Such magnanimity was not evident on the men’s side. In contrast to the sense of fraternity that characterizes men’s tennis these days (the hugs, the tears!), petulance was the defining attribute in the mid-1970s. The locker room wasn’t devoid of camaraderie — the tour’s reigning heartthrobs, Bjorn Borg and Brooklyn’s own Vitas Gerulaitis, were known to be close friends and partied together. Mostly, though, there was a lot of ill will, much of it supplied by Jimmy Connors, who took his bad-boy antics to new depths during the ’77 Open. When Corrado Barazzutti challenged a line call in their semifinal match, Connors ran around the net and erased the ball mark before the chair umpire could inspect it. Connors beat Barazzutti but lost the final in spectacular fashion to Guillermo Vilas of Argentina, whose muscular frame and seismic topspin made him something of an early-model Rafael Nadal. Enraged about a line call that went against him on match point, Connors bolted from the stadium before the trophy ceremony. Not that many people noticed. In one of the more surreal moments in Grand Slam history, dozens of fans ran onto the court to celebrate Vilas’s win and parade him on their shoulders.

The biggest story on the men’s side that year, however, was a racket. In the early 1970s, a German horticulturalist and tennis buff named Werner Fischer created a double-strung racket whose unusual weaving generated enormous topspin and high, unfamiliar bounces. What came to be known as the spaghetti racket quickly caught on with German amateurs and eventually found its way into the hands of some professionals, among them the Australian veteran Barry Phillips-Moore, who notched a number of wins using it.

During the spring of 1977, a young pro from Long Island named Michael Fishbach was traveling the European circuit when he noticed Phillips-Moore using the strange racket. Fishbach was intrigued — it was clear to him that the racket rewarded players with excellent touch, like himself. “I had a lot of wrist and racket control,” Fishbach says. “If players were ranked on the basis of ability to produce severe angles and drop shots, I would have been among the top players in the world.” The spaghetti racket also appealed to him because it introduced an element of surprise. All of that spin made the ball move in quirky ways.

Phillips-Moore refused to let anyone examine his racket, but while playing a tournament in Gstaad, Switzerland, that spring, Fishbach came across a similar one in, oddly, a camera store. The shop’s owner wouldn’t let him buy the thing, but Fishbach got a good enough look at it that he was confident he could assemble one of his own. After returning to the United States that summer, he and his brother spent some 30 hours stringing the racket, using nylon strings, Venetian-blind cord, plastic tubing and adhesive tape to cobble it together. Fishbach’s rendering of the spaghetti racket produced exactly the desired effect — massive topspin and big bounces. It turned out that the key to the racket was the lateral movement of the main strings. Not only did they slide farther on the spaghetti racket than on conventional ones, but they also sprang back into place while the ball was still on the racket. (This didn’t happen nearly as much with normal rackets, which is why players often adjusted their strings between points.)

Fishbach, who was ranked 200th in the world, won three qualifying matches with the spaghetti racket to gain entry into the main draw of the Open. He then beat the very gifted Billy Martin in the first round to earn a match against the former U.S. Open and Wimbledon champion Stan Smith, whom he crushed 6-0, 6-2. By now, Fishbach’s magic wand, as Sports Illustrated later dubbed it, had become a matter of controversy. After the Smith match, there was talk of outlawing the racket.