People and Pop Culture
Open House
Forty years ago, the U.S. Tennis Association made a bold decision to move the U.S. Open to its current home. Tennis great Billie Jean King looks back at how, while difficult, the tournament and its fans came away winners.
The first U.S. Open held in Flushing in 1978 offered a glimpse of the event’s potential for the decades ahead.Jack Mecca/Tennis Magazine
The small tennis stadium — next to a scraggly field and not far from LaGuardia Airport, featuring little seating and with more than two dozen side courts — didn’t look like much, but to American tennis in 1978, it was major improvement.
The U.S. Open, the country’s national tennis championship, had been played in Queens since 1915, at the quaint West Side tennis club in Forest Hills. Its horseshoe-shaped main stadium and Tudor-style clubhouse reeked of tradition, so many players preferred to see the event stay put.
But the U.S. Open knew it needed a new location that would offer more for fans and more room for expansion.
“We had to move from West Side. Even if we didn’t want to, we had to,” said Billie Jean King.
Once I saw how much space there was, I said ‘Now we can take care of the customer’.
Billie Jean King
Her reaction to the U.S. Open's move
King’s hesitation evaporated when she saw the new location three miles from Forest Hills in Flushing, which was built on part of an old World’s Fair site and a short walk from Shea Stadium, the then-home of the New York Mets.
“Once I saw how much space there was, I said ‘Now we can take care of the customer,’” King said. “And it’s right near the freeway, which makes it accessible; near the subway, accessibility; it’s a public park, I like that idea; that sends a really strong message.
“It has got a lot of land because you know things always expand and if we are going to take care of the customer and the players, all the other things that go into it, we are going to need more space,” she said.
King was right. At this year’s event, which starts this week, more than 700,000 fans are expected to stream through the gates over the next two weeks. The stadium pictured above, Louis Armstrong, is reopening as a rebuilt, retractable roof venue (it is now the No. 2 stadium) as the final touch of a five-year, $600 million-plus renovation.
King, a four-time U.S. Open champion, finished her career playing at the new site in 1982. Her name now graces the complex, something she says she couldn’t have imagined back when the U.S. Open moved, especially given some of her long-ago struggles with the U.S. Tennis Association hierarchy, including when King and other players briefly formed a rival tennis organization in the early 1970s.
“We have had our ups and downs in the early years,” she said. “Thank God we are in a good place now.”
