Men’s 45 Hardcourt Tennis Championships : Tradition, La Jolla Lose to Huntington Beach

From the first toss of a ball back in 1948, the U.S. Tennis Assn. Men’s 45 Hardcourt Championships have been held at the picturesque La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. Tradition has insisted upon it.

Years of elegant cocktail parties and memorable victories by players such as Bobby Riggs and Pancho Segura flowed by, pleasantly uninterrupted.

Few would have predicted that one day--July 21, 1986--the tournament would relocate to Huntington Beach’s Lindborg Racquet Club, an institution not a quarter the age of venerable La Jolla.

La Jolla’s loss--after several years of increasing dissatisfaction by players with facilities and arrangements--is Orange County’s gain. The tournament, which opens today and runs through Sunday, is the first USTA national championship to be held in the county.

A strong field of 104 of the nation’s best players will meet in the singles, which starts today at 10:30.

Among the favorites are defending champion Len Seputo of Walnut Creek and runner-up Larry Dodge of Piedmont, along with former champions Bob Duesler of Newport Beach (’84 and ‘81), Jim Perley of Coronado (’79 and ‘82) and Les Dodson of Kalamazoo, Mich. (‘83).

The top seeds in doubles competition, which starts Tuesday, are defending champions Dick Leach and Ron Livingston. Seputo and partner Bob Dalton of Danville, Ill., the top-ranked 45s team in the United States, are seeded second, and Newport Beach’s Jim Nelson and Duesler, who won the title from 1981 to 1983, are seeded third.

The owner of the Lindborg Racquet Club, Lenny Lindborg, a business entrepreneur in construction and banking and the No. 8-ranked singles player in the 50s division, said he was almost as surprised as everyone else at the decision to move the tournament.

The problems with the tournament in recent years stemmed mainly from congestion. The men’s 45 tournament was held in December in conjunction with the national women’s 40 hardcourt championships, national mixed doubles and father and son championships.

There had been grumbling and even letters of complaint by players regarding a lack of practice courts, unreasonably early starting times, damp courts and unfortunate juxtapositions of singles and doubles scheduling.

“The event was a super thing, but it became almost too successful,” said Bob Kramer, executive director of the Southern California Tennis Assn. “There is no greater tradition and no site nicer than La Jolla, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger and they were running out of courts.”

La Jolla’s partisans managed to fend off a plan to move the men’s 45 event to Northern California several years ago. But the situation got no better, and last fall, despite a petition of protest with 2,000 signatures, the USTA decided on a change of venue.

Lindborg has put together an elaborate social schedule, employing party themes ranging from luau to fiesta to country western. The club offices are stacked high with boxes of prizes that will be awarded after every round.

Lindborg is the first to admit that his club, an oasis of pretty courts set among flowering shrubs in an unlikely neighborhood of industrial Huntington Beach, isn’t La Jolla . . . but what else is?

Instead, Lindborg is trying harder. The USTA will probably review the issue of the tournament site for next year.

“Everyone’s going to be checking us out,” Lindborg said, “so we want to do a bang-up job.”