Open Houses: The Best Are Welcome

By John Jeansonne | Staff Writer

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TENNIS WAS INVENTED in England and its first American tournaments were played in Newport, Rhode Island, now home to the sport's hall of fame. But the tennis event that has rivaled Wimbledon as the world's largest and most important for almost a century settled itself on Long Island and stayed.

What is now the U.S. Open first was played at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, in 1915. Officially, it was the ``U.S. National Championships,'' but everybody referred to the tournament simply as ``Forest Hills,'' just as the All-England Club championships always has been ``Wimbledon.''

It became the U.S. Open in 1968, when the sport at last admitted professionals alongside amateurs. Ten years later, it was moved to a new National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow in 1978. And, after brief discussions of relocating in Atlanta, the Open instead built an addition on its venerable NTC last year with 23,000-seat Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Tennis historian Bud Collins calls the sport's surge in the past 40 years ``spectacular'' and cited a 1992 Gallup Poll that put tennis No. 4 among sports Americans preferred to watch, behind only football, baseball and basketball. But even as far back as the first Forest Hills championships in 1915, there were accounts of large crowds and widely known stars.

In the 1920s, Bill Tilden and Suzanne Lenglen were considered celebrities of the same magnitude as Babe Ruth and Red Grange. Tilden's appearances in Davis Cup matches -- then even bigger than Wimbledon or the U.S. championships -- caused Forest Hills to construct a 13,000-seat horseshoe of stands next to the West Side clubhouse.

When Lenglen made her first U.S. appearance at Forest Hills in 1921, 8,000 fans showed up, the largest ever to see a women's match at the time. By 1923, a new concrete stadium had to be built on the West Side grounds, with permanant seating for 14,000, to accommodate the crowds.

The current U.S. Open format, with men's and women's singles and doubles play all part of the same tournament, didn't take shape until 1935 at Forest Hills. The men's nationals had been played from 1886 through 1914 in Newport, and in Philadelphia from 1921 to '23; the men's doubles in various locations; the women's singles from 1887 through 1920 in Philadelphia. Occasionally, one segment of the field or another would be moved elsewhere, but Forest Hills remained in use as a championship site for at least one of the four titles until the big move to northern Queens in '78.

Ellsworth Vines brought his 121-mile-per-hour serve to Forest Hills in 1932. Don Budge completed his Grand Slam of winning the four majors, before it was called a ``Grand Slam,'' in '38. Bobby Riggs, 35 years before he would become a household name for his ``Battle of the Sexes'' loss to Billie Jean King, won Forest Hills in '39. Of the four Grand Slams, Forest Hills was the only one that carried on during the World War II years -- 1941-45.

Helen Wills Moody, Pancho Gonzalez, Althea Gibson, Maureen Connolly, Rod Laver -- all the greats -- played on the Forest Hills stage, home to the nationals until 1977, with the last three tournaments played on clay surfaces that had replaced the battered grass.

That stadium cost $250,000 and, by comparison, the $10 million to build the National Tennis Center, with Louis Armstrong Stadium as its centerpiece, likewise was a bargain in 1978 dollars. Last year's NTC expansion, including Arthur Ashe Stadium, cost $254 million.

Night matches were a U.S. Open innovation, begun at Forest Hills in 1975, facilitated by the new clay surface, and continued with rollicking success at Flushing Meadow. Thanks to night sessions and the huge main stadiums - first Louis Armstrong and now Ashe - the 14 best-attended tournaments in tennis history all have been at Flushing Meadow.

The U.S. Open was the first Grand Slam tournament to use the tiebreaker scoring system, in 1970; that was the year after F.D. Robbins needed 100 games to defeat Dick Dell, 22-20, 9-7, 6-8, 8-10, 6-4. The U.S. Open was the first to offer equal prize money to men and women, in 1973. Its move to Flushing Meadow in 1978 symbolically gave tennis over to larger, rowdier crowds and to working-class heroes on the court as well. Louder, rougher players such as Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe (himself a Long Islander, from Douglaston, Queens) and Andre Agassi were the antithesis of traditional country club types.

There were a time, on Long Island and elsewhere, when modern-day tennis was called ``lawn tennis'' to distinguish it from the older indoor game of ``court tennis,'' the father of all racquet sports dating at least to the 12th century. But that high society sport existed only among the well-to-do at a handful of North Shore estates. William Payne Whitney, heir to a transportation fortune, died at 51 while playing court tennis at his Greentree estate in Manhasset and was buried in his white tennis flannels.

More recently, there was a significant grass-court tournament which drew top players to the Meadow Club in Southampton each summer, but that too died out as the game spread to the masses.

In 1978, Flushing Meadow introduced hard courts to a Grand Slam event and dramatically changed the international tour, which had been played almost exclusively on grass or clay until then. By 1988, the Australian Open followed that lead, and now grass-court tournament tennis virtually has disappeared.

Perfect for this part of the world, where paving over grass often becomes progress.