Darren Carroll's relationship with the U.S. Open goes back a long way. “When we were kids growing up on Long Island, my little brother and I were serious tennis players,” Darren recalls. “One of the highlights of our summer was when the head pro at our club would take the two of us over to Flushing Meadows, about half an hour away, to watch the U.S. Open. This was back in the days before computers and barcode scanners. He bought us all general admission tickets, and we’d head over to Louis Armstrong Stadium—at the time, that was the main court where all the top seeds played—and he’d slip the usher a $20 bill. That was good enough to get us an otherwise unoccupied court-side box to watch the likes of Martina Navratilova, Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl, and Steffi Graf play.”

Fast forward 30 or so years, and Darren found himself back at the USTA National Tennis Center, only this time as a photographer on assignment for Sports Illustrated. He photographed 5 U.S. Opens for the magazine, eventually being approached by the championship’s photography team about working for them.

“It’s a totally different approach,” he says about the difference between covering the tournament as an editorial photographer versus an in-house one. “At S.I., you focused on peak action and reaction, all the time. Oh, sure, you’re always looking for pretty light and different angles and compositions, but at the end of the day, it was all about who won, and who lost, and how that happened within the confines of the tennis court.

“Working for as an official championship photographer, you still have to do that. But you’re also shooting with an eye toward branding, toward marketing, toward creating a historical record,” he adds. “And since the pandemic, our team has also taken on the role of providing imagery for all platforms, including player relations, sponsors and social media. We are setting the narrative of the U.S. Open, telling the story both in detail and writ large. From what I was doing for Sports Illustrated to this, I had to completely shift gears.”

With that shift came the opportunity for more access—and the responsibility of using that access to tell the story of the US Open that few get to see. One of his favorite behind-the-scenes haunts is the player access tunnel in Arthur Ashe Stadium, where competitors spend their last few seconds of quiet and solitude before entering the arena to do battle with their opponents. While you wouldn’t know it from television coverage, there are an additional 5 or 6 people packed into that space (with their prime directive being: “Stay out of the live TV shot!”), wedged and contorted in an attempt to hide in alcoves yet still do their jobs—documentary video, production coordination, and in Darren’s case, capturing still images of those last seconds as the players stand in the narrow hallway lined with black-and-white images of those very past champions that he and his brother used to watch in person.

Some get in some last-minute calisthenics, some exude steely confidence, and others close their eyes and soak it all in. At the signal from the show runner, the player exits the tunnel to the roars of 20,000 fans, walking straight past a plaque with a quote from the great Billie Jean King: “Pressure Is A Privilege.”