Galaxy Plans Arena Add-On

Soccer supporters do not make pilgrimages to Roland Garros tennis stadium in Paris to watch World Cup qualifiers, nor do tennis fans trek to Old Trafford in Manchester, hoping to see Pete Sampras trade forehands with Andre Agassi.

But in Tim Leiweke’s grandiose vision of Los Angeles’ sporting future, local soccer and tennis enthusiasts will be sharing the same address by 2002--on an 87-acre plot of land in Carson.

Initial plans by the Galaxy to build a 30,000-seat soccer stadium and a permanent national training center on the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus have mushroomed to include a 12,000-seat tennis facility, as well as a tennis academy to provide young players a West Coast alternative to the established tennis schools of Florida.

Leiweke, a top executive for Anschutz Corporation who serves as president for the Galaxy and the NHL Kings, imagines a marquee above this $100-million sports megaplex one day not only touting such coming attractions as Cobi Jones and the Galaxy, and Mia Hamm and the U.S. women’s national soccer team, but also Lindsay Davenport and the WTA tour and Sampras-Agassi in the final of an ATP Masters Series tournament.

Looking over architects’ models and sketches at his Staples Center office, Leiweke laughed as he discussed how, in only a few weeks, a fairly ambitious soccer-only project had been super-sized into nine-figured multisport audacity.

“I can’t figure out if an angel’s looking over us or a devil’s pulling us down--I guess time will tell--but we’ve had ongoing conversations in relationship with a lot of people in the tennis world and we have been looking for a long time at a way to get more involved in tennis,” Leiweke said.

“We were approached by a few people within the Southern California Tennis Assn. who were visionary and came to us, saying, ‘Why don’t you guys build a tennis facility on the Westside?’ We looked at it and, unfortunately, on the Westside, you’re just not going to find the land--and if you found it, it would be too expensive.”

But the Galaxy had this soccer complex on the planning board, and Cal State Dominguez Hills had all this land, so Leiweke and his staff began thinking combination plate.

“We said, ‘If we threw this idea out there, would there be interest?’--and the idea would be a 12,000-seat tennis stadium to give L.A. a first-class tennis facility,” Leiweke said.

“It would be similar to, but not as nice as [the Tennis Garden at] Indian Wells, because Charlie [Pasarell] has done a phenomenal job down there and we are in awe of that whole facility. But it would be close. And the 12,000-seat tennis stadium would be built next to the 30,000-seat soccer stadium, so that a lot of the back-of-the-house amenities--locker rooms, commissary, all of the engineering and maintenance areas--would all be one and we can literally utilize one build-out to service both buildings.

“And we realized that the economies of scale, by building two, meant that the tennis facility made some economic sense.”

But the hosting of professional tennis tournaments requires auxiliary courts for competition and practice, so plans to add a “show” court and eight practice courts were drawn.

“Not only did that become a perfect environment for tennis tournaments,” Leiweke said, “but we suddenly realized it’s a perfect environment for a tennis academy . . . that would be able to give Southern California a place for our young athletes to go and train.

“When we talked to people like Pete Sampras’ folks and others, what we learned is that none of our current tennis stars that have grown up in Los Angeles ended up doing their training here. Many of them ended going to Florida and going to the [Nick] Bollettieri Academy.

“So we kind of scratched our heads and said, ‘All right, we have probably the largest amateur tennis population in the United States, we have perfect weather, and yet no one’s been able to build out a tennis academy, less a tennis facility, that allows us to compete on a national basis.’

“So in addition to the tennis tournaments, we suddenly introduced this idea of a tennis academy.”

That translates into a lot of extracurricular activity on the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus, but George Pardon, vice president of administration and finance for the university, said the school would welcome the tennis component of the sports complex.

“We think that it really enhances the project,” Pardon said. “I think the more that it can be viewed as a sports complex and not focused specifically on soccer, we are really trying to build a real strong athletic venue that can service not only the university but also amateur athletics in Southern California.

“While there isn’t a soccer stadium of this caliber [in Southern California], there isn’t a tennis stadium of this magnitude that can service [the Southland], either.”

Currently, two professional tennis tournaments are held annually in the