This Week in Tennis History: U.S. Open moves to Flushing

“You throw a dart in the dark and drill.”

This was how William Ewing “Slew” Hester, the first USTA president from the Deep South, described what he did for a living. He was an independent—i.e., “wildcat”—oilman from Mississippi; in 1977, when he arrived in the foreign land known as New York City to begin his presidential term, he was invariably caricatured as Ol’ Slewfoot, a bluff, beady-eyed, cigar-chomping scion of a state political family who, in his own words, liked to “drink all night and play tennis all day.”

From the start, Hester was underestimated by the tennis establishment on the East Coast, where, according to TENNIS Magazine, he was “pegged as a stupid redneck.” But Slewfoot knew one important thing about that East Coast establishment: It needed a new home for its signature tournament, and it needed it fast. By the mid-1970s, the U.S. Open had blown the doors off, literally, the old Tudor clubhouse at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, where the tournament had been held since 1915.

There was no room in that exclusive preserve for the new suburban hackers and fans who had flocked to the game, and the Open, over the previous decade. There was no room for them to park their cars in the narrow lanes of the surrounding neighborhood, which had been planned in the 19th century. Most important, there was little room for the merchandise tents and sponsor booths that now ate up vast swaths of territory at all pro tournaments. There was hardly even room for the garbage anymore; at the last Open at Forest Hills, in 1977, trash spilled out of giant bins and floated across the courts after a rainstorm. It was time to get out.

Hester knew it, and after looking out of an airplane window one night in January ’77, he knew where the tournament’s new location was going to be. As his plane descended toward LaGuardia Airport that night, Hester glanced out the window at Queens below him. There were several inches of snow on the ground in Flushing Meadows Park. Taken buy the beauty of the scene, he looked more closely. He caught a glimpse of what had once been called the Singer Bowl, a disused and graffiti-strewn outdoor performance space built for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Slew had his drilling spot.

He also had a new partner. After 62 years, the West Side Tennis Club was out, and New York City was in. The USTA ended up spending $10 million to lease the land and build a municipal tennis center that would double as the new home of the Open. For the first time, Grand Slam tennis would be played on public courts, on an asphalt surface similar to the one used by the waves of recreational players who had picked up the game over the previous decade in parks all over the country. It was also, not coincidentally, a surface where most U.S. pros thrived. Now all Hester had to do was have it finished by the following fall.

Most people familiar with New York construction believed this was next-to-impossible, and that the ol’ wildcatter would be eaten alive by the industry. Gene Scott, a member in good standing of the East Coast establishment, believed the Open would likely still be in Forest Hills in 1980. “It pushes the outer limits of wishful thinking to believe otherwise,” he wrote in Tennis Week. But Hester, after approving a plan to split the former Singer Bowl into two arenas—the larger would be called Louis Armstrong Stadium, the smaller would be called the Grandstand—had his new facility ready, or ready enough, for opening day on August 30, 1978.

The new National Tennis Center opened with 12 fast-food stands and nine bars in Armstrong Stadium. This seemed a little dangerous, given that the sides of the arena were steep enough that Hester could joke, “If a drunk fell out of the 51st row, he’d end up somewhere on the sideline. Outside the main arena, there had been no time for landscaping of any sort—it was steel and concrete for as far as the eye could see.

The tennis fans of New York didn’t care. Labeled “cheerful slobs” by a fashion critic of the time, they came in tube socks and T-shirts, chinos and sneakers, sleeveless denim jackets and skull-and-crossbone tattoos, Lacoste shorts and Madras jackets, short shorts and halter tops, designer jeans and polyester shirts unbuttoned to the waist, and often with no shirts at all. They stuffed themselves with shrimp cocktail, strolled around licking ice cream cones, yelled out as players were serving, and jammed the outer walkways of Armstrong to survey the field courts below. Sometimes they jumped the fences and plopped themselves down on one court to get a better view of the match that was being played on the next court. In the evenings—the U.S. Open was the first Grand Slam to stage night matches—the 18,000 people inside the big stadium could unleash a formless roar more commonly heard at NFL stadiums than tennis clubs.

Since the start of the Open era in 1968, the U.S. had been pulling tennis into its orbit; now the sport had a new capital. This was tennis the American way—in a public facility, on hard courts, with plenty of acreage for merchandise booths and wall space for corporate logos. And the nation’s players responded. Chris Evert won her fourth straight Open title, while Jimmy Connors, one year after storming off the court an unpopular loser at Forest Hills, got off the mat to reclaim the trophy. He said the hard surface and public-court buzz at Flushing Meadows reminded him of home in the midwest, and he made sure he was the first player to practice at the new site.

It didn’t take him long to put his stamp on the place, with a five-set comeback win over Adriano Pannatta in the fourth round. In ’77, in a match against an Italian, Jimbo had run around a net post and been booed; in ’78, in a match against another Italian, he hit a spectacular backhand around a net post and was raucously cheered. Connors went on to beat Bjorn Borg for the title, and told the audience, “Whether you like me or not, I like you.” His love affair with New York had begun.

Yet there was one more development at the ’78 Open that would have even more far-reaching consequences, and would make Flushing Meadows look a little more like your average public-park courts. Sixteen-year-old Pam Shriver came out of nowhere to upset Martina Navratilova and reach the final, where she lost a close two-setter to Evert. While the way Shriver played was impressive, it was what she played with that helped change the sport forever. She was the first player to have success at a Grand Slam while using an oversize racquet, made by Prince. The ludicrously large, 100-inch metal frame had been seen around rec facilities for a while, but it was considered a novelty, and possibly illegal. It took Shriver’s run to give the Prince legitimacy.

The ’78 Open pointed tennis in a new direction, and we’re still feeling the effects of that big two-week bang at Flushing Meadows today. When it was over, the sport had a new capital, a new Grand Slam surface, and a revolutionary new weapon. A century after it began, the wood era was suddenly doomed, and the power era was around the corner. As for New York, it gained a new, well-lit beacon of progress at the heart of one of its gritty outer boroughs. As the city climbed out of the wreckage of its mid-’70s financial collapse, the National Tennis Center did its part to help. Each year, the U.S. Open generates more revenue for the city than either of its baseball teams, the Yankees or the Mets, do for an entire season. Slew Hester’s dart in the dark has turned into a gusher.