After all, he doesn't need to practice his serve.
A man who was seen holding a cocktail and being snubbed by his date in footage from the U.S. Open told The Washington Post after the embarrassing video went viral that he wasn't insulted at all.
“I'm so glad the U.S. Open didn't zoom in on me and then pan out and play the video for two seconds longer,” the 43-year-old Wall Street resident in Brooklyn Heights said with a straight face.
The video shows the man returning to his seat with two Honeydeuces, the tournament's signature cocktail, and preparing to give one to the woman sitting next to him when another man, who appears to be a suitor, jumps in from the row above and hands the woman another $23 cocktail.
But the woman sitting next to him was not his wife, and the drink was not intended for her.
His wife was sitting in the lower row but was barely visible in the frame of the video, he explained.
He had actually brought her a drink.
“If you look closely at the bottom right of the video, you can see a blonde woman [a bob haircut]”, and that's my wife. She's leaning over and I'm actually looking at her,” said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wanted to put the video, which has been viewed 11 million times, behind him.
“We were with a couple friends and we were sitting in overlapping seats. The wife was sitting below our blonde friend and her husband was sitting above her. So he handed her her drink,” he continued about the exchange on Monday night at Louis Armstrong Stadium. The U.S. Open captioned it, “This is a movie.”
“There's always a long queue. [at the bar]So I waited 25 minutes for the team. When I got back to my seat, I expected my wife to say “Thank you,” but she had already [a honey deuce]so she said, 'I don't want it,'” he recalled with a laugh.
The 41-year-old's wife said the couple had received hundreds of messages and had “had a lot of laughs” about the video.
“We emailed the U.S. Open thinking, 'Maybe we can get free tickets or something in exchange for this viral video,'” his wife said.
