Super Saturday 1984: Thirteen Sets Before Midnight

Tennis never knows when it will be done. There is no clock, no fourth quarter, no last call. Tournaments guess how long matches will run and build the day around the guess. On Saturday, September 8, 1984, the US Open put both men's semifinals and the women's final on one court, one after another, and spent the next twelve hours learning how wrong a guess can be.

The Card

The format had a name: Super Saturday. Two men's semis and the women's final, stacked in Louis Armstrong Stadium for a national television audience, with the men's final the next afternoon. The tournament dropped the format years ago. The 1984 edition is the reason people still say the name.

Look at who was on it. John McEnroe, world No. 1, in the middle of a season that still holds up as one of the best any man has played. Jimmy Connors, who had just turned 32 and had already won this tournament five times. Ivan Lendl, the reigning French Open champion, who had lost the previous two finals in New York and wanted this one badly. Pat Cash, a 19-year-old Australian who served and volleyed like he had somewhere else to be. And in the women's final, Martina Navratilova against Chris Evert, the rivalry that had carried the women's game for a decade.

Five Grand Slam champions and a teenager who would become one. Nobody on that card was going to roll over.

Lendl and the Teenager

Lendl and Cash opened the main program and set the tone for everything after. Cash took the first set. Lendl took the next two. Cash forced a tiebreak in the fourth and won it. The fifth went to a tiebreak as well, and this time Lendl got there first: 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-7, 7-6.

On any other day, that match is the headline. Here it was the opener.

Cash got his payback three years later, beating Lendl in the 1987 Wimbledon final and climbing through the crowd to reach his box. In New York in 1984, he was just the kid who dragged Lendl to a fifth-set tiebreak.

Martina in Evert's Building

The women's final went on whenever the first semifinal let it. Navratilova came in as the defending champion and the most dominant player in the sport, riding a winning streak that would eventually reach 74 matches. Evert had won the US Open six times and had the building on her side. New York wanted her to win this one.

For a set, she gave them what they wanted, taking it 6-4. Then Navratilova did what she had been doing to everybody for two years and took the next two, 6-4, 6-4. It was her sixth major title in a row.

At three sets, it was the shortest match of the day. That tells you what kind of day it was.

Lights On in Queens

By the time McEnroe and Connors walked out, the sun was going down over Flushing Meadow. These two did not like each other, and neither spent much effort hiding it. They had gone five sets in the same round here in 1980. Two months earlier, in the Wimbledon final, McEnroe had taken Connors apart, giving up four games in three sets.

New York was a different story. McEnroe won the first set. Connors won the second. McEnroe edged the third. Connors took the fourth. The fifth went to McEnroe, and the match finished a little after 11 p.m.: 6-4, 4-6, 7-5, 4-6, 6-3.

Add it up. Across the three marquee matches, 13 sets were played, and all three went the full distance. That is 135 games of tennis on one court in one day, between players who had already won majors or soon would. The first ball of the day had been struck roughly twelve hours before the last one.

Sunday Came Anyway

The men's final was the next afternoon. McEnroe had finished his semifinal close to midnight. Lendl had been showered and done since the afternoon. If fatigue was going to decide anything all week, it was going to decide this.

It did not. McEnroe beat Lendl 6-3, 6-4, 6-1 for his fourth US Open title, three months after Lendl had come back from two sets down to beat him in the French Open final. McEnroe finished 1984 with an 82-3 record.

Then comes the strangest part of the whole story. McEnroe was 25, at the top of the sport, and he never won another Grand Slam singles title. Lendl lost his third straight final in New York that Sunday, then won the next three. The sport tilted toward him and stayed there for years.

The US Open eventually stopped asking men to play a semifinal and a final on back-to-back days, and fair enough. But the schedule makers in 1984 got something nobody could have planned: the best players in the world, one after another, all refusing to lose quickly. Twelve hours, three matches, one court. Nobody got off it early.