The Shangri-La of Tennis : Ojai Event Survives and Thrives After 92 Years of Amateur Play

Their names won’t be found on any marquees. There is a McEnroe, but it’s Patrick, not John. There will be no Ivan. No Martina. No Boris. The Ojai tennis tournament doesn’t draw top professionals for a very simple reason: There is no prize money.

The big names who have played in the tournament are those from the past. Bill Tilden, Helen Willis, Jack Kramer, Bobby Riggs, Arthur Ashe and Billie Jean King all have won Ojai titles.

Stan Smith played in the tournament, as did Jimmy Connors--but in college, years before they became the Stan Smith and the Jimmy Connors.

The Ojai tournament’s open division--whose champions have won more than two dozen Wimbledon titles--now consists of players with triple-digit rankings. And what is most peculiar about the whole situation is that the people of Ojai, who have nurtured the tournament since 1896, couldn’t care less.

Their tournament, which begins today for the 89th time and runs through Sunday, is one of setting and substance, one to be played more for the experience than anything else. The possibility of offering prize money to bolster the field is rarely mentioned. Ojai is steeped in competition, community involvement and tradition.

So, bring on the kids. The freshly scrubbed ones with cheeks as rosy as the flowers that adorn Libbey Park on a spring day. The ones wide-eyed from their first trip away from home for competition. Ojai is theirs for a weekend.

The city of Ojai, population 7,589, is an unusual setting for an amateur tennis tournament. It is located roughly 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles, 30 miles southeast of Santa Barbara and 15 miles inland from Ventura. Surrounded by mountains of the Coast Range, it probably couldn’t be found by accident. Ojai is so naturally scenic that film-maker Ronald Colman chose it to portray Shangri-La in his 1937 movie “Lost Horizon.”

Originally, Ojai was settled by citrus growers and cattle ranchers. Later, in the 1870s, it gained a national reputation for its warm climate, rich agricultural land and mineral baths. Now it is a resort town and the pace is slow except for weekends when visitors to nearby Lake Casitas spill over to the restaurants, shops and arcade downtown.

It would be the perfect spot for a no-bars-closed, weekend-in-Palm Springs spring-break party if it wasn’t for one thing: the participants are too darn serious about tennis. And thank goodness for that, because if they weren’t, people like Jack Morrison, Caroline Thacher and Fred Lamb would quit and the whole tournament might shrivel up and die.

They are three of the tournament officials who have been working since the day after the end of the 88th Ojai tournament to make the 89th even more of a hit. Their salary comes in the form of seeing it, more often than not, come off without a hitch.

With the exception of a man who is hired to set up and tear down equipment needed for the weekend, no one is paid for their services. In all, more than 500 volunteers--including 200 from The Thacher School, grades nine through 12--will work during the four-day tournament. Their jobs range from washing down the courts and picking up litter to running errands for officials and referees. Others might work in the orange juice or tea stands.

At Wimbledon, they have strawberries and cream. At Ojai, they have orange juice in the morning and tea--which is poured from crafted silver pots into fine china cups--during the afternoon. And, if you’re lucky enough to be considered part of the “in” crowd, you may pour instead of serve.

“That’s a very important thing for the women,” says Morrison, former president of the Ojai Valley Tennis Club, “who pours and who passes.”

The pourers are generally the wives of tennis club officers or other dignitaries. The servers are those who are being initiated into the higher echelon of the club’s society. Do not, under any circumstances, get the two confused.

“Oh, heavens,” says Morrison, cringing at the thought of a mistake. “Don’t ever ask them to pour and the next year ask them to pass. That’s a no-no.”

For decades, many of the same people have worked in the same capacities. “We have a rule,” Morrison says. “A person has the same duty until they find their own replacement. It’s a tradition.”

Ojai is a tournament of tradition. And it begins with the people.

Morrison, 71, is as old as the grandstand at Libbey Park, where the tournament is headquartered. His wife Ruby is the current tennis club president. He has been involved with the tournament for 35 years, starting as part of the security force, then working at the gate, selling advance tickets and coordinating publicity before becoming president in 1968.

“As a kid I used to sneak into the tournament,” Morrison says. “I could show you how. We have a fence, but there are lots of places. I see somebody sneaking in very obvious and I say, ‘You can find a better way to get in than that. I know. I’ve done it.’ ”

Unlike Thacher, the tournament secretary, and Lamb, the tournament director, Morrison has no tennis background. In fact, he says he’s never played a single game. But he’s dedicated to the tournament.

“There are a million details,” he says, “but it’s something we love to do. It’s something we do as a community. It’s become part of our lives.”

All there is to organize is a tournament involving 1,400 players on 104 courts at 30 sites, 19 of which are private homes. Transportation alone is a real problem. Parking spots are already sparse in the downtown area, where Libbey Park is located, even without the parade of cars and buses a tennis tournament brings.

For four days, says Thacher, “there is a lot of foot activity.”

