INDIAN WELLS, Calif.—On a warm Monday night at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, Mylan World Team Tennis (WTT) celebrated its 40th birthday. Hosted by league co-founder Billie Jean King and CEO/commissioner Ilana Kloss, attendees included dozens of players from all of the league’s five decades, including Roy Emerson, Chris Evert, Lindsay Davenport, and Andy Roddick. Fitting indeed that WTT would mark this occasion at the venue of the BNP Paribas Open, the spectacular dual-gender tournament that’s also turned 40 this year.
If in ways big and small each of us is formed by the decade we were born in, consider that these two properties—and make no mistake, this story is as much about real estate as tennis—began in the game’s Wild West era, the 1970s. These were the early years of Open tennis, a period teeming with so much tumult that to decode all that happened you’d need a team of political scientists, economists, and sociologists. Though both league and tournament began with a splash, as early as age five each was threatened with extinction, and not for the only time.
The common thread between these two: A pair of windmill-tilting leaders born within three months of one another. It’s intriguing to note that King and Pasarell were the top-ranked Americans in 1967, the final year of tennis’ amateur era. Having played well into their 20s during the days when players were paid under the table and tournaments were mostly held at genteel clubs, King and Pasarell raged with a desire for tennis players to earn a legitimate living. When the sport went open in 1968, they stormed the gates, King the star of the fledgling women’s tour and the creation of the WTA in 1973, Pasarell among the founders of a player’s association that by 1972 would be christened the ATP.
Tennis’ territories were in disarray. That’s hard to believe given their current status, but through much of the ’70s the four majors were scarcely omnipotent. Nary a top player went to Australia. Roland Garros’ mix of facilities and prize money was at best second-rate. The U.S. Open was clearly getting too big for its old-school and old-money facility in Forest Hills. Even Wimbledon suffered, the depth of its men’s field in 1972 and ’73 gutted by political factors. Said King, “In those years it was about building the tour and creating opportunities.” So long, country club days. Hello, arena nights.
World Team Tennis began in 1974, a 44-match season—yes, 44—that ran from May to August with a break for Wimbledon. From ’74 to ’78, the lineups were rich, featuring such stars as Rod Laver, John Newcombe, Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, Ilie Nastase, Martina Navratilova, Evonne Goolagong, Virginia Wade, Evert, and, of course, King. Less than a decade earlier, King and her mates had competed in white clothes and struck white tennis balls. Now, in the Technicolor ’70s, everything exploded.
From the start, World Team Tennis became the sport’s de facto innovation center for such new approaches as vocal fans, roving umpires, multi-colored courts, glittery outfits, music on changeovers, playing service lets, no-ad scoring, and on-court coaching. Experimentation, community, and access quickly became the league’s watchwords. Said Kloss, “We’re small, we’re nimble, we can try things, see if they work and if they don’t, quickly try something else.”
But by the end of the 1978 season, despite such wealthy owners as future Los Angeles Lakers head Jerry Buss and current New England Patriots honcho Bob Kraft, the league’s business model had toppled. There was no WTT season in 1979 or 1980.
1980 was also a pivotal year in the history of what is now called the BNP Paribas Open. The Palm Springs-area tournament had begun in 1976, an ATP-run event that from the start showed considerable promise. Held that first year in Rancho Mirage at Mission Hills Country Club, the first field included stars Laver, Borg, and Connors. By 1980 it also boasted an impressive $250,000 purse.
The winner turned out to be the weather. The 1980 tournament was gutted by a massive flood that forced all play to be cancelled at the semifinal stage. The ATP contemplated ditching it once and for all. “People thought the desert wasn’t the place to have a tournament,” said Ray Moore, a former pro, ATP board member throughout the ’70s and current BNP Paribas Open CEO. “But Charlie had vision.” Pasarell, Moore noted, made persuasive comparisons to such locales as Augusta, Georgia, the small town that hosted golf’s incredibly successful Masters tournament.
By 1980, Pasarell had been living in the desert for several years. An ATP board member, he delicately grabbed control of the event and knew that to some degree he’d have to compete to some degree for player and public attention with nearby tour spots in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Pasarell next took a step that would chart the tournament’s destiny: He moved it to a new venue, the La Quinta Hotel. The point here wasn’t that La Quinta was the perfect spot. The point was the recognition that tennis events went hand in hand with real estate, construction, and a certain financial accountability that was vital to meet the growing prize-money demands of players—and the increasing number of fans flocking from all over the world to the desert.
Outgrowing La Quinta, Pasarell and Moore built a new facility—including a hotel—in nearby Indian Wells that opened in 1987. “Charlie knew he was going to need a first-rate stadium,” said Butch Buchholz, a former pro who in the course of his career has served as WTT commissioner, ATP executive director, and the founder/tournament director of the Miami Open dual-gender event played in Key Biscayne, Florida.
By 1990, when the ATP reinvented the tour, creating a new calendar and hierarchy of tournaments, Indian Wells earned designation as what was informally dubbed the “Super Nine” and is now known as a Masters 1000 event—the level of tournament just below the Grand Slams. By 2014, all of the other events in the western U.S. had vanished.