Breaking serves with star power

Alicia Robinson

Professional team tennis comes to the city today as the Newport Beach

Breakers begin their second season at the Palisades Tennis Club.

It took eight months of planning to get ready for the season. The

matches make a mess of parking and take one of the courts out of

commission, yet hundreds of spectators will come to each match to

watch Breakers players such as Maria Sharapova, the teenage sensation

who won Wimbledon Saturday, and Mike and Bob Bryan, the top-ranked

men’s doubles players in the world.

The Breakers kick off the 2004 season at 7 p.m. against the

Springfield Lasers. Late last week, workers were scrambling to finish

putting up the 1,800-seat grandstands for the Breakers’ seven matches

in the next three weeks.

The Palisades Tennis Club will turn 30 this fall and has had its

ups and downs over the years, but over the last nine years, club

owner and general manager Ken Stuart has built it into a popular and

profitable venture.

“Today, this club is arguably one of the better clubs in Southern

California, if not the best,” Stuart said. “We are at capacity and

have been for a year.”

Stuart designed the 15-court club, founded as the John Wayne

Tennis Club in 1974. The movie star built the club for his wife

Pilar, a tennis enthusiast, and owned 10% of it.

The facility includes a court that slants down toward a ball

machine at one end, so the balls roll down and are collected

automatically after they’re hit. The club also features a

video-paging system, phones on each court and computer software

Stuart developed to set up matches -- state-of-the-art amenities that

other clubs didn’t have in the 1970s, Stuart said.

“Here we are 30 years later, and they’re still not duplicated at

any facility that I know of,” he said.

After leaving to become an entrepreneur in the 1980s, Stuart

started his own club in 1989, the Palisades Tennis Club in Costa

Mesa. The John Wayne club, meanwhile, was riding a roller coaster

with different owners, two foreclosures and a bankruptcy, Stuart

said.

When the lease at his Costa Mesa club was running out in 1995, he

came back as a managing partner at the former John Wayne club and

changed the name to Palisades.

Business has been on the rise ever since. The club now has a

four-month waiting list, and last year he pushed hard to bring

professional team tennis to Newport Beach. It didn’t hurt having

known World Team Tennis league founder Billie Jean King since

childhood.

Newport Beach Breakers marketing manager Jenna Silverman said

Stuart’s staff and club members have been supportive of the team from

the beginning.

“Ken Stuart’s been such a part of World Team Tennis as long as I

can remember, and we wouldn’t want to do it anyplace else but the

Palisades Tennis Club,” she said.

While Stuart said hosting the Breakers’ matches can be disruptive

for club members, most of them don’t seem to mind and instead are

excited about having the professional matches.

“This is probably the most all-around club with different ages and

different levels [of players] and the best people [on staff],” said

10-year member Mike MacKenzie of Newport Coast. MacKenzie said he met

his wife at the Palisades Tennis Club.

He stopped by the club Friday with friend Dave Holman, who noted

that Palisades has good children’s programs, and professional tennis

players like Lindsay Davenport sometimes use the club.

Holman also praised the club’s staff and service. As if to

illustrate the point, Stuart agreed to play with Holman, MacKenzie

and another player because they needed a fourth for doubles.

Stuart said he owes the club’s success to a full-time staff of

people who arrange matches for club members, something most other

clubs don’t bother with. While those kinds of services for members

are normally top priorities, for the next few weeks the focus will be

on the Breakers.

“It’s not a financial success, but it is a huge boost for the

community,” Stuart said. “Billie Jean’s focus, as well as mine, is

that one of the things we want to do is expose our community to team

tennis.”

For information on Newport Beach Breakers games, call (877)

NB-TENNIS or visit https://www.newportbeachbreakers.com.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers business, politics and the environment.

She may be reached at (949) 764-4330 or by e-mail at

[email protected].