On a Sunday night midway through the 1977 US Open, nearly7,000 people gathered for a third-round match between the ninth-seeded EddieDibbs and an 18-year-old named John McEnroe, who was making his debut at thetournament that year. Two months earlier, McEnroe surprised the tennis world byreaching the semifinals of Wimbledon as a qualifier. Now McEnroe, who grew upin nearby Douglaston, looked poised to make a deep run at the Open. Soon afterthe match started, commotion in the stands halted play. A spectator had beenshot in the leg; the bullet, the police later surmised, was fired from a nearbyapartment building. Dibbs and McEnroe didn’t want to stick around to find out. Then the story was coincidentally revised: the fan hadn’t been shot, he’dgone into shock. The match eventually resumed with McEnroe beating Dibbs twosets to one.
The stray bullet was just one of a number of bizarreoccurrences that defined the ’77 Open, its final run at the normally genteelWest Side Tennis Club. Those two weeks in Forest Hills included a transgendercontroversy, mutinous fans, appalling breaches of etiquette and a jerry-builtracket strung with Venetian-blind cord that threatened to upend the wholeevent. Thirty-five years on, it remains the wildest Open ever played. ForestHills partisans opposed the move in part because they feared the chaos thatwould come with a larger, more democratic tournament. Chris Evert, who won herthird consecutive U.S. Open that year, seemed to experience a flashback whenasked about the tournament. “That year?” she said warily. “Oh, oh, oh.”
Overshadowing all of it during that first week was the entryof Renée Richards, the former Richard Raskind, who had a sex-change operationin 1975. Her presence in the draw was unsettling for some of the players. TheRichards saga was particularly striking compared with another major story linefrom that first week, the US Open debut of a 14-year-old phenom named TracyAustin. On the men’s side though there was ill will, much of it supplied byJimmy Connors. When Corrado Barazzutti challenged a line call, Connors ranaround the net and erased the ball mark before the chair umpire could inspectit. Well it was that kind of a year.
