Open court

Victoria Sun

Friday, March 31, 2000 | 10:27 a.m.

Alan King couldn't contain his enthusiasm when he talked about the legendary professional tennis tournament he ran in Las Vegas from 1972-85.

Sitting in one of the plush conference rooms of the brand new $75 million Indian Wells (Calif.) Tennis Garden recently, King reminisced about his former venture.

"It was more than a tennis tournament, it was a carnival," King said of the Alan King/Caesars Palace Tennis Classic. "We used to bring in 32 celebrities to play with 32 pros.

"It was great. It was a great time. For those who remember, it was definitely a Las Vegas event."

What he's not so sure of is when this quintessential country club city, one that offers ideal tennis conditions seven months out of the year, will nab a coveted week on the ATP Tour calendar again.

"I think for the people of Las Vegas, it's an entertainment center, so they should have a tournament," King said. "How they're going to get it, I don't know.

"To bring a small tournament to Las Vegas after what we did and what's going on now would have had no meaning. To get a big one, it's tough now."

Try improbable, unless someone with a big pocketbook and an even bigger love of tennis steps forward.

Since King stopped running his tournament in 1985, the only pro tennis in town has been a Challenger event, tennis' equivalent of the minor leagues.

What King did by running his event that offered $50,000 in prize money in 1972 and was increased to $495,000 in 1985 was help transform men's professional tennis into a lucrative multibillion dollar business.

Before 1990, when the ATP Tour was formed, the Men's Tennis Council oversaw all operations of the sport.

Each year the MTC would draw up a tournament schedule for the following year. It was a lot of work, but it allowed more flexibility for new tournaments to be added to the calendar.

The advent of the ATP Tour brought about the start of the permanent tennis calendar and the start of tournament stops becoming franchises.

According to J. Wayne Richmond, executive vice president of the Americas for the tour, the move was beneficial for several reasons.

"We decided to make tournaments franchises and we had an application process where cities could bid for spots on the calendar," Richmond said. "We're like the NBA, NFL and NHL.

"People own memberships now so basically they own franchises on our tour. The difference for us is as a member, you have a date on the calendar."

The bid process for cities to secure a tournament under the new guidelines was held in January 1989. Richmond estimates that the tour received 170 applications for roughly 75 events that made up the calendar in 1990.

"At that point, no one said they wanted to bring a tournament back to Las Vegas," Richmond said.

Now, it may be too late.

There are 70 ATP Tour tournaments excluding the four Grand Slams (the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open) in the world; 15 of those are played in the U.S.

In order for Las Vegas to become a tournament host, it would have to approach an existing tournament owner, buy the tournament membership, draw up a proposal for moving the tournament, and then have the deal approved by the ATP Tour board.

"We're not adding events in North America or anywhere else in the world at this time because the calendar is already very full," Richmond said. "We have been working very hard to make sure we bring as good a player field as we can to every tournament on the tour so right now we're not adding events.

"Should someone want to move a tournament to Las Vegas, the tour board would look at who is buying it, ask if it would fit into the calendar and go through all the buying, selling and approving you'd find in other pro leagues when someone wants to buy a new team."

Because there are tournaments held in 32 countries on six continents, the deal would have to make sense geographically as well.

"You couldn't buy an event that is in the Asian swing and move that to Las Vegas," Richmond said. "So you're looking at tournaments held in February, March, April and July and August.

"That's when we play tennis in North America."

For example, if someone wanted to buy the Mercedes Benz Cup held July 24-30 this year in Los Angeles and move it here, it probably wouldn't be approved because the weather here would be too hot for tennis.

Although the 10-year-old policy makes it almost impossible to get a tournament, the benefits to the tour and its owners are enormous.

"In the past, under the old Men's Tennis Council, people only had a position on the calendar for a year," Richmond said. "So if you were going to go to a bank to apply for a loan to build a $75 million facility like this (one at Indian Wells) and the bank said, 'OK what would you have to show for it?' And you say, 'Well I've got a week on the calendar,' of course you'd be denied.

"You can't build a long-term business that way. So now people have an ownership. They can go to the bank with something like this because they own a franchise. You have an equity."

