Elm City fights for tennis, but at what cost?

By Carl Bialik

By the time most Yale students returned to campus this year, the Pilot Pen International Tennis Tournament was drawing to a close. Steffi Graf won the championship match of the inaugural women's singles draw on Sun., Aug. 29, held annually at the Connecticut Tennis Center near the Yale Bowl. As the players and fans were leaving New Haven--some not to return at least not until next August--the mayor's office was already preparing to make special concessions to protect the tournament's existence.

The question that must be asked at some point, though, when enough is enough. While marquee players like Graf and Pete Sampras helped to drive attendance figures up by 14 percent this year, the tournament still lost approximately one million dollars. Nonetheless, tournament organizer Butch Buchholz believes he can turn Pilot Pen's financial troubles around and replicate the success he has had running the Lipton Championship in Key Biscayne, Florida.

Mayor DeStefano's spokesman, Michael Kuczkowski, has faith in Buchholz's ability to rejuvenate interest in the tournament. "[The Lipton tournament] has a reputation as one of the best non-Grand Slam events in the country. [New Haven] has a clear sense that [Buchholz] was a good partner to have."

Indeed, some of the deficit of this year's tournament can be attributed both to Buchholz's having only a few critical months to market the new women's event and to the defeat of many top-seeded men's players early in the draw--the latter a turn of events over which organizers had no control.

For this reason, the mayor's office has agreed to forgive--for a few years--the tax on gate receipts that the Pilot Pen organizers originally agreed to pay. To Kuczkowski, the mayor's office's stance on this issue is both reasonable and fair to all parties. "It's not an unreasonable thing to give somebody a start to see what they can build. We felt we'd be fair in this case." The Board of Aldermen will vote on this proposal in the near future.

However, the city has already been more than fair in its treatment of the tournament. In 1991, the Tennis Foundation of Connecticut, with $18 million in state bond money, opened the Connecticut Tennis Center. Paul Bass, associate editor of The New Haven Advocate, said that the state originally promised the facilities would be used year-round to benefit the community, but that this promise has not been kept. The stadium, which has the second-highest capacity of any tennis stadium in the country, has been used primarily to host the Pilot Pen. Yet even with the new, high-quality facilities in place, at no cost to tournament organizers, the Pilot Pen has continued to lose large amounts of money.

Kuczkowski argues that the tax abatement Buchholz has requested, which amounts to approximately $70,000 a year, "is not a lot of money compared to what Pilot Pen generates for the city." However, it seems unlikely that this concession alone will rescue the men's tournament from an untimely demise. The ATP recently decided to move the Pilot Pen men's championship one week earlier beginning in 2001. Buchholz doubts that he will be able to pay for the cost of the idle week between the draws, and may have to cancel the men's tournament entirely. He was quoted in The New Haven Register saying that continuing the men's tournament until 2001 "may be just delaying the inevitable."

Most cities with professional sporting events must ante up to stay in the game. When the prices get too high, some cities have to make the tough decision to let go. But New Haven, a small city suffering from high crime and unemployment rates, is apparently not willing to do so. Besides, in agreeing to Buchholz's request for the tax abatement, the mayor's office took control of most of the security cost for this summer's tournament. This decision has come even as the organizer himself expects the tournament to soon shrink from its current size down to a week-long, women-only event.

Kuczkowski insists that it is important to have a top-quality tennis tournament in New Haven. He argues that the event draws fans who may not have been to New Haven before, and who may come back in the future and spend money in the Elm City. However, while the Pilot Pen may entice wealthy suburbanites to come to the Yale Bowl area, there is little indication that they actually do stick around after match point.

Eventually, the tournament, whose benefits to the city will continue to shrink, has to show that it can stand on its own. That point has now been reached. If the New Haven government continues to put professional tennis first, there may not be much of a city left for tennis fans to visit.

Back to Sports...