Queens Was Burning, Too
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Version 0 of 1. On a Sunday night midway through the 1977 U.S. Open, nearly 7,000 people gathered in the stadium at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, for a third-round match between the ninth-seeded Eddie Dibbs and an 18-year-old named John McEnroe, who was making his debut at the tournament that year. Two months earlier, McEnroe surprised the tennis world by reaching the semifinals of Wimbledon as a qualifier. His feathery touch dazzled the British fans while his combustive behavior led the British tabloids to nickname him Superbrat. Now McEnroe, who grew up in nearby Douglaston, looked poised to make a deep run at the Open. First, though, he had to get past Dibbs, a short, speedy player known as Fast Eddie. Soon after the match started, a commotion in the stands halted play. A spectator had been shot in the leg; the bullet, the police later surmised, was fired from a nearby apartment building. At the time, New York was still reeling from the citywide blackout in July and the looting that followed. It had been terrorized for much of the summer by the Son of Sam, and now a scene straight out of “Black Sunday,” a film about a planned attack at the Super Bowl released earlier that year, seemed to be unfolding at the Open. “It had been a crazy summer in New York,” says Bud Collins, the famed tennis commentator, who left the press box to investigate the disturbance, “and we were all up there wondering if another bullet was going to appear.” Dibbs and McEnroe didn’t want to stick around to find out. As McEnroe later recalled, when an umpire told them what happened, Dibbs announced, “I’m out of here.” Then the story was coincidentally revised: the fan hadn’t been shot, he’d gone into <em>shock</em>. The match eventually resumed with McEnroe beating Dibbs two sets to one. (At that time, early-round men’s matches at the Open were best-of-three.) Only later did they learn that it had indeed been gunfire. The stray bullet was just one of a number of bizarre occurrences that defined the ’77 Open, its final run at the normally genteel West Side Tennis Club. Those two weeks in Forest Hills included a transgender controversy, mutinous fans, appalling breaches of etiquette and a jerry-built racket strung with Venetian-blind cord that threatened to upend the whole event. Thirty-five years on, it remains the wildest Open ever played. The decision to transfer the Open from leafy, affluent Forest Hills — a suburb within the city — to a new, vastly expanded facility in cacophonous Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, on the other side of the Long Island Expressway, was a source of angry debate as the ’77 Open began in late August. The West Side club had history and intimacy on its side. Except for a three-year absence in the early 1920s, the Open was played there continuously since 1915, and the Tudor-style clubhouse was then as much a part of tennis lore as Centre Court at Wimbledon. But the Open had outgrown Forest Hills, and the United States Tennis Association was intent on relocating the tournament to Flushing Meadows. This did not sit well with some players, nor with the West Side club. At a news conference during the Open, William McCullough, a member of the club’s board, claimed that the new neighborhood was a poor choice because it was “95 percent . . . Negro” (in fact, it was mostly white) and that organizers “will not only have trouble in making the tennis fans come but in getting the community to work with them.” Arthur Ashe, the club’s most prominent African-American member (his membership was granted automatically after he won the ’68 Open) denounced the remarks as racist and threatened to resign. Instead, McCullough quit. Forest Hills partisans opposed the move in part because they feared the chaos that would come with a larger, more democratic tournament. The irony is that the ’77 Open proved to be far more tumultuous than any subsequent Open at Flushing. Chris Evert, who won her third consecutive U.S. Open that year, seemed to experience a flashback when I asked her about the tournament. “That year?” she said warily. “Oh, oh, <em>oh</em>.” Along with the stray bullet and the McCullough flap, there were bomb threats during the Open, a protest against the participation of some South African players and a near riot in the stadium when officials tried to switch an afternoon match to the evening session. Overshadowing all of it during that first week was the entry of Renée Richards, the former Richard Raskind, who had a sex-change operation in 1975. Richards, who grew up in Forest Hills and played in the final of the U.S. Men’s 35-and-over championship five years earlier, was originally barred from competing because she refused to take a chromosome test to determine her eligibility. Richards, 43, challenged the U.S.T.A. in court. Two weeks before the Open began, a