This area’s ties to big time tennis first surfaced in 1965 with the opening of Peter Paxton’s Tahoe Racquet Club at Incline Village. That event drew the top professional players of the day who included: Rod Laver, Pancho Gonzalez and Kenny Rosewall. Ten years later the Clint Eastwood Celebrity Tennis Tournament at Incline saw Clint, Gene Hackman, Cornel Wild, Lloyd Bridges, Dan Rowan and a score of other celebrities cavorting on court.
Now comes word that one of the major international sponsors of professional tennis, one Larry Ellison, has recently purchased the Cal Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe. Ellison is best known in tennis circles as the owner of the Tennis Garden at Indian Wells, California. His plans for the Cal Neva Lodge are yet to be disclosed.
The 2018 professional tennis season is now underway with the recently completed Australian Open and the next major event will occur March 5-18 at Indian Wells.
As a 50-plus year aficionado of tennis, I had the pleasure of attending the 2014 tourney at Indian Wells. The facility could easily be called the “Garden of Eden” for tennis players. The 121-acre site contains the second-largest Tennis stadium in the world. The main stadium seats more than 16,000 with Stadium 2 adding another 8,000 seats. The site also has two 19,000-square foot shade structures and 29 world-class courts.
Many of the top male and female players appear each year including five-time Indian Wells Champion Roger Federer and 2011 Indian Wells Champion and three-time finalist Caroline Wozniacki. Federer and Wozniacki were the 2018 Australian Open Champions and are ranked Number 2 and Number 1 in the world, respectively.
Stadium 1 now features new seats, a lowered court surface to accommodate recessed television cameras, a VIP Champions Club, remodeled suites and the addition of 21 new restaurants and concession areas. Additional improvements were made outside of Stadium 1, most notably the now permanent Stadium Plaza and Superwall which provide a relaxing area for fans to view matches live on screen.
As for the writer, my most salubrious tie to the racquet sport came in 1975 when I was the chairman and producer of the Clint Eastwood Celebrity Tennis Tournament, sponsored by the Hyatt Corporation at the Tahoe Racquet Club in Incline Village.
But that event pales in comparison to the exploits of one Maurice McLoughlin, who was born on Jan. 7, 1890 in Carson City. Locals here in the northern Nevada area can visit a man-hole cover sized plaque that is embedded in the sidewalk of the northwest quadrant of the Legends Shopping Center in Sparks. The plaque itself sits below a large-sized sculpture of a tennis player and is easy to find.
McLoughlin was fortunate enough to spend most of his childhood in San Francisco where he was able to polish his game on the public courts of northern California. At the age of 17, he won the San Francisco and Pacific Coast Championships and went to the National Championships at Newport, Rhode Island. Probably his most famous appearance occurred in 1913 when he was the first American player to reach the singles final at Wimbledon. At that time the reigning champion did not have to play through. So in the finals, which was called the Challenge Round, he was beaten by the 1912 winner, New Zealander Anthony Wilding in three straight sets 6-8, 3-6 and 8-10.
Following his spectacular play at Wimbledon, in 1914 he travelled to Forest Hills in New York. He played against the great Australian player Norman Brookes in the 1914 Davis Cup, who, interestingly enough, had earlier in the year beaten Wilding to become the Wimbledon singles champion. As there was no such thing as a tie-breaker in those days, McLoughlin won 17-15, 6-3, 6-3 and also in the reverse singles defeated his old foe Wilding 6-2, 6-3, 2-6, 6-2.
According to an article in the New York Times following the tournament, the matches involving McLoughlin produced the best series of sets and as reported in American Lawn Tennis, “Would go thundering down the ages as the greatest ever seen.” McLoughlin was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in March, 1957 and died a few months later on Dec. 10, 1957.
For northern Nevadans who want to escape our winter weather this year and witness world-class tennis as well as future Tennis Hall of Famers, they can make the easy trip south to temperate Indian Wells, CA for the BNP Paribas Open March 5-18 at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.
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