Silver King in the Golden Age

I was going to write Lindsay Davenport for my blog over at ESPN, but at the last minute my buddy over there, the consummately professional Keith Hawkins, asked me if I could write about Lamar Hunt. who died early this morning in Dallas. My post should be up at ESPN soon. Meanwhile, here's a comprehensive obit that ought to give you a sense of Hunt's pervasive influence on the sporting landscape. And now for some additional thoughts on Hunt.

I got to know Lamar reasonably well over the years; he was the kind of guy who remembered your name and returned your calls. I don't think I ever saw him in anything but a perfectly fine but utterly plain dark suit, white shirt, and solid tie (no canary yellow or bright red power neck wear for this hombre!). He was borderline monk-ish, with his thinning dark hair and fastidious ways. He could have been the model for a sociology text with some high-falutin' title: The Corporate Disciple (although, as a fabulously wealthy individual, he was anything but a cog in someone else's machine), or, if the folks who came up with those titles ever wanted to leaven things with a little humor: Man Or Machine. Who Cares Anyway?

Hunt was incredibly disciplined in everything he did, and his genius, as it was reflected in tennis, was for organization. Long before "branding" became a buzzword, he had a branding vision for tennis, traveling under the name World Championship Tennis. Readers of my age may remember as vividly as I do the utterly professional, compelling broadcasts of WCT events.

Something must have made a pretty big impression for me, for I still vividly remember scenes like that of a helicopter hovering over a court somewhere in Florida (Boca Raton), the whirring blades drying off the gray Har-Tru, while Cliff Drysdale, in tighty-whitey shorts and wearing a pristine white golf glove on his right hand, patiently stood by, waiting to play the final.

WCT featured a pretty slick logo, it had a deal with - I believe - Supreme Court for uniformity at its many indoor tournaments, and at one point there was talk of the players all having to wear some kind of uniform, to emphasize the continuity and the WCT brand identity.

In short, WCT wanted to project the image that it was the only tennis tour that mattered, and unlike World Team Tennis, which came along much later, it did not aggressively challenge the Grand Slams by scheduling tournaments during the major Spring and Summer national championships (the French and U.S. Opens and Wimbledon).

Lamar's genius, as it was expressed in tennis, was his overarching vision. He was the ultimate system-maker and organizer. Looking to the model he helped create for the NFL, he wanted to move into the frontier of Open tennis with something more than vague ideas of promoting a tournament here or there. He aspired to creating a template for the pro game.

The icons and pioneers of the pro game rushed enthusiastically to embrace Hunt's vision, and that says a lot about a number of things, including Hunt's confidence in the game as a viable, professional enterprise, and the degree to which the men now positioned to create a new sport from nothing found his approach viable. New sports enterprises often have trouble luring big talent; in soccer, the North American Soccer League (started at around the same time as WCT) hoped that lavishing millions on Pele, even though it meant surrounding him with bit players, would swing the tide. But in tennis, the talent was there, ready and willing to go.

Hunt loved football, and were he not a Texan, the history of the game might have been written differently. But Texans have a natural affinity for Australians, and Hunt had deep admiration and affection for the likes of Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and John Newcombe. When it was time to create his tour in 1968, he put together a formidable line-up of international players known as The Handsome Eight. In addition to those three icons, the group included fellow Aussie Tony Roche, South Africa's Drysdale, Dennis Ralston and Butch Buchholz of the U.S., Nikki Pilic of Yugoslavia, Pierre Barthes of France, and Roger Taylor of Great Britain.

The tour was a smash hit from the start, and WCT's annual, year-end playoff for the top qualifiers, the WCT Finals, quickly became an event that rivaled the Grand Slams in prestige and visibility. The high-water mark was the 1972 WCT Finals championship match, in which Laver and Rosewall created an epic that takes a prominent place on everyone's list of GMAT. It attracted 21 million viewers and, almost immediately, tennis was transformed from a blip to a blimp on the sports radar.

Owing to the Hunts clout and status in Dallas, the Finals also became an annual Event on the social calendar. The Finals was played in Moody Coliseum on the SMU campus, where roughly 7500 perched in seats on the almost comically steep sides of an arena that had great sight lines and a terrific atmosphere of intimacy. The feeling was electric, the lighting superb. And then there were the post-match parties. . .

Sighs

The WCT tour was a success from the start. So much so, that it soon split up into various groups, coded by color (there's that instinct for organization again; the color-coding remained a staple of round-robin events for years, until some genius had the bright idea to name the groups for players instead, as in the Laver or Rosewall group). These groups played mini-circuits, mostly in Europe and the U.S., and then convened again in Dallas for the Finals.

But while all this was going on, forces that feared that Hunt would corner the pro tennis market (much like his family at one point tried to corner the world silver market - let it never be said that the Hunt's don't think outside the jewelry box!) aligned against him.

The International Tennis Federation and its affiliates - the entities, like the USTA, that govern and largely control the direction of the sport, both at the amateur level  and upper echelon of the pro game - understood that a tennis league as well-run, lean and professionally administered as WCT (the tour had a commissioner in the late Mike Davies; no further comment required), operating independent of the traditional ITF-supported tournament circuit, was a long-range threat.

It didn't exactly help that the next wave of pros, led by Jimmy Connors, had nothing like the sense of loyalty shown by Laver, Rosewall, et al.

Faced with the opportunity to slip into a pre-existing WCT system or work the open market for all it was worth, increasing numbers of players chose the latter.

In this, they were abetted by managers, agents and tournament promoters who all wanted to take part in the commercial feeding frenzy known as the tennis boom. This played nicely into the hands of the ITF, to whom a de-centralized game consisting of independent operators who would pose no threat to the Grand Slam pecking order amounted to a nice preservation of the status quo.

WCT soldiered on, it lasted for a surprising 23 years - although it was a shadow of its former self for many of those final years. In the beginning, WCT was the players tour, but over time, and facing manifold opportunities for short-term gain, the players formed their union (the ATP), further relegating WCT to a role as just another opportunity provider, rather than the preferred vehicle for delivering year-round pro tennis to a worldwide audience.

In the big picture, the struggle to impose a template on the game of tennis failed. It helps explain why we have a chaotic, overcrowded, sometimes illogical calendar. In straying from the WCT model, the game essentially opted to remain a free-market enterprise, complete with the opportunity, chaos, instability, perplexity and complexity that comes with the territory. Maybe we're better off, maybe not. The only things I know for certain are that cornering the tennis market proved easily as daunting a task as cornering the silver market, and that it's kind of weird that in the saga of WCT, tennis reversed one of basic premises that we live by: from chaos comes order.

RIP, Lamar. You were a gentleman and visionary to the end.