New Home for a Troubled Game

After a decade, open tennis is becoming, well, decadent

It was the usual time: the last week in August and the first week of September. The usual people were in attendance: Grand Slam Candidate Bjorn Borg with a fortune in endorsement insignia to grace his tennis togs; new women's No. 1 Martina Navratilova with a fortune in gold jewelry to adorn her now-winning form; Chris Evert with a list of crack hairdressers for prematch sprucing up; Vitas Gerulaitis with a list of ear-splitting discos for post-match winding down; Evonne Goolagong stayed home with her baby; Jimmy Connors brought his mother along. Only the place was unusual: the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, better known to generations of players and fans as Forest Hills, was under way at a new site in Flushing Meadow, Queens, N.Y. After more than half a century, the small New York community that, like Wimbledon, gave a nation's tennis title its name, had vanished from the tennis vocabulary.

Forest Hills--abandoned in favor of bigger gates at the new 25,500-seat facility --is the most prominent casualty of the tennis boom. In the ten years since shamateurism gave way to open competition, and open compensation, under-the-table payments have been replaced by out-of-this-world purses, and country-club courtliness has been supplanted by locker-room epithets. With $12 million at stake this year on the men's tournament circuit and another $5 million up for grabs on the women's tour, a bad call by a linesman is worth money--not to mention a few choice words. However offensive the behavior of the modern mercenaries, other, more serious problems confronted the sport as it moved into its new National Tennis Center on the grounds of the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs.

At the end of a decade of undisciplined expansion, growing pains have begun to set in. On the eve of the U.S. Open, 15 former tennis greats--among them Fred Perry, Tony Trabert, Vic Seixas, Roy Emerson and Alice Marble--put their names to a two-page warning in a major tennis magazine, cautioning young players against the excesses of recent years. "The huge financial rewards you've received . . . were undreamed of when we were in our primes," the elders wrote. "How have you repaid it? By debasing tennis--its standards, its traditions, its reputation--and jeopardizing its future . . . Tennis must clean up its act . . ."

In the oldtimers' view, a vision shared by many in tennis, money alone has not been the root of such evil; indeed, they consider the closet professionalism of the past to have been much worse for the game. But they fear that an overabundance of lucre has choked off thoughtful cultivation of the sport's foundations. Banned from such prestigious but amateurs-only events as Wimbledon and Forest Hills, professional tennis players once barnstormed in station wagons to play for a cut of the gate at a high school gym. Today's stars are not only welcome at the big-name championships, they are free to jet from high-paying tournaments to still higher paying exhibitions to the stratospheric payoffs of staged-for-TV challenge matches. Once Jack Kramer, Lew Hoad, Pancho Gonzales and Ken Rosewall dreamed of an organized tour circuit that would provide steady income to pro regulars. The current Big Three--Borg, Connors and Argentina's Guillermo Vilas --can now ply their trade on two multimillion-dollar tours, Lamar Hunt's World Championship Tennis and the Grand Prix circuit. However, this year none of them has deigned to play in enough W.C.T. and G.P. events to qualify for the $2 million bonus pool for top players; they can make more money on the outside.

The preference for easy exhibition money over the demands of playing through a grueling tournament has littered the tennis calendar with nonscheduled two-man events and, too often, left promoters and sponsors with literally empty nets. Without top tennis names in the tourneys, gate sales slump and sponsors disappear. Late withdrawals to rest or to nurse phantom injuries--only to have fallen heroes turn up at an exhibition in Puerto Rico, not an orthopedic ward--have become common. As a result, corporations once eager to hitch their brand names to the tennis bandwagon have begun to have second thoughts. American Airlines sponsored a G.P. tournament for five years, putting up $225,000 in prize money and another $50,000 in promotion. But the absence of big-name players gradually undermined the event's allure, and the airline now refuses to sponsor the tournament next year.

It is a pattern that could be repeated--often. Says Jack Kramer: "If you want to rest, fine. But if you're so tired you can't play in tournaments, how can you go to three cities for exhibitions? The big attractions, the top five or six guys, are marauders, using TV to play exhibitions and selling out to marketing devices."

Arthur Ashe, winner of the first U.S. Open in 1968, likewise decries the new superstars' lack of loyalty to the game. As an amateur, Ashe earned $28 a day for his ten-day stint at Forest Hills, while the beaten finalist, Pro Tom Okker, took home a check for $14,000. Says Ashe: "Only when the players take it upon themselves to assume responsibility for the circuit and the health the game as a whole will we have coherence. Right now we've got some greedy players at the top who do whatever they please, entering tournaments late, asking for illegal guarantees."

The Justice Department has periodically examined the intertwined business interests of pro tennis for antitrust violations. Often the same men have painted both sides of the tennis fence. Promoters fumed at the power of Lawyer Donald Dell, who served both as agent for a number of top players and as legal adviser for the Association of Tennis Professionals. Tournament directors, such as Jack Kramer, doubled as circuit organizers. The Federal Communications Commission and a House committee have looked into CBS's bogus $250,000 "winner-take-all" match between Connors and Ilie Nastase (in which Connors actually was guaranteed $500,000 and Nastase received $150,000). Far more serious are charges of players' defaulting and "tanking," or purposely losing matches. Occasionally, players who lose early in singles expend less than full effort on their doubles matches with the aim of squeezing in a few days of rest or practice on a faltering serve.

Nastase, currently under a 90-day ban for his loathsome court behavior, threw the finals of the 1975 Canadian Open Championships after a linesman's call went against him in the first set. Nastase sleepwalked through the final sets, winning but one game, and was fined $6,000 for "not using his best efforts." But in other sports--remember baseball's Black Sox?--he might well have been banned for life for throwing a game.

For all its internal woes, the quality of play in the decade since tennis went open has become the best in the history of the game. No longer are players required to banish themselves from the top tournaments in order to earn an honest living. Kramer remembers: "If you took money under the table, you were violating IRS regulations, but the minute you did it honestly and legally, you were out of the big tournaments. It was a cruel system. You'd win Wimbledon and the next time you'd go back, you couldn't get into the locker room. The minute you turned professional, they'd take away your honorary membership in the All-England Club."

Instead top young amateurs today can count on early honing against the sport's best. And the parade of youngsters eager to enter the pro ranks of this newly lucrative sport has become a stampede. John McEnroe, at 18 the youngest semifinalist in Wimbledon history, tossed over a scholarship to turn pro. His earnings, $68,432 to date this year, are far from Borg's $550,141, but considerable for a kid who, not so long ago, survived on an allowance. At 15, Tracy Austin remains an amateur, but one sign of coming times is the fact that she is seeded No. 5 for the U.S. Open.

In many respects, the new National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadow typifies the change in the game itself. Built with U.S. Tennis Association financing for $9.5 million, it will pay for itself in short order: $6.5 million was donated to U.S.T.A. coffers by CBS in exchange for rights to televise the tournament for three years. Flushing Meadow is glass and concrete modern, not Forest Hills grass and Tudor. Jets from nearby La Guardia Airport roar overhead. And that most crucial modern convenience -- enough restroom space for thousands of tennis fans--is in ample supply.

The only question that remains unanswered about Flushing Meadow, indeed about the state of the sport, is simply: Can it last? Without care and moderate use, the answer is, most probably, not long. "When you walk around Wimbledon," Arthur Ashe says, "you somehow get the feeling that it's going to be there 100 years from now. This place, they'll tear it down in 50 years and build another one." Tennis-- at least big-time tennis as it is practiced now -- has far less time to put its house, even a plush one like the Taj in Flushing, in order.

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