The Technology Billionaire Helped Keep Tennis Alive in the California Desert.
One day in February 2006, two tennis nuts from the San Francisco Bay area drove down to San Jose to watch a little of the pro game. One of them, Sandy Mayer, had been a Wimbledon semifinalist. The other was one of Mayer’s clients, an enthusiastic amateur basketball player who had switched to tennis and paid Mayer to hit with him. While in San Jose, the men watched an un-retired John McEnroe and Jonas Björkman unexpectedly bag the doubles title. This got Mayer’s buddy so jacked up that he fantasized about putting on a doubles tournament, and within days he took a call from the San Jose director, Barry MacKay. It happened that way because this other guy happened to be Larry Ellison, the founder of the Oracle Corporation and one of the world’s half-dozen richest men.
A complex chain of events later and Ellison was the owner of the tournament that takes place in the California desert at Indian Wells in early March, currently known as the BNP Paribas Open. Indian Wells is a vital fixture on the American tennis calendar. To the outside world, this may seem like a familiar story: Ultra-rich dude adds another trophy to his collection of all those things that a guy like Donald Trump describes as “Super!” But there’s more to it than that.
When Ellison tiptoed into the picture, the men who created, ran and held a 50 percent stake in Indian Wells, former ATP tour pros Charlie Pasarell and Ray Moore, had a gun to their heads. Odds are that were it not for Ellison, the tournament— technically, the right to stage a major tournament that week—would have been sold and moved outside of the U.S. As a result, it would have been re-invented under a different name in Doha or Shanghai. Poof! Just like that, one leg of what might be called the Quadruple Crown of American tennis (the U.S. Open, Miami, Indian Wells and Cincinnati) would have vanished, at a time when the game, historically so strong in the U.S., was already in crisis.
As Moore says, “At one level the pitch was simple. I went to Larry and said, ‘You’re the guy who can save us. And if we go under, it could be the death knell for U.S tennis.’”
If there was a bit of hyperbole in his entreaty, it wasn’t entirely unwarranted. Mayer, who evolved over the years from hitting partner to confidant of Ellison, puts it this way: “It would be a huge blow to the U.S. during an already tough time for tennis.That spurred Larry on a bit. When he decided to buy the event, it was like tennis won the lottery.”
“I could get myself in trouble with Roger [Federer] here, but I suppose my favorite tennis player of all time is Rafa [Nadal].” Larry Ellison, who has dined with Federer, is talking tennis, something that you get the feeling he’d do with anyone, starting with the guy sitting next to him on the bus. That is, if he rode the bus, instead of flying his own decommissioned fighter jets, sailing in the America’s Cup (Ellison’s BMW Oracle USA 17 won the 2010 event), or riding in the saddle of a mountain bike. “I don’t think Rafa’s a better tennis player than Roger, but I don’t think that a greater athlete than Rafa has ever played tennis. That agility in the semifinal against Murray at Wimbledon, remember that spinning, 270-degree backhand overhead that he hit, you remember that, don’t you? My cat can do that, but a human being can’t do it. What the hell?”
Ellison can go on like that. He once saw Ken Rosewall begin a match against Rod Laver by returning three stone-cold backhand winners, all off Laver first serves, and that was it that day for the Rocket. How about Novak Djokovic and that three-setter with Rafa in Madrid last year? “It was maybe the best match of the guy’s life, and he lost!”
Ellison is a tennis fan of the first order. As Moore says, “At his tournament, he doesn’t even come into his hospitality suite. He runs up every once in a while to grab a bottle of water, then goes right back to his seat outside to watch.”
While Ellison has followed tennis all of his life, he only took the game up six years ago, about 12 months after a club pro near Ellison’s home in Woodside, Calif., contacted Mayer to ask if he would give lessons to Ellison’s fiancée (now wife), Melanie. “I saw Larry in the driveway every once in a while, but that was about it,” Mayer recalls. Melanie gave up on the game after a year, at about the same time Ellison decided he could no longer take getting banged up in pickup basketball games. He took up tennis with a passionate intensity. The friendship that developed between Mayer and Ellison was a godsend for tennis. Mayer never planned to sell Ellison a tennis tournament, but in effect that’s what he did as the two men hit, day after day, and Ellison developed into a good recreational player. Mayer is free to play any way he wants against his boss; the only thing he’s forbidden is to hit to the same side, forehand or backhand, successively.
“Sandy is an unbelievably technical-minded guy, so he gets along great with Larry, to the point where they sometimes even argue,” Moore says. “And that’s how the door was opened for us.” It would have taken otherworldly profiling skills to study the past of Lawrence J. Ellison and predict that he was destined to become, at one point, the second richest man on the planet, and even more predictive ability to foresee him as the White Knight of American tennis.
Ellison was born in the Bronx, N.Y., at a time when tennis was still largely a patrician diversion. His mother, an unmarried 19-year-old, gave him away to be raised by her aunt and uncle in a two-bedroom apartment on the South Side of Chicago, where he developed a connoisseur’s appreciation of hot dogs and a passion for the game he would play for most of his life, basketball. He eventually drifted west, where he became a software engineer and programmer who held various low level jobs until he founded the company that would become Oracle Corporation, which remains the world’s premier database management system and the largest provider of business software.
At about the same time, Pasarell and Moore were cementing a partnership and working to rehabilitate a struggling ATP event that would ultimately become the Indian Wells tournament. Oracle and Indian Wells both flourished, on parallel tracks— until the untimely death of the man who had become a 50-percent partner in Indian Wells with Pasarell and Moore, the original superagent and head of the International Management Group, Mark McCormack. IMG was soon bought by private equity/leveraged buyout titan Ted Forstmann, who didn’t like the debt load that McCormack, an ardent tennis fan, and his partners had assumed when they built the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. Forstmann demanded that he be bought out or the tournament sold. At the last moment, a consortium of private investors, including Pete Sampras, the owners of TENNIS magazine, and other stakeholders in the American game, stepped in to buy out Forstmann.