New York State Supreme Court justice ruled in her favor, a decision that is considered a landmark in the battle for transgender rights. Her presence in the draw was unsettling for some of the players. The 6-foot-1 Richards had a strong serve-and-volley game, and before their first-round match, Virginia Wade, the reigning Wimbledon champion, told reporters, “I’ve practiced with a lot of 40-year-old men; if Renée beats me, she should be checked out.” In the end, there was no need. Wade defeated Richards 6-1, 6-4. (Richards had more success in women’s doubles, reaching the final with her partner, Betty Ann Stuart.) Richards, who still practices ophthalmology in Manhattan, remembers feeling overwhelmed in the first set against Wade. “It was the emotion of the moment,” she told me. “The whole thing was just such a dramatic, and traumatic, experience.” But she pulled herself together in the second set against a superior player (“Virginia was always tough for me,” she said). The women never discussed Wade’s gibe, Richards said, and they went on to become good friends. In fact, Wade is now one of her patients. The Richards saga was particularly striking compared with another major story line from that first week, the U.S. Open debut of a 14-year-old phenom named Tracy Austin. “Tracy, in her pinafore dress and braces, was the picture of innocence,” Evert recalled. “Renée, on the other hand, had been through so much adversity and hurt in her life. They were just polar opposites.” Evert also acknowledged that she was apprehensive about Richards. “It was a little uncomfortable to go into the locker room. Renée would be in there — do you look, do you not look? But she was just such a gracious person, with no resentment about the press coverage. It was a life lesson and definitely made me a better person.” Such magnanimity was not evident on the men’s side. In contrast to the sense of fraternity that characterizes men’s tennis these days (the hugs, the tears!), petulance was the defining attribute in the mid-1970s. The locker room wasn’t devoid of camaraderie — the tour’s reigning heartthrobs, Bjorn Borg and Brooklyn’s own Vitas Gerulaitis, were known to be close friends and partied together. Mostly, though, there was a lot of ill will, much of it supplied by Jimmy Connors, who took his bad-boy antics to new depths during the ’77 Open. When Corrado Barazzutti challenged a line call in their semifinal match, Connors ran around the net and erased the ball mark before the chair umpire could inspect it. Connors beat Barazzutti but lost the final in spectacular fashion to Guillermo Vilas of Argentina, whose muscular frame and seismic topspin made him something of an early-model Rafael Nadal. Enraged about a line call that went against him on match point, Connors bolted from the stadium before the trophy ceremony. Not that many people noticed. In one of the more surreal moments in Grand Slam history, dozens of fans ran onto the court to celebrate Vilas’s win and parade him on their shoulders. The biggest story on the men’s side that year, however, was a racket. In the early 1970s, a German horticulturalist and tennis buff named Werner Fischer created a double-strung racket whose unusual weaving generated enormous topspin and high, unfamiliar bounces. What came to be known as the spaghetti racket quickly caught on with German amateurs and eventually found its way into the hands of some professionals, among them the Australian veteran Barry Phillips-Moore, who notched a number of wins using it. During the spring of 1977, a young pro from Long Island named Michael Fishbach was traveling the European circuit when he noticed Phillips-Moore using the strange racket. Fishbach was intrigued — it was clear to him that the racket rewarded players with excellent touch, like himself. “I had a lot of wrist and racket control,” Fishbach says. “If players were ranked on the basis of ability to produce severe angles and drop shots, I would have been among the top players in the world.” The spaghetti racket also appealed to him because it introduced an element of surprise. All of that spin made the ball move in quirky ways. Phillips-Moore refused to let anyone examine his racket, but while playing a tournament in Gstaad, Switzerland, that spring, Fishbach came across a similar one in, oddly, a camera store. The shop’s owner wouldn’t let him buy the thing, but Fishbach got a good enough look at it that he was confident he could assemble one of his own. After returning to the United States that summer, he and his brother spent some 30 hours stringing the racket, using nylon strings, Venetian-blind cord, plastic tubing and adhesive tape to cobble it together. Fishbach’s rendering of the spaghetti racket produced exactly the desired effect — massive topspin and big bounces. It turned out that the key to the racket was the lateral movement of the main strings. Not only did they slide farther on the spaghetti