Twenty-five Years Ago: Marathon Super Saturday

In a wonderful example of coincidence, or irony, or synchronicity, the U.S. Open will be staging a “Super Sunday” of sorts 25 years after the mythic “Super Saturday” of 1984. Thanks, rain.

This “Super Day” tradition is like the notorious cinema slasher Freddy Krueger—it just keeps coming back to make life miserable, or at least daunting, for the U.S. Open men’s finalists, because it requires them to play best-of-five matches on consecutive days. No other Grand Slam event departs so radically from the basic format that calls for days of rest alternating with days of play.

Sunday’s tentative schedule features the two men’s semifinals during the day (with a Monday final slated to start at 4 p.m.), and the women’s final in prime time. It’s identical to the current “Lite” version of Super Saturday, which became the new tradition when the women’s final was moved to its prime-time Saturday night slot in 2001. Confused yet?

The Super Saturday format was conceived in the mid-1970s, and it evolved in a curious crucible of promotional savvy, WTA discontent, and the over-arching demands of the CBS television network. Basically, CBS knew everybody was back at work on the first Friday after Labor Day, when the men’s semis had traditionally been held. With the NFL season kicking off on the Sunday after Labor Day, Saturday would present a final opportunity to capture strong ratings. This was significant then, and is only less so now in the age of live streaming video.

Moving the men’s semis from Friday to Saturday seemed like a great idea to CBS and the USTA, less so to the men actually swinging the racquets. But they acquiesced in good faith, eager to help the game grow. And then things got a little complicated.

Saturday is traditionally the day of the women’s final. Playing the men’s semis that day was an act of encroachment. Advocates for the women’s interests—and let’s remember, these were the salad years of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, still basking in the afterglow of Billie Jean King’s barrier-breaking accomplishments—quickly grew tired of playing third-fiddle. How could you relegate a match as significant as the women’s final to the customary second-round drill: Oh, Chris and Martina, they’re the third match on Armstrong, following the two men’s matches. . .

The women players thought such relegation was insulting, and wanted a definite start time. CBS also saw the beauty in being able to promote a definite, 4 p.m. start for the women’s U.S. Open final. So Super Saturday was re-designed to revolve around the women’s final. This meant, among other things, that the first men’s semi had to be played early enough to clear the time slot for the ladies, and that the second men’s semi could start awfully late, if the women produced a close final.

But watching this “tradition” develop made me a Super Saturday Dissident. Sure, it took the game to more people. Sure, it placated the women. Sure, there was an appalling kind of majesty about the heroic effort it demanded of the male finalists. But it just tilted the field too far in favor of the winner of the first men’s semi.

Twenty-five years ago, in the first match of the now-mythic Sept. 8, 1984 Super Saturday, Ivan Lendl and Pat Cash staged a barnburner, with Lendl barely surviving on the tenuous wings of a couple of topspin lobs at the end of the fifth set. Evert and Navratilova then staged one of the most memorable of their 3,456,656 classic confrontations, with Navratilova prevailing, 6-4 in the third. It was after 7 p.m. by the time John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors took the court to work out the final details, with McEnroe winning another unforgettable, artfully played five-set clash of titans.

Including the warm-up act (a veterans’ doubles final), the first ball of the day was hit at 11:07 a.m., and the last at 11:16 p.m. I remember exactly where I was during the heart of that second men’s semi: high up in Armstrong stadium, sitting with an editor who took advantage of the privacy afforded to try to lure me away from TENNIS. I mention this only because by that time (around 10 p.m.), vast portions of the stadium were empty; many of those still present catatonic—passed out like drunks in their seats, intoxicated by too much tennis. It was like being snowed in for a week in the Colorado Rockies—not as exciting as it may sound, although you get points for having endured it, and it makes a great story for the grandkids.

My biggest complaint, though, is that Super Saturday has ruined too many finals (see “S” for Sampras, who has said that the consecutive-day format effectively destroyed any chances he had to beat a much younger Lleyton Hewitt in 2001). Curiously, though, McEnroe went on to beat Lendl in that 1984 final. As he recently told TENNIS.com’s Abigail Lorge:

“It was the energy of a New York crowd [that got McEnroe through], but I’d like to think I was a little better [than Lendl] at that time. I remember walking into the locker room [before the final], and I felt really stiff and I’d played until 11:20 p.m. But I knew that Lendl had played a 7-6-in-the-fifth match as well, so he’d have to be feeling something. And I walked by where he was in the locker room, and I saw him stretching and he could barely get below his knees. And so I thought, he’s even as bad or worse than I am.”

McEnroe was quick to add that he still feels that he lost the final the following year (in a rematch with Lendl) because of the Super Saturday fatigue factor, adding that the format has become increasingly unsupportable as the players have gotten better and the game in general more physically demanding.

Although moving the women’s final back to its third-match slot (albeit as a separate, night-match ticket) has improved the situation, it might be time for the USTA to consider retiring the Super Saturday theme. It was of a different time, and a different world. Old myths die hard, and the New York weather is unpredictable during hurricane season, hence this year’s Super Sunday. But all good things come to an end, and maybe some bad ones should, too.

Peter Bodo, a senior editor at TENNIS magazine, writes the TennisWorld blog. Follow him on Twitter.