{"id":35,"date":"2026-09-01T07:57:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T12:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/best-two-weeks-in-sports\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T15:15:52","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T19:15:52","slug":"best-two-weeks-in-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/best-two-weeks-in-sports\/","title":{"rendered":"Best two weeks in sports"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

MIKE BURKE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allegany Communications Sports<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The daily and, best of all, nightly drama is happening now, as Sunday marked the beginning of tennis\u2019 U.S. Open, for my money, the best and most enjoyable major sporting event we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. Open has always been Casablanca and Rick\u2019s, because everybody comes to the U.S. Open \u2013 the biggest reason being it\u2019s played from morning to midnight every day and night in the heart of New York City, and for two solid weeks it lives up to New York\u2019s being the city that never sleeps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the U.S. Open moved out of stuffy Forest Hills and into the National Tennis Center, now the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, at Flushing Meadow in 1978, it was symbolic. Tennis in this country had exploded from the country club to the public parks and playgrounds in the form of a spacious national tennis center situated in a city park where everybody and anybody could simply walk right in and enjoy the very best the sport had to offer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, every late August, great memories ensue from a time in the 1970s and \u201980s when tennis, boxing and horse racing were right up there in popularity with football, basketball, baseball and golf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While today\u2019s tennis provides great drama with so many talented players, including good American players once more, there has never been a more golden era for tennis than the 1970s and the early-to-mid \u201980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were names and difference makers in the game then: Ashe, Borg, McEnroe, Nastase, Vitas and Lendl, with a 14-year-old kid by the name of Boris winning Wimbledon on the men\u2019s side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the women\u2019s side, it was King, Court, Evert, Navratilova, Goolagong, and Austin, with Graf just beginning to realize her legend. Then, of course, there was Gabriela Sabatini, who won just one grand slam (the 1990 U.S. Open, no less), but if you were there, you understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet as we say here every U.S. Open, the guy who brought the sport of tennis to the Everyman and helped the U.S. Open soar into being the event it\u2019s become was Jimmy Connors, \u201cThe Brash Basher of Belleville,\u201d who was taught and coached by his mother and his grandmother, which was brilliantly chronicled by the late, great Frank Deford in his 1978 Sports Illustrated piece, \u201cRaised by Women to Conquer Men.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a year at UCLA, Connors, a left-hander who hit a hard, flat ball, came to professional tennis in 1972 as a product of the public parks of St. Louis, and it showed, not only in his impassioned play, but in the vulgarities he spewed while on the court, further distancing himself from the repulsed country-club tennis establishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of which, to the great dismay and disgust of my country-club tennis playing aunt Sue, appealed to me a great deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connors attracted blokes like me to tennis, and if his crass behavior on the court wasn\u2019t enough to turn the establishment against him, his engagement to Chris Evert, the darling of tennis, most certainly was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connors would tone down the act after some mentoring from Arthur Ashe and after a younger, more combustible tennis genius by the name of John McEnroe would enter the picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Providing wonderful irony (not to mention gall), Connors often scolded McEnroe on-court for his behavior. But he remained anti-establishment, as well as the best player in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still the career singles titles leader for men (109) in the Open era, an eight-time grand-slam winner and a five-time U.S. Open champion, Connors took tennis to the taxi drivers, the street vendors, construction workers, firemen and to the cops walking the beat. While his behavior would improve considerably, he would never mellow as he played with the same grit that his fans went to work with everyday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then he married former Playboy Playmate of the Year Patti McGuire and the Connors legend was cemented in the eyes of Joe Hardhat, making New York\u2019s Louis Armstrong Stadium (the main stadium before Arthur Ashe Stadium) Connors\u2019 homefield, with the everyday New Yorker being his fanbase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connors and New York fed off each other for the next 13 years until, as all tennis players do, he faded into retirement, giving way to the great era of Sampras, Agassi, Courier, Chang, Graf and then the Williams sisters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Billie Jean King maintains Connors had the greatest return of serve in the history of the game, followed by Andre Agassi. Both in their day were considered rebels, though Agassi\u2019s rebel ways were manufactured for television ads and photo ops. Neither he nor his game were real until he married Steffi Graf and grew up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Connors always stood for something during his career and that was never giving up the fight and never giving up on a match, which appealed to New Yorkers a great deal and might explain why he had mastered the return of serve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With no apologies to Wimbledon, the U.S. Open is the greatest tennis tournament in the world, played in the greatest city in the world to the smartest and loudest fans in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To some of us, the best games to watch are baseball, tennis and golf, mainly because they are games that do not end on a clock. You can\u2019t run a few plays into the line to kill the clock, as Earl Weaver once said about baseball. You have to give the other man his chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In tennis and in golf you have to play every point and all 18 holes. However long it takes, that\u2019s how long it takes. You never hear Rory McElroy say, \u201cI just ran out of time,\u201d do you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s two delicious weeks of late-night mystery and noise. However, with the start of each U.S. Open comes a certain melancholy, because it marks the end of summer for the most part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet for my money, the U.S. Open, in the heart of New York, is the only good way to send the summer out with a bang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the best two weeks in sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began. covering sports for the Prince George\u2019s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at mikeburke934@gmail.com<\/a>. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports The daily and, best of all, nightly drama is happening now, as Sunday marked the beginning of tennis\u2019 U.S. Open, for my money, the best and most enjoyable major sporting event we have. The U.S. Open has always been Casablanca\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allegany-communications-sports-w-mike-burke","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63,"href":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radio.wvrcdev.com\/cumberlandsmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}