racket than on conventional ones, but they also sprang back into place while the ball was still on the racket. (This didn’t happen nearly as much with normal rackets, which is why players often adjusted their strings between points.) Fishbach, who was ranked 200th in the world, won three qualifying matches with the spaghetti racket to gain entry into the main draw of the Open. He then beat the very gifted Billy Martin in the first round to earn a match against the former U.S. Open and Wimbledon champion Stan Smith, whom he crushed 6-0, 6-2. By now, Fishbach’s magic wand, as Sports Illustrated later dubbed it, had become a matter of controversy. After the Smith match, there was talk of outlawing the racket. Fishbach lost in the third round to John Feaver of Britain, who later said of the racket: “You don’t know what’s going on with the bloody thing. You can’t hear the ball come off the face. It looks like an egg in flight.” The racket was banned several weeks later, after Ilie Nastase used it to thrash Vilas at a tournament in France, ending the Argentine’s record 53-match winning streak on clay (the record stood until it was broken by Nadal in 2006). Vilas was so disgusted that he quit the match in protest after two sets. Fishbach, who retired in 1983, is now a whale conservationist. The spaghetti racket is his legacy and his millstone. “I played on the tour for 10 years and had many good results,” he says. “People diss me as if I had no career other than the spaghetti racket.” But he also recognizes that the racket earned him a place in tennis history that he otherwise would not have had. He has a point. The spaghetti racket was a forerunner of the polyester strings that enable today’s players to conjure spins and bounces that resemble those that Fishbach unleashed in Forest Hills. And for the same reason: these revolutionary new strings automatically snap back into place. Fishbach, it turns out, was simply ahead of his time, a point he is quick to emphasize. “They banned the spaghetti racket,” he says, “but they’ve been chasing it ever since.” The ’77 Open was also significant for another reason; it was the last time the tournament was played on clay. Traditionally, the Open had been a grass-court event, but it was switched to clay in 1975. It was thought that the slower surface might be better for television. It wasn’t necessarily better for American players, however. Although Connors defeated Borg the year before to win the Open, and Evert was arguably the greatest women’s clay-court player ever, clay was generally a difficult surface for Americans, especially the men. By 1977, it had been 22 years since an American man last won the French Open, the most prestigious clay-court championship. The futility lasted until Michael Chang won at Roland Garros in 1989. When the Open moved to Flushing in 1978, it became a hardcourt event for good, which was more hospitable for the American players. McEnroe and Connors traded the title back and forth the first seven years in Flushing. On the women’s side, Evert claimed three of the first five, and Austin won the other two. In the process, hardcourt became America’s unofficial surface. With the change in surfaces, the U.S.T.A. helped set in motion the eclipse of clay-court tennis in the United States. In 1977, there were 10 A.T.P. clay-court tournaments nationwide, not including the Open; last year, there was just one. The decline of clay didn’t seem to matter in the 1980s and ’90s, when the United States continued to produce dominant players like Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras and the Williams sisters. Lately, though, the country seems to have lost its ability to manufacture champions, and it is hard not to notice that with the exception of Serena Williams, the sport is increasingly ruled by players who learned their tennis on clay, or at least had significant exposure to it. José Higueras, who lost in the fourth round at the ’77 U.S. Open and went on to coach both Sampras and Roger Federer before becoming the head of coaching for the U.S.T.A., thinks that lack of clay-court experience is an important factor in the current malaise of American tennis. “The game is played more from the backcourt now, you have to hit a lot more balls to win points,” he says. “That’s going to benefit someone who grew up on clay.” Thirty-five years after it last hosted the Open, the West Side Tennis Club is still around. The stadium is in disrepair — parts of it look like Roman ruins — but the club appears to have otherwise rebounded from some recent financial difficulties. No one is forced to dodge stray bullets, and the all-white dress code is still in place. The clay courts remain in excellent condition. <NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Michael Steinberger covered tennis for The Financial Times. He has also written for Vanity Fair and The New York Times, among other publications. Editor: Dean Robinson |