Equity?

All King had almost three decades ago was a vision and a love of tennis.

The comedian began working in Las Vegas in 1949. When Cliff Perlman, then chairman of Caesars World Inc., the group that owned the hotel, asked King what he could do to make his contract more worthwhile, King said he wanted to run a professional tennis tournament.

"I convinced the owner that it would be good, and he just said, 'Well, OK, I'll give it to him, whatever he wants,' " King recalled. "But nobody ever thought that it would be anything.

"After we gave $50,000 in prize money the first year, I said we have to up it to $100,000 the second year. They said, 'OK.' And then there was a story in Tennis Magazine when I announced $100,000 -- which was unheard of in prize money back then. They wrote an article and said, 'Alan King with his Las Vegas personality will destroy professional tennis.' "

King paused to let out a satisfied laugh.

Then he added, "They're playing for $4 million now, you know."

Tennis greats including Rod Laver, Ivan Lendl, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg played in the Alan King/Caesars Palace Tennis Classic. Pancho Gonzalez, the tennis pro at Caesars at the time, served as tournament chairman.

King said he wanted to keep the tournament running, but two things caused him to leave Las Vegas.

The first was when Perlman sold his shares in the hotel around 1983.

"The new owners thought they owned the tournament, but I owned the tournament," King said. "I didn't want to move.

"I just didn't feel I could do business with the new owners. I was spoiled by the old ownership."

Then King's friend and current ATP Tour board member Charlie Pasarell asked King to move to the California desert.

Pasarell was running a tournament in La Quinta, Calif., called the Pilot Pen Classic. He wanted King aboard to help expand the tournament by building the Hyatt Grand Champions Resort in Indian Wells. King agreed.

The Hyatt, with its 13,000-seat main stadium, was completed in 1987. It became the new home of the Pilot Pen Classic. The tournament grew to become a Mercedes Super 9 event (the highest level of competition outside of the Grand Slams) called the Newsweek Champions Cup.

When the Newsweek became so successful that the Hyatt Grand Champions couldn't accommodate the swelling number of fans and media, Pasarell and partner Ray Moore decided it was time to build a new facility.

The result was the $75 million Indian Wells Tennis Garden that was site of this year's $2.95 million Tennis Masters Series-Indian Wells that concluded on March 19. King was the tournament co-chairperson.

That tournament might have been played here.

Pasarell said he came close to moving his tournament to Las Vegas but negotiations over the financing of a stadium with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority went awry. Tourism officials refused to speak on record for this story.

"We almost had Indian Wells here in Las Vegas," said Perry Rogers, president of Andre Agassi Enterprises and Agassi's close friend. "It was very disappointing.

"If you can't bring a first-class event to Las Vegas, you don't bring it. Charlie was very committed and willing to come here, but he needed a public partnership as well. At the end of the day, we simply couldn't get it done."

And although the chances of bringing professional tennis back to Las Vegas seem slim, Richmond says that the city would be an ideal place to hold the 2002 Tennis Masters Cup.

That event, formerly known as the ATP Tour World Championship, is the season-ending championship featuring the world's top eight players competing in a round-robin format.

"I think it would be a great opportunity for Las Vegas to hold the Tennis Masters Cup in 2002," Richmond said. "It is definitely a city that we would want.

"Because Andre Agassi is a local, it makes a lot of sense, because he is usually one of the eight guys playing at the end of the year."

Until this year, the championship was held every November in Hannover, Germany. But after the ATP Tour inked a new $1.2 billion partnership with ISL Worldwide and the nine Tennis Masters Series tournaments, the parties agreed it was time to make changes in the marketing of the sport to help it become more fan friendly.

The changes included playing the Tennis Masters Cup in a different city each year and organizing the nine tournaments into the world Tennis Masters Series instead of the Mercedes Super 9.

The 2000 Tennis Masters Cup will be held in Lisbon, Portugal and the 2001 version in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

"An event like the Masters Cup would be wonderful for a city as dynamic as Las Vegas," Rogers said. "Las Vegas is a town where you have to bring first class talent and first class events. The Masters Cup certainly qualifies."

archive