Sport: 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In the ten years since shamateurism gave way to open competition, and open compensation, under-the-table payments have been replaced by out-of-this-world purses, and country-club courtliness has been supplanted by locker-room epithets.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 . . ."