Graf's Entry Is Big Boost

By JULIE CART

March 5, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

With the last-minute addition Monday night of Steffi Graf to the field of this week’s State Farm Evert Cup, the newly formatted 10-day event at Indian Wells--which includes the men’s Newsweek Champions Cup--just may begin to live up to the ambitious dreams of its creator.

The tournament, which for the first time will feature men’s and women’s matches concurrently, will be Graf’s first tournament in four months. After winning the U.S. Open last September and the WTA Championships last November, Graf underwent surgery to remove bone spurs from her foot. For the second year in a row, Graf sat out the Australian Open and has been training at her home in Boca Raton, Fla.

She was scheduled to begin her season in three weeks, but Graf’s recovery went better than expected and she accepted a wild card from the tournament late Monday night. Graf, who only rarely has appeared at tournaments in California, has never played in the Evert Cup.

Graf is co-ranked No. 1 with Monica Seles, who is also entered in the Evert Cup, an event that now has some of the same luster as the men’s field. The women’s tournament begins Friday and the men’s event begins Monday, and the person most looking forward to the start of play is Charlie Pasarell, who dreamed up the format 20 years ago but is only now getting the chance to apply it.

Pasarell has been nursing the idea of a combined tournament since 1976, when he was still a professional tennis player and long before he should have been thinking like the promoter he is now.

His idea--to bring the men’s and women’s tours together for a single mega-event, as only the Grand Slam tournaments do--was appropriated by his pal Cliff Buchholz, the tournament director for the Lipton Championships at Key Biscayne, Fla. Lipton is one of the most lucrative and successful events in tennis. The unusual format has something to do with that, although there are a few other such events in the world.

Now Pasarell has his own joint tournament to play with, beginning Friday at the Hyatt Grand Champions at Indian Wells. In years past, the women’s State Farm Evert Cup used to be followed immediately by the men’s Newsweek Champions Cup. This year, they are going from back-to-back to side-by-side.

Although the new format is being described as Lipton-like, in reality it’s more like Lipton Light. The idea may be the same but its development is different. Lipton is a single event played under one corporate banner. The men’s and women’s events at Indian Wells are separate, occurring about the same time. There are two title sponsors, differing schedules and different tournament directors.

The men’s and women’s schedule at Lipton plays out over 10 days. By contrast, this week at Indian Wells, the women will have played their first two rounds before the men begin to trickle in on Monday for their first-round matches.

And, whereas the men’s field and prize money are comparable at Indian Wells and Lipton, neither is the case on the women’s side. Lipton’s $1.5-million prize purse is the largest of any regular event on the women’s tour. The $550,000 prize money at Indian Wells is not only 25% of the men’s purse, it is also not enough to qualify it as one of seven Tier I events for women, tournaments whose prize money must be $926,250 or more.

Pasarell acknowledged the disparity and said the goal is to raise the Evert Cup to Tier I next year. “I want the women’s prize money to be equal to the men,” he said.

Another obstacle to greatness is the women’s field. Tier II events are entitled to fewer “designated” players than Tier I tournaments. A Tier I event is designated, or guaranteed, five of the top 10 players, for example, whereas a Tier II event is entitled to only three of the top eight.

Even if the Indian Wells men’s and women’s tournaments are short of Lipton’s impressive model, the evolution of the events has been monumental when considered against the glacier-like speed of change on the tours, especially as it relates to schedules.

“This is not something we’ve been talking about for a few months,” said Barbara Perry, tournament director for the Evert Cup. “We’ve been working on it for years.”

The move was greatly facilitated by the International Tennis Federation. The ITF had been asking the ATP tour for years to change its schedule so the season’s first Davis Cup week would not immediately follow the Australian Open. That change was made to the men’s schedule, which pushed the entire schedule back a week.

None of which would have affected the women except that Lipton was moved back a week too, which did impact the women’s schedule. Something had to give in the complicated domino effect of tour scheduling. The tournament in Houston was dropped and the Evert Cup was given an extra few days from a dead week to start earlier.

An advantage of the revised schedule is that there is an open week before Indian Wells and an open week after. That makes the tournament more desirable for players who have hectic travel schedules. They can come to the desert early and practice before the tournament and get to Key Biscayne early and practice a few days before Lipton.

“Because of the way the schedule lays out, we have a much better chance of getting some of the top players at the last minute,” Perry said.

Such was the circumstance that allowed Graf to accept a wild card at a last minute, bringing the weaker women’s field up to par with the men’s.

“It only strengthens the tournament when you have the men and the women,” said Chris Evert, who has previously expressed concern about the tournament that carries her name. “There’s nothing negative as far as I’m concerned, as long as we get a good player field. If we get three of the top 20 it would be a disaster and it would really make women’s tennis look bad.

“I don’t think this is the wave of the future. I would think this would be it, to have one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast. The women worked so hard to separate themselves from the men, way back when Billie Jean [King] and Rosie [Casals] were tired of getting unequal prize money and broke away. I think we’re strong enough now to be able to play with the men.

“We can still stand on our own two feet and be proud of the product that we have. It’s not like we’re piggy-backing on the men, I think we’ve proven it over the last 20 years. Whenever the men and the women are together it demands more press and it gets more press and more publicity and more TV time. That’s great for the women’s game right now, that’s what the women’s game needs.”

Evert is correct in her assessment of the media attraction to a combined men’s and women’s event. Television and print reporters view such events as one-stop shopping where there is access to top players. Some of the Lipton’s success in attracting an international press corp stems from its geographical position, since the East Coast is cheaper and faster for Europeans and South Americans to reach than the California desert.

Now that Pasarell has gotten his wish, he has also been handed the arduous task of finding space to accommodate a full complement of tennis players, fans and media in a facility that seemed small before.

“The two biggest problems we have are practice courts and locker rooms,” he said.

The eight hard courts at Grand Champions and the seven courts at the nearby Stouffers’ have been resurfaced identically so that Stouffers’ can be used for practices. Even with that, some players will be sent to other nearby tennis venues at La Quinta for practice.

The locker-room problem has been solved temporarily by putting the men in the existing facilities under the stadium court and converting two hotel guest villas for the women.

Lighting on nearly all the courts has been improved, Pasarell said.

With more fans than ever expected and a 40% increase in reporters, Pasarell said the grounds will be busy, particularly for parking.

“We’ll have the same problems we have had in the past,” he said. “I wish I had an unlimited amount of space, but I don’t.”

For future tournaments, he hopes to carve out more space in the sprawling complex of hotels. There also are plans for a new stadium court that would rival Lipton’s state-of-the-art facility.

Pasarell has even hired the same architects.

“Lipton is the model,” he said. “We want to move toward that . . . then do better, of course.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Side-by-Side Tennis Cups

State Farm Evert Cup

Prize money--$550,000

Main draw begins Friday. Final on March 16.

In the field are Monica Seles, Conchita Martinez, Kimiko Date, Gabriela Sabatini, Anke Huber, Mary Joe Fernandez, Lindsay Davenport and Chanda Rubin.

Defending champion: Mary Joe Fernandez.

Newsweek Champions Cup

Prize money--$2.2 million

Main draw begins Monday. Final on March 17.