Tennis

TENNIS

The Open Era

The year 1968 signaled the beginning of a revolution for those athletes who sought to make a living playing a sport known for its snobbish appeal and starchy white-flannel image. In that year tennis's "open era" began, and professionals could compete with amateurs for the sport's most coveted titles. Tennis was free to enter the new decade unabashedly commercial, casting off its "shamateur" label earned during the previous era in which the game's spokesmen hypocritically held up tennis as pure amateur sport while paying off players under the table.

The "In" Sport

During the 1970s the tennis revolution took to the streets, as tennis became the "in" sport in the United States and certainly the nation's growth sport. The country's middle class embraced tennis as theirs and spent millions on equipment and clothing. By the end of the decade it was estimated that more than a quarter of the country's population—and a nearly equal number of blacks and whites—played tennis at least four times a year; approximately 160,000 tennis courts had been built, with an extraordinary 5,000 more expected for each coming year. In 1978 the nation's premier tennis tournament, the U.S. Open, was moved from tony, exclusive Forest Hills to a public park, the recently built National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York. The change of venues ordered by United States Tennis Association (USTA) president and oil millionaire W. E. "Slew" Hester reflected what professional tennis in America had become: glitzy, fast-paced, big-money entertainment with mass appeal.

An American Revolution

In less than ten years the U.S. Open had moved from the patrician grass and clay surfaces of Forest Hills to hard courts—like the asphalt surface played on by the vast majority of the American public and the surface with which the rest of the world had come to associate tennis in the United States. While in other parts of the world the game continued to stand still—and Wimbledon, tennis's "lawn court championship," with its insistence on all-white shirts, shorts, and balls, remained the game's monument to tradition—tennis in the United States was a whirlwind of social and technological change. Television-friendly yellow balls replaced white ones; splashy pastels became a part of tennis fashion; metal and graphite replaced wood in rackets built to be stronger, larger, and more powerful; and tournament prize money for the winners jumped from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Renee Richards

During the decade the sport also rebelled against its socially conservative image. Professional women tennis players such as Billie Jean King were at the forefront of the women's lib movement as they worked to establish their own organizations and circuits—and fought for and won increased prize purses. Tennis also found itself embroiled in gender-bending experimentation and controversy when in 1976 the former Dr. Richard Raskind, an ophthalmologist and one-time captain of Yale's tennis team, entered the women's professional tennis circuit as Dr. Renee Richards, professional sports' first transsexual. Fearing that Richards might possess an unfair advantage in strength, endurance, and speed—fears that proved to be unfounded—many women players opposed her acceptance on the circuit. She was denied entrance to the 1976 U.S. Open. But she was admitted in 1977 after having successfully sued for entry in a highly publicized court case.

Circuits

In the first years of the so-called open era, competition among pro tennis organizations greatly contributed to the increase in the number of events and stunning growth in prize money. Implementation by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) of a points system, the Grand Prix, in 1970 created a method for establishing the world's best player, heightening the drama of tour events and thereby attracting new fans to the tournament gates. World Championship Tennis (WCT), a professional tour bankrolled by Texas oilman Lamar Hunt, had by 1970 successfully contracted many of the big-name players. The WCT announced for 1971 a "million-dollar" circuit leading to a nationally televised final played in Dallas and worth $50,000 to the winner. As a result more American stars such as Arthur Ashe hopped onto the WCT bandwagon, lured by the tour's promise of guaranteed big money. To keep players from defecting, the ITF began increasing the prize money at its events; players became the objects of hot bidding wars. But the high profile enjoyed by tennis, the steady increase in purses, and the phenomenal growth in number of fans and active participants in the sport during the 1970s were mostly due to television.

SHE HIT LIKE A MAN

Ophthalmologist Dr. Richard Raskin was a fine tennis player, but never quite good enough to be competitive on the men's pro tour. So he tried the women's division. In 1976, Raskin underwent a sex-change operation and assumed a new identity as Dr. Renee Richards. She was a larger than average player and more competitive than ever before.

When she tried to enter the U.S. Open, the other women protested, and the matter was taken to court. A federal judge ruled that Richards was a woman, but he could not give her a serve and volley. She lost in the first round.

Laver and Rosewall

Two televised matches in the early 1970s were largely responsible for the tennis boom in the United States—and for tennis's transformation into a major American spectator sport. In 1972 two of tennis's most dominant players, Aussies Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall, met in Dallas for the WCT Championship finals. The match was played late on a Mother's Day afternoon and was televised nationally by CBS. As the two players traded sets and sweated out superbly played points, the match entered the dinner hour and the size of its television audience had swelled to nearly 52 million. The network preempted its regular evening shows in order to stick with the three-hour-and-forty-five-minute tennis marathon; and Americans and their families, many of whom had never so much as touched a tennis racket, sat glued to their televisions as the match entered the decisive, fifth-set tiebreaker. Rosewall, then in the last years of his brilliant career, upset the exhausted Laver, and the next day millions of Americans flocked to sporting-goods stores to purchase their first rackets.

Connors and Evert

King might have brought to the sport a women's libber's edge and sense of social import, but Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert, the decade's king and queen of American tennis, brought youth, brash attitude, and even a little romance. Engaged to be married, Connors and Evert each became Wimbledon singles champions in 1974. By the fall of that year the couple had broken up, but the love affair each had begun with fans furthered the American tennis boom—and sustained America's newly found prominence in a sport that had been dominated by the Aussies. Unlike his former fiancée, Connors was subject to temper tantrums on the court. His relations with fellow players was often chilly, and his boycott of the Davis Cup did not make him the darling of the U.S. tennis establishment. But his fiery brand of competition endeared him to many. He was a new breed of player whose two-handed backhand, metal racket, and bold and arrogant attitude constantly challenged tennis convention. Evert also was breaking new ground. In 1976, in only her third season on the tour, she became the first woman to earn $1 million in prize money. She simply dominated the tour, winning twelve of seventeen tournaments in 1976, including Wimbledon. Her stoic demeanor, intense look of concentration, and baseline style punctuated by her two-handed back-hand were emulated by high-school players. Her presence in women's tennis was responsible for the cultivation of future champions, most notably Tracy Austin. In 1977, at the age of fourteen, Austin reached the U.S. Open quarterfinals; in 1979 she beat Evert in straight sets to win the tournament.

Fortune

At decade's end many—such as Neil Amdur in his January 1979 World Tennis article, "Has the Tennis Boom Lost its Bloom?"—were wondering if American interest in the sport had peaked. Tournament attendance figures and the numbers of Americans taking up the sport continued to remain high, but recreational interest in sports such as racquetball seemed to be greater. Furthermore, many feared that the glut of tennis programming on television was overkill, as the same matches were often shown repeatedly. Connors and his American successor John McEnroe were also displaying an ugly side to competitive tennis, and temper tantrums were becoming more frequent at junior tennis events as well. Critics such as former great Jack Kramer warned that the sport was becoming too fast-paced, too rich, and consequently too obnoxious for even the most spectacle-loving American sports fans to stomach. At the end of decade Kramer was sounding a warning: "The game is headed for a great depression unless we solve the problems."