID-19.
Lazo has never forgotten the middle-aged man she wheeled from the ER one day. She had her two masks on, so she showed him her ID.
“I’m Sandra,” she said. She told him she would be taking him upstairs. The man looked at her, his eyes desperate with fear. He began to cry. “Am I going to die?” he asked.
Lazo began to cry. She didn’t know what to say. She locked her eyes on his.
“You are going to be OK,” she said. “You are going to make it. You’ve got to be strong. I’m going to pray for you.”
Lazo wheeled the man into his room and said goodbye. The image of the man’s face and his tears are still with her all these months later. She had more jobs to do, more trips to the morgue. Lazo went home. She felt numb. She got something to eat and went to bed and was up at 4:15, as usual. “Every day, you just say, ‘OK, let’s do this,’ ” she said.
“I knew I had to show up. Lots of my co-workers are doing it, too. I can’t leave them alone.”