The tournament owner and management of the Indian Wells Masters event offered to buy the Los Angeles men’s tournament last year, which is now in the process of being sold to a group from Bogota, Colombia, TENNIS.com has learned.
Indian Wells CEO Ray Moore told TENNIS.com that his group—which includes owner Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle—“offered to buy the tournament a year ago. They never came back to us. A year ago they gave us two stories, they said they’d sell 49 percent to us and we said Larry Ellison is not going to be a minority partner, and then they told us that they had someone else who was interested and would conform to the 51 to 49 percent, and they never even came back to us. They never said said, ‘Guys we have a buyer from Bogota do you want to preempt it?’ I’m surprised there wasn’t another conversation about it. I was amazed when we heard about the deal. We only heard about it two or three weeks ago.”
Moore says that the Indian Wells group—which manages the WTA Premier-level tournament for Octagon in Carlsbad (San Diego County) in early August—wanted to combine the ATP 250-level tournament with WTA event at La Costa Resort and Spa. The L.A. men’s tournament is played during the last week of July.
As recently as 2005 there were three tournaments in Los Angeles: the ATP stop; a WTA Premier-level tournament that was played in Manhattan Beach and moved to Carson; and the WTA Championships, which was played at the Staples Center. With the sale of the ATP event, all those tournaments will have left the area.