The tournament is a boon to motels, hotels and restaurants, but some downtown merchants say it has little effect on their businesses.

“They say the people don’t buy anything, they just take up parking spaces, but no one really complains,” says Wayne LaRue, a volunteer at the Chamber of Commerce. “It’s a community effort.”

Almost the entire town has the same attitude. “No one says, ‘Oh, the Ojai is coming. What a pain in the butt,’ ” says Dave McKinney, tennis pro at the Ojai Valley Inn. “It’s more, ‘The Ojai’s coming. How can I help?’ ”

Lamb, who has been tournament director for 30 years, describes the tournament as “an overwhelming logistical problem,” but in the same breath says, “there is an amazing continuity to what we do. A lot of it may seemed old-fashioned, but that’s part of the tournament’s charm.”

Indeed, in 92 years, the tournament has been interrupted only twice: In 1924, when agricultural officials restricted travel to the area because of the outbreak of a cattle disease, and from 1943-46, during World War II.

Few people seem to mind that the players they are catering to aren’t household names. Celebrity status is still several years away even for the best players in the Pac-10 and independent college events. But, if anything, that seems to encourage the locals to go even more out of their way. Morrison estimates that the 19 home sites used during the tournament constitute roughly 70% of the private courts in the area.

Many of the juniors play and stay at private homes during the tournament. They are required to pay $15 a night for room and board with a local family but more often than not the money is passed back to the tennis club.

The tournament usually nets about $5,000 annually, which is spent on the upkeep of the area’s tennis facilities and to provide lessons to any youngster from the Ojai Valley area interested in learning how to play tennis.

Libbey Park, a lush, green 7 1/2-acre forest of eucalyptus, sycamore and oak trees in downtown Ojai, is owned by the city, but its courts are maintained by the tennis club year-round in exchange for their use on the four days of the tournament.

The balls used during the tournament go to the recreation department and to Thacher School, which has its own special place in Ojai lore: The family that founded the school also started the tournament.

In 1895, William Thacher, a former collegiate doubles champion from Yale, joined brothers Edward and Sherman in settling in Ojai. Edward had been the first to make the move west, trading in a career as an architect to take up citrus growing. Sherman followed, eventually turning a tutoring business into a school.

Legend has it that William Thacher hadn’t been in Ojai long when he received the following admonishment from his brother, Sherman: “If you have brought white tennis trousers, tennis shoes, and a racquet and white hat in your truck, please, please keep them there. We, here, do not play tennis at all.”

That quickly changed.

In 1893, William, by then the associate headmaster at Thacher School, organized an all-comers tournament. Two years later, he started the Ojai Athletic Club, which included tennis. And a year after that, the Ojai Valley Tennis Club was born. The initial membership fee: a quarter, with another 25 cents due every three months.

The club started playing competitively in 1896, when members of the Ojai club took on players from Ventura. Ojai, led by William Thacher, won. The following year, players from surrounding areas were added and by 1899 the tournament was drawing 500 players. There are still three Thachers listed as tournament directors, including Caroline, who is married to one of Sherman Thacher’s grandsons.

Thacher School played host to the tournament during its infancy and the games were played on a packed dirt surface that was cleared of pebbles by hand. Players took the train to Ojai and were transported to the playing sites by horse-drawn wagon or carriage.

Hospitality has always been the tournament’s trademark, which Lamb, Thacher School’s tennis coach since 1955, knows too well. He was a victim of it once.

The year was 1938 and Lamb was a Thacher School freshman hoping to play in his first Ojai tournament. An official overdrew the singles competition for his age group, however, and Lamb was almost left out. The official managed a spot for him to play, but there was one problem: the vacancy was in the men’s invitational singles, opposite two-time defending champion Jack Tidball.

Lamb says he remembers being ahead, 40-15, in one game before Tidball started paying attention and went on to win the match, 6-0, 6-0. Overall, Thacher students have a better reputation as hosts than as players in recent history. The last time Thacher emerged victorious was in 1963 when a doubles team won the boys’ 16-and-under event. The school took a holiday the following Monday.

Forty years after his debut, Lamb, who wears a floppy red felt hat to make him easy to spot amid the crowd around the Libbey Park courts, is known more for his iron hand than his forehand. As director, he has the final say before a player is forced to default.

“I’ve heard all the excuses,” Lamb says. “ ‘The car broke down in Bakersfield. How can you default me?’ One kid said he was in jail, so how could he get to the tournament on time? One got stuck in the Holiday Inn elevator and said that was a legal excuse since he was trapped there for 45 minutes. You hear all kinds of sad stories.”

For some reason, Lamb reports, the best players rarely have such tough luck.

And neither does the Ojai tournament, whose traditions appear to be kept safe in the hearts of those who run it.

Lamb is sure of it.

“I think, for a bunch of amateurs, we do a pretty good job,” he says. “When you think that it’s everybody donating their time and energy, I think what we have here is something very special.”