Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay had a sweet piece Thursday about taking his Dad, “a high school tennis coach in Cambridge, Mass., the city he grew up in, for 38 seasons,” to the U.S. Open.

He has coached players who arrived at their first practice with dazzling spin serves, great players who started with no skills at all, homegrown kids and kids whose families escaped faraway countries in crisis. My dad once tried to talk a towering, teenaged basketball star at his high school to try out for his tennis team. He was convinced the student would make a phenomenal doubles player. Patrick Ewing said no.

But Jason’s Dad had never been to a tennis Grand Slam.

He has now.