Michael Steinberger has a fun, brief New York Times Magazine piece this weekend, “Queens Was Burning, Too,” which recalls another incendiary borough, which roiled all throughout the steamy months of 1977, the Summer of Sam, like John McEnroe on the wrong side of an “out” call at the U.S. Open. The opening:

“On a Sunday night midway through the 1977 U.S. Open, nearly 7,000 people gathered in the stadium at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, for a third-round match between the ninth-seeded Eddie Dibbs and an 18-year-old named John McEnroe, who was making his debut at the tournament that year. Two months earlier, McEnroe surprised the tennis world by reaching the semifinals of Wimbledon as a qualifier. His feathery touch dazzled the British fans while his combustive behavior led the British tabloids to nickname him Superbrat. Now McEnroe, who grew up in nearby Douglaston, looked poised to make a deep run at the Open. First, though, he had to get past Dibbs, a short, speedy player known as Fast Eddie.

Soon after the match started, a commotion in the stands halted play. A spectator had been shot in the leg; the bullet, the police later surmised, was fired from a nearby apartment building. At the time, New York was still reeling from the citywide blackout in July and the looting that followed. It had been terrorized for much of the summer by the Son of Sam, and now a scene straight out of Black Sunday, a film about a planned attack at the Super Bowl released earlier that year, seemed to be unfolding at the Open. ‘It had been a crazy summer in New York,’ says Bud Collins, the famed tennis commentator, who left the press box to investigate the disturbance, ‘and we were all up there wondering if another bullet was going to appear.’

Dibbs and McEnroe didn’t want to stick around to find out. As McEnroe later recalled, when an umpire told them what happened, Dibbs announced, ‘I’m out of here.’ Then the story was coincidentally revised: the fan hadn’t been shot, he’d gone into shock. The match eventually resumed with McEnroe beating Dibbs two sets to one. (At that time, early-round men’s matches at the Open were best-of-three.) Only later did they learn that it had indeed been gunfire.”