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New Haven Isn’t Key Biscayne
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Business New Haven
9/7/1998
By: BNH
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Is greater New Haven tennis-challenged, or have those who run the Pilot Pen International tennis tournament simply not done a good enough job selling their event?
That's the question on everyone's lips in the wake of news reports suggesting that near-seven-figure financial losses in each of the last two years might send the nine-year-old men's and one-year-old women's events elsewhere next year - or be used as a lever to extract some species of public-money concessions to stanch the flow of red ink.
It is taken as an article of faith by now that tournament top dogs Butch Buchholz and Mike Davies know how to run a big-time tennis event. It was, after all, their savvy and connections that built the springtime Lipton Championships in Key Biscayne, Fla. to a level just one notch below that of the four Grand Slams.
And it was testament to the deep pockets of them and their investors that, less than a year after a disastrous 1997 New Haven men's event, Buchholz and Davies were able to secure a women's tourney from Stone Mountain, Ga. to run contiguous to the existing men's play.
For all the factors in the event's favor - and even considering that Buchholz & Co. are managing a turnaround situation from the low ebb of Jim Westhall's tenure running it - the players played in front of half-full houses over the course of both weeks.
It shouldn't be thus. Only the most hardened local cynics would wish failure upon this event - certainly not us. We offer the following observations and comments in the hope of helping to make tennis a more viable presence here.
In recent years the New Haven event had suffered from a lack of star power. Buchholz addressed this significantly by attracting some of the sport's most luminous stars, such as Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf, as well as up-and-comers including Patrick Rafter and Anna Kournikova. For this they are to be commended.
But the tournament's flagging fortunes recently aren't attributable solely to lack of stars - but to lackluster marketing effort and a decline in business an public support.
For all the inroads to mass appeal forged by the tennis stars of the '70s and '80s - Connors and McEnroe, Navratilova and Evert -tennis remains a sport which appeals predominantly to a socioeconomic elite. And, without making a value judgment, greater New Haven simply lacks enough high-end sports consumers to fill a 15,000-seat stadium every day for two weeks.
That being said, on the individual-ticket level, organizers did a good job making the event affordable to a wider audience - but did a poor job communicating that fact. In truth, single-session tickets could be had for as little as $10. But (at least in our observation) this fact was not firmly established in the public eye (“Pete Sampras for $10!”) - at least not enough to fill the cheap seats.
Making this event succeed will be to make it a southern New England - not a New Haven - event, generating excitement (and crowds) from Greenfield, Mass. to Providence, R.I., to Stamford. Blame if you will our innate New England parochialism for a disinclination to look much beyond local borders for entertainment (or anything else). But we all should have learned a lesson from the experience of the former Hartford Whalers: If the team had succeeded in drawing from New Haven and Springfield, it wouldn't be in Carolina today.
Similarly, tournament organizers and business community boosters must find a way to attract corporate sponsorships from among the state's largest companies. Hats off to SNET and Fusco Corp., sure, but where were Heublein, or Duracell, or Aetna, or the Stanley Works, or United Technologies - all Connecticut-based corporations with giant advertising and marketing budgets? Not here, that's where.
Finally, greater New Haven is home to a large and affluent African-American middle class (a group that is invisible to many marketers). For 1999, why not get the sister act of Venus and Serena Williams - the brightest lights on the American tennis scene, anyway - and market them to that target audience?
Based on the 1998 experience, the Pilot Pen event could do worse. But it could also do much, much better. New Haven isn't Key Biscayne; learning the differences between the two may make all the difference to the future of big-time tennis in Connecticut.
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