Friday Feature: What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Been . . . for New Haven
The news about New Haven’s Pilot Pen Tennis event and the post I wrote on it (on Thursday, May 12) got me thinking about the crazy saga behind this particular event, which is now owned by the USTA. It began its life as the Bretton Woods Tennis Classic, an exhibition featuring Rod Laver and Roy Emerson, and gradually morphed into the Volvo International, a fixture in the 1980s in the scenic outpost of North Conway, deep in the wilds of New Hampshire’s Presidential Range mountains. It was an extremely successful event, but the Volvo later moved to Stratton Mountain, Vt., and finally to New Haven, Conn., where it struggled and ultimately went bust—the remains that lay around were pieced back together to create what is now the Pilot Pen tournament.
The story of how all that transpired is the subject of Nonsense at the Net, a fascinating book by the promoter of the tournament, Jim Westhall (full disclosure: Jim, whom I’ve known for a long time, hired me to edit the book, but it was for a flat fee—I stand nothing to gain from how well—or poorly—it sells).
Some of you may remember Jim as the guy with that dorky soup-bowl haircut and a Barnum-esque knack for gimmicky promotions (one of Jim’s many masterful strokes was having his head shaved by Andre Agassi while he sat in an authentic barber’s chair on the center court at New Haven). Jim is a fun-loving, freewheeling, innovative character—the kind that helped spur the tennis boom in the first place. The scary thing is that he basically was maneuvered out of business by his inability to negotiate the political swamps and, I suppose, his own naivete, as the pro game became an increasingly bloodless, show-me-the-money enterprise.
Nonsense at the Net is both a loving memoir of the event and a frank, fascinating narrative of how it all fell apart. This book may interest you if you want to get a really good handle on tennis politics and how a big tournament works (or doesn’t), even in its most complicated, dimly lit areas (like negotiating with the ATP or sponsors). And to his credit, Jim names names. Ultimately, the book shows how a unique organism—an out-of-the-norm but surprisingly appealing tournament—can be destroyed by the escalating demands of an establishment obsessed with growth and conformity.
This is the story of a great event that flourished because it had “soul,” and failed because it lost it.
I talk with Jim periodically—he spends his time between Hale’s Location, N.H. (he’s a native of the Granite State) and a winter home in Naples, Fla. He’s one of those indefatigable optimists who always sees the glass as half-full. Frankly, Jim is still in thrall to the mystique of the event he created a quarter of a century ago in the unlikely setting of the deep New England woods, and he still keeps in touch with many of the often eccentric characters who helped his improbable rise to the summit of the game. At heart, he’s a real sentimentalist, always drawn to memories of the good times, rather than the bitter battles—most of which he lost—that followed. You can see how the guy was able to assemble a virtual army of enthusiastic volunteers, and why attendees at the Volvo kept coming back, year after year.
In fact, Jim recently e-mailed to alert me of a reunion that is being planned in North Conway this summer. Here is some of what he wrote:
Some of you baby-boomers reading this may have attended the Volvo International in its glory days at North Conway and Stratton. I know you’ll be tempted to traipse on up there this summer. If you’re a veteran, you can reach Jim at Westhall99@aol.com.