anywhere in the world.” This is the sort of line you expect a rock promoter to say, but with Forest Hills, it’s not that big a stretch. I’ve never seen a band at Madison Square Garden—or any other arena, for that matter—without feeling, on some level, that I was part of the corpo - rate-entertainment-industrial complex. You don’t feel that at Forest Hills. The place is like no other, notable in a number of ways— for one, the acoustics, which people remark on time and again. “A crystal-clear sound,” the critic Robert Palmer wrote of a Talking Heads show back in ’82. “She was aided by well-balanced amplification,” a reviewer re- marked of Barbra Streisand in ’64. Beatrice Hunt, the chair of the archives committee for the West Side Tennis Club, said that even in its sorriest state, she and other members liked to take guests out to the stadium to volley, because balls echoed inside the horse - shoe with this incredibly resonant thwock .
There’s also the resonance of history. Walking around, you get a sense of what tennis—and pro sports, generally—was like before everything went big-business. The intimate scale, compared with modern sta- diums, is startling. In Carnival at Forest Hills , sportswriter Marty Bell’s account of the ’74 Open, Bell wrote that holding the cham- pionship there was like “playing the Super Bowl in a high-school stadium.” They used to hand-paint the match results on a huge board, which is still there today. The corpo- rate boxes sold for between $750 and $990, or less than what a courtside seat might cost you in 2016 at Flushing Meadows. Craig Finn said that more than as a mu- sician, he was stoked to play Forest Hills as a tennis fan. His band opened for the Re- placements in 2014. “As a kid I was really into Borg,” Finn said. “As I’ve gotten older, and especially when I moved to New York, I’ve gotten into McEnroe.” Opening for the Re-
Meat Loaf and John McEnroe during MusiCourt, a rock and roll celebrity pro-am and “jam session” at the Forest Hills Stadium in New York, Aug. 27, 1982. ap photo
68
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker