Dukes to Use Successful ’92 Season as Springboard : TeamTennis: Owner Lieberman resumes pursuit of McEnroe for next year. Patton wants to return as coach.

Life moves on for the Newport Beach Dukes, who are coming off a near-miss of the TeamTennis championship.

The Western Division championship banner arrived at the Dukes’ office the other day, and owner Fred Lieberman can’t stop staring at it. For Lieberman, it’s tangible proof of the Dukes’ first successful season in three years of TeamTennis play.

“Three years is a long time to wait (for a winner),” he said. “When we were 1-3 early in the season, I was sitting there saying, ‘Lieberman, you don’t know what you’re doing.’ ”

A few miles away in his soon-to-be-vacated office at UC Irvine, Coach Greg Patton spent a recent evening writing farewell notes to his former Anteater players.

“I want to come back and do the tennis camps at UCI, and I love coaching the Dukes,” said Patton, who leaves Sept. 4 for his new job at Boise State. “I want to come back if they’ll have me.”

“It took me three years to get it right, and I don’t want to quit now that I know what I’m doing.”

It has been only three weeks since the Dukes lost the championship match to Martina Navratilova and the Atlanta Thunder, but Lieberman and Patton have begun making plans for 1993.

Lieberman has returned to his pursuit of John McEnroe, which began after the 1991 season. A pairing of Patton and McEnroe would be a tennis promoter’s dream, and Lieberman knows this well.

However, chances are that McEnroe, coming off a doubles title at Wimbledon, might not be interested in playing against the likes of Buff Farrow and Craig Johnson in Wichita.

“After Wimbledon he doesn’t need the money,” Lieberman said. “I just don’t think he’ll be available.”

Patton, meanwhile, is trying to figure out the logistics of coaching the Dukes again next season. He said his return hinges on whether he continues to run his youth camps at UCI. Under NCAA rules, Patton cannot earn a salary with the Dukes, but he has offset that with income from his camps.

Irvine also might not want its former coach running camps on its courts, preferring to have camps run by its own coach, Patton said.

Plus, “(Boise State) wants me to start tennis camps up there,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want to fade gradually out of the scene in Southern California. This is too abrupt with me driving away Sept. 4.”

Lieberman has offered to find Patton a new home for his camps if Irvine turns him away.

“I’ll find a place for his camp,” Lieberman said. “It’s not hard to find a place. There are plenty of empty courts around. If Patton wants to coach, it shouldn’t be a problem to get his camp relocated.”

Rest assured, Lieberman doesn’t want to lose one of his star attractions.

By the end of the season, though, it was clear that Amy Frazier’s play on the court had begun to pass Patton’s off-the-wall, post-match quotes as the Dukes’ No. 1 draw. And Lieberman wants Frazier back for her fourth season in Newport Beach.

He also would like to begin talks with Rick Leach, particularly if McEnroe is not interested in playing TeamTennis, and possibly swinging a trade for former UCI All-American Trevor (Tank) Kronemann, who played with the San Antonio Racquets this season.

“He’s a perfect fit for TeamTennis,” Lieberman said of Kronemann. “He’s got a big serve. He’s intimidating. He needs the money. And he has a certain local panache.”

So the best-case scenario for 1993 has Patton coaching McEnroe, Kronemann, Frazier and perhaps Katrina Adams, who left the Dukes early to have surgery.

“It wouldn’t be the worst-case scenario to have the Swedes (Rikard Bergh and Ronnie Bathman) back with Frazier and Adams,” Lieberman said.

After all, the Dukes came within a match of the championship with that group.

In other local tennis news: Lieberman is billing his Oct. 1 exhibition between Michael Chang and Pete Sampras at the Bren Center as the best tennis match in Orange County history.

Lieberman hopes this will be the first of many such exhibitions at the 5,000-seat Bren Center. Disneyland has been lined up as one of the chief sponsors.

“This is not a one-shot deal,” he said. “Disneyland is not in this for a one-shot deal.”

For ticket information, call (714) 644-5800.