December, 2006
LAMAR HUNT BROUGHT TENNIS INTO THE OPEN ERA

Tournament tennis had been around a long time - 90 years - before Lamar Hunt looked in on the game, and started writing checks. He was as good with a pen as one of his newly-signed employees, Wimbledon and US champion John Newcombe, was with a racket.

Hunt, who died Wednesday, was a Texas rich guy who didn't act like one. A gentleman, humble, soft-spoken, straightforward, he flew steerage class until late in life when, ill, he used a private jet. But he was always first-class in his imaginative dealings in numerous sporting ventures. His was a creative mind. He liked being in on the start of things, as he was as a founder of the American Football League in 1960 and its later merger in 1966 with the National Football League, coining "Super Bowl" for the championship game.

His money came from the ground, oil ventures of his wildcatting daddy, H.L. Hunt. Besides his Kansas City Chiefs, Lamar in 1967 greased the beginnings of "open" tennis with those petrodollars poured into a sport that he hardly knew. He also funded soccer projects. When his parent was asked if young Lamar might go broke throwing millions at sports, the old man answered, "Maybe in a hundred years."

Lamar was curious when a friend in New Orleans, Dave Dixon, sought his help in bankrolling then-struggling-and-insignificant pro tennis.

At that time a very wide chasm separated the alleged amateurs, who played a recognized circuit, including the majors, for chump change under the well-known table, and a handful of pros barred from the spotlight and subsisting mainly on one-night stands. True, John Bottomley, president of Longwood Cricket Club in 1964, averted a likely pro collapse by bringing the US Pro Championships to Boston -- $ 10,000 total prize money for a 12 man field. This and a few other cities following suit were a transfusion.

But the game needed more, richer blood, a breakthrough that forced professionalization and over-the-counter prize money. That's where Hunt came in as Dixon's partner, enabling the birth of WCT (World Championship Tennis). He agreed to pick up most of the tab for establishing an office in Dallas and raiding the amateur ranks. An aide, Bob Briner, was sent on safari to the US Championships, and the hunting - should I say Hunt-ing? -- was easy.

"Briner took me and Tony Roche to a fine clothing store and bought us new suits," said Newcombe, the world No. 1," and we were impressed. The money he talked made us thrilled to leave amateurism." He and Roche were two-thirds of Australia's Davis Cup juggernaut. The other one-third, Roy Emerson, would eventually join the flock.

The dollars were guaranteed, somewhere between $ 30,000 and $ 60,000 for the year, a gold mine to Briner's catches. Signing on three other amateurs (Nikki Pilic, Roger Taylor, Cliff Drysdale) and three pros (Butch Buchholz, Dennis Ralston, Pierre Barthes), he had a gang that Dixon dubbed "The Handsome Eight."

Whenever Roche, a firm-jawed country boy (currently Roger Federer's coach) was asked where he stood among the handsomes, he'd answer, "Fifteenth."

Dixon planned a tournament tour for his iconoclastic octet, the first in tennis annals to abandon all-white apparel, clad in startling colors, each with his own shade - Newcombe in a raspberry polo. The tour, badly organized and promoted, was a flop financially, but a success historically. WCT had captured four of the amateur top ten, and Wimbledon had lost 75 per cent of its 1967 semis: Newcombe, Taylor, Pilic. Since the greatest of pros, Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall and Pancho Gonzalez, would soon be targets for Hunt's pen, it was apparent to Herman David, who ran Wimbledon, and Bob Kelleher, the US, that the cream of the men's game had flowed across that chasm to the outlaw side. Their amateur camp was impoverished.

Within months everybody was together under the banner of "open" tennis. The subject had been debated, and rejected, for decades within the ultra Stone-age amateur ruling body, the ITF (International Tennis Federation). Now there was no choice.

"Amateurism" became an archaic term, although it took time to sort it out.

"It wouldn't have happened without Lamar," says Butch Buchholz, one of the handsomes who later launched the eminent spring tourney at Key Biscayne, Fla., and was tapped for the International Tennis Hall of Fame. "That first year [1968] nothing went right for us. The only tournament that made money was Shreveport. And that was a fluke. The truck carrying our carpet court didn't show up. Dixon had insurance against such mishaps, and the company paid off.

"Lamar told me you have to be ready to take a bath when you go into new sports - but this looks like a long swim."

It was. Dixon lost his shirt and was quickly gone. But 35-year-old Hunt had an invulnerable wardrobe. He picked up the pieces, added Laver and Rosewall and carried on, hiring ex-British Davis Cupper Mike Davies to direct the show.

"That," says Buchholz,"was a great move. "Mike made WCT into the first really professional organization in the game. With Lamar's football connections helping, Mike got the tour on NBC."

In 1970 Davies told Hunt, "I need a million bucks. That was a huge sum then. I wanted to expand WCT to 20 tournaments at $ 50,000 each, unheard of then. We had to guarantee the money although we came close to making it all back. But Lamar said OK, win or lose."

That global circuit was called the World Championship of Tennis, culminating in an 8-man playoff in Dallas, offering a $ 50,000 payoff, far beyond first prize at any of the four majors.

In 1972 those tiny titans out of Australia clashed for that jackpot. Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver kept a nationwide TV audience enthralled for 3 1/2 hours in one of the all-time masterpieces. Rosewall, 37, won in a fifth set tie-breaker, and gasped, "I never even thought of so much money in my life. I always thought I'd be selling life insurance or something at this age."

That encounter gave new life to the pros. (And to Rosewall, still winning titles 5 years later.) Despite the wars he went through with the ITF and later the ATP (Association of Tennis Pros), Hunt was, says Davies, "one of those rare guys everyone respected and liked even if they were fighting him. And he responded in a like manner, although that was difficult because they were trying to put us out of business." Finally the ATP did in 1990. The WCT tour that had meant so much in professionalizing the game for 22 years was dead.

Billie Jean King said yesterday, "Lamar was a visionary. It was one of the saddest days for tennis when they pushed him out."

"I detected no bitterness in Lamar," says Davies. "He enjoyed the ride, a sportsman always. His innovating deeds got him into the Tennis Hall of Fame [as well as the Pro Football and Soccer Halls]. Lucky for all of us in tennis that he gave the pro game the big step forward."

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