Los Angeles ATP Tournament Had Offer From Indian Wells Management

Written by: Staff on 15th November 2012

Los Angeles ATP Tournament Had Offer From Indian Wells Management |

The ATP 250 level tournament in Los Angeles that is being sold to Bogota could have stayed in the United States had it accepted on offer from the owner and management of the Masters Series event at Indian Wells.

Instead, the Los Angeles tournament is finalizing its contract with a group from Bogota, Colombia. When that deal is completed, Los Angeles will be without a men’s or women’s tournament for the first time in 86 years.

Indian Wells is owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and managed by Ray Moore and Steve Simon.

“We offered to buy the tournament a year ago. They never came back to us,” Indian Wells CEO Moore said. “ A year ago they gave us two stories, they said they’d sell 49 % 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 51-49% and they never even came back to us. They never said ‘guys we have a buyer from Bogota do you want to pre-empt it?’ I’m surprised there wasn’t another conversation about it. I was amazed when we heard about the deal. We only head about it two or three weeks ago.”

The Indian Wells group currently manages the WTA Premier level tournament (The Mercury Insurance Open) in Carlsbad, California for Octagon (San Diego County) in early August and was considering combining the ATP 250-level tournament with the women’s event at the La Costa Resort and Spa.

The LA men’s tournament is played during the last week of July and has struggled with sponsorship and ticket sales, losing nearly about $450,000 annually for the past three years.

Since none of tennis’ popular “Big 4” of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray want to come to North America before the Canadian Open in August, Los Angeles’ late July date began to play against them, especially with the retirement of all of the United States Grand Slam winners.

However, Moore said his group thought they might be able to make a go of it.

“It seems like an impossible task [without the Big 4] but we thought we could form a different marketing point of view,” Moore said. “You are never going to get Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray to play it, but we thought we could promote young Americans and college players and get into that market. It can never be a big tournament because of where it is in the system [at a 250 level].”

The tournament was played at UCLA and owned by the Southern California Tennis Association (which is part of the USTA).

“We told them you can still hand out the prizes and still be the face of the tournament, we are just interested in owning it,” Moore said. We didn’t want to be aggressive about calling [tournament director] Bobby Kramer, asking why didn’t you call us, because it’s difficult to promote that level of event in the month of July in the US because the star players don’t want to play it, but if they called us and we had a conversation, maybe we could come up with something.”

Moore added that the success of Indian Wells and other combined events have convinced him that’s the way to go with tournaments.

“You can’t have them every week, but for tennis to put its best foot forward you need both men and women,” he said. “It’s a truly unique sport when they can play at the same time, or back to back, and then it becomes a very attractive event.

©Daily Tennis News Wire

Topics: ATP 250, Farmers Classic, Indian wells management, Indian Wells Tennis News, Los Angeles tennis, Los Angeles tennis news, Tennis News