Starting Out Or Ending Up

Until this season there was another level of competition between the Penn Circuit and the Grand Prix, the American Express Challengers Series, whose events were worth $25,000 apiece. In 1979 Vince Van Patten, the ATP Rookie of the Year, used this series to propel himself onto the Grand Prix tour. But American Express canceled the circuit this year. This means the competition on the Penn Circuit this season will be even more fierce, a crucible that will either turn a player into tempered steel or leave him on the slag heap.

The Penn Circuit is broken up into six segments of five tournaments each and a grand-finale tournament of champions. In each segment the top 32 players over the first four weeks meet in a masters event in the fifth week. If a player appears in a match in the masters tournament, he's assured one ATP computer point. One point is good for a ranking of about 680th in the world, a position that some 50 or so players share.

There are other ways to show how tough the Penn Circuit is. Of the 345 entries in the Hialeah tournament, the large majority were excellent players, the kind that could give lessons to your teaching pro, and yet fewer than 90 of them had earned even one point on the ATP computer. Last year Bjorn Borg led the rankings with 1,497 points amassed in 16 tournaments. He averaged 93 points per event. The 250th player in the world, John Hayes of the U.S., had 34 points.

The competition is so fierce that the Penn Circuit remains virtually the only route in the U.S. by which a player can break in. The last one who didn't have to come up the hard way was McEnroe, who, as an 18-year-old in 1977, worked his way through the qualifying rounds at Wimbledon and wound up in the semifinals before he lost to Connors, thereby earning enough computer points to be eligible for Grand Prix events.

But McEnroe's story is so unusual that it is the tennis equivalent of Lana Turner being discovered in Schwab's Drugstore. The usual road is the one taken by Andres Gomez of Ecuador, who last year showed up as an unknown for the first stop on the Penn Circuit. Gomez waded through the qualifying and the main draw, and won the tournament by sweeping 11 straight matches. He finished the year ranked 64th in the world and early in 1980 went to the finals of a $50,000 Grand Prix event in Sarasota, losing to Eddie Dibbs. Similarly, young John Sadri played against McEnroe in the finals of the NCAA tournament in 1978, losing a close match, and then went on the satellite circuit. It took him two years to work his way up in the standings, until at the end of 1979 he was a finalist at the Australian Open. In March, Sadri was ranked fifth in the Volvo standings. Many of the players in Hialeah thought that if they stood in the rain long enough, they might catch the same sort of lightning.

The tournament was being played at the Goodlet Tennis Center, a public facility set among stark, empty fields of white limestone and coral. On the first afternoon of qualifying, Chip showed up early for his opening match, and while he waited he surveyed the players sitting in a covered patio area. Most of them had lost earlier, and they looked as if they had stepped out of one of those photographs of shocked and fatigued Vietnam combat troops, their heads drooping, eyes vacant. For a loser in the first round of qualifying, unless he had a high national ranking or was well fixed financially, the tour was in all probability over, because he couldn't enter qualifying for the rest of the circuit's Florida segment. Take the case of Khelil Lakdar of Belgium. Earlier in the week, while he slept in the Miami airport, his bag containing $3,000 in cash and traveler's checks had been stolen, he said. Now he was left with $850, but his airplane ticket home would cost $750. Lakdar's dilemma was that he would have to wait four weeks until the circuit began its next segment, in Louisiana, and he had only $100 on which to live until then. At that, he was better off than a doleful fellow from Panama who had stood in the tennis center parking lot earlier that morning, asking to borrow $7 so he would have enough money to pay his $10 entry fee.

There are a million sad or absurd stories on the Penn Circuit. One of the favorites is the tale of Charlie Owens and the telephone. The courtside phone began to ring during a match Owens was playing, and he hit a high lob, ran over, picked up the receiver and said, "Hold on." Then he scampered back to retrieve his opponent's return. Owens hit another high lob and ran to the phone. "I'll be right with you." This sequence was repeated several times before the other player finally smashed away one of Owens' lobs. The players laugh whenever the story is retold, but they most enjoy the kicker—that Owens is now on the Grand Prix circuit. He got off the street to nowhere, and that's the best part of all.

According to the players, none of them belongs on the Penn Circuit, or ever suspected he would be there. Each is waiting for his big break, getting together a portfolio and hoping for the day when his "look," or playing style, will come into vogue. Until then, each anticipates "a lucky draw," a succession of opponents so ineffectual that his ensuing series of wins will propel him upward. Borg hits with top spin, so Chip was trying to change his game from the classic, hard and flat shots his father taught him back at the country club. On the satellite trail, an inordinate number of players use oversized Prince rackets because, as with vitamins and religion, there is no evidence that they hurt you, and there remains the possibility they will help.

Because Hialeah was the opening tournament of the season, anyone with a racket, tennis shoes and a dream could enter. After five rounds, 16 qualifiers would join the exempt players, those ranked about 200th or better on the computer, in the 64-man tournament the following week. Qualifiers would have to pay $10 to play the main event, and they'd be happy to pay it.

Money was of minor consideration for those entering the qualifying, perhaps because they generally had so little of it. Thus, fans who find the hyper-inflation of big-time tennis prize money disturbing should find solace in the Penn Circuit. No money is awarded for victories in the qualifying. In the main tournament at Hialeah, first-round losers were to be paid a piddling $28, and the winner of the tournament could count on only $1,120, which, if he happened to have worked his way up through the qualifying, meant he would earn about $100 for each match won. "It's a one-way street for most guys," says one of the circuit's officials. "They think it leads somewhere, but it doesn't. All they do is keep going up and down the street."