Playing in his first US Open in singles at Forest Hills Stadium in 1977, tennis icon John McEnroe made his debut at 18 with a bang.
An unseeded upstart, the Queens native found himself on the identical clay courts where he was once a ballboy — gliding and grinding in an interborough contest against Brooklyn-born Top Tenner Eddie Dibbs in his third-round match.
But, on the primary changeover, something wildly unexpected happened.
“We were switching sides after which there was some commotion up within the stands, and the umpire said to us, ‘Someone’s been shot within the stands,’ ” McEnroe, 64, told The Post.
“And Eddie Dibbs was like, ‘I’m getting the hell outta here!’ We walked off the court, and we form of waited to search out out what was happening.”
It turned out that a spectator had been by chance shot within the leg from a stray bullet fired from outside the stadium. However the incident pumped up a feisty young McEnroe to attain certainly one of his first big upsets.
“We went back and played the match, which was certainly one of my biggest wins of my life at the moment,” said McEnroe, who went on to lose to 1975 US Open champion Manuel Orantes within the fourth round.
“It was actually a bizarre first US Open for me.”
It was also the last he would play at Forest Hills Stadium. The next 12 months, the tourney moved a couple of miles north to Flushing Meadows, where McEnroe would eventually smash his option to 4 victories at what’s now generally known as the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.
However the magic at Forest Hills Stadium didn’t stop in 1977. Opened 100 years ago as America’s premier tennis site, the long-lasting venue has played host to not only racket royalty — but a number of the biggest names in music, too, still to today.
“It’s the stadium’s one centesimal birthday, and our tenth 12 months of doing shows out here,” said Mike Luba, president of Forest Hills Stadium, who reopened the venue — after a 16-year drought — with a Mumford & Sons show in August 2013 that will herald its transformation into certainly one of NYC’s hottest summer concert spots.
The West Side Tennis Club commissioned the constructing of the stadium to carry events comparable to the US National Championships and the Davis Cup. In August 1923, it first hosted the Wightman Cup — the ladies’s team competition where the US faced off against Great Britain — before becoming the house of the US Nationals after which the US Open.
American ace Bill Tilden won the primary US Nationals held at Forest Hills Stadium in 1924 and twice more while it was a grass-court tournament. “Mainly, quite a lot of people consider it was built because Bill Tilden was so popular and he was playing to sell-out crowds,” said Beatrice Hunt, 67, a West Side Tennis Club member since 1971 who now serves as its archivist.
The stadium would go on to serve up historic tennis moments comparable to Harlem-born Althea Gibson breaking the colour barrier in 1950; one other African-American, Arthur Ashe, winning the inaugural US Open in 1968, as an amateur who needed to forfeit his winnings to losing finalist Tom Okker and Aussie great Rod Laver completing two Grand Slams in 1962 and 1969.
And in the fashionable tennis boom, there was a 16-year-old Chris Evert fascinating the sports world together with her two-handed backhand and ponytailed charm on her fairy-tale trip to the semifinals against Billie Jean King in 1971.
The truth is, McEnroe was a ballboy at Forest Hills Stadium — watching champions comparable to Pancho Gonzales and Adriano Panatta smoke cigarettes across the grounds in between matches — before he became the Man on the US Open.
“I ballboyed there for 3 years,” he said. “I remember ballboying for Bjorn Borg, who later turned out to be my best rival. And I had an inkling that I desired to be like him because … there was quite a lot of interest in what he was doing, particularly from young girls. In order that made it an entire lot more interesting to hopefully [follow] in his footsteps.”
Along with the elite tennis players of the world, Forest Hills Stadium also hosted a number of the biggest music acts of the ’60s and ’70s — from the Beatles, who famously landed in a helicopter in 1964, to Bob Dylan, who folked up the venue in each 1965 after which 51 years later in 2016.
That second Dylan concert, though, might never have happened. By 2010, the storied stadium was on the verge of going condo.
Forest Hills Stadium historian and preservationist Michael Perlman, 40, spearheaded the campaign to save lots of the venue from being bought by developers and demolished when it had been long dormant.
“It was holy ground,” he said “I attempted to point out how it will be more profitable to revive it and profit our community and city in the long run,” said the fifth-generation Forest Hills resident. “It felt like a destroy in Rome, just like the Colosseum … Since it’s positioned in Queens, sometimes it doesn’t get the entire attention or the complete appreciation.”
The members of the West Side Tennis Club never got the two-thirds vote required to dump the property. And the stadium got a second lease on life after Luba had a moment of serendipitous inspiration in 2012.
“I had spent a few summers on the road with the Mumford & Sons guys — two of whom are literally from Wimbledon in England,” said Luba, 52. “And having grown up on Long Island and played tennis in highschool, I used to be aware of the urban legend of Forest Hills. So I cold-called the tennis club, and the top pro picked up the phone and said, ‘I don’t know who you might be … but your timing is pretty good.’”
Now, even with some neighborhood residents recently raising noise complaints, Forest Hills Stadium is launching its best and biggest concert season yet, with upcoming shows by the likes of Dave Matthews Band (June 9), Fall Out Boy (Aug. 1) and Duran Duran (Sept. 22).
McEnroe — who once shared the stage on guitar with Carlos Santana at Forest Hills and even tried to purchase the stadium to preserve it — is planning to be back where all of it began for him this summer.
Except he won’t be rocking those short shorts and that headband like back within the day.
“It brings back memories. The red clay where there’s parking — that’s where I played once I was 9 or 10 years old,” said the seven-time Grand Slam champ, who, after covering the French Open for NBC and Eurosport May 28 to June 11, will launch his recent ESPN+ show “McEnroe’s Places” later this summer.
“I’m glad that the rock and roll thing, the music thing, happens more often. It gives me more of a probability to go there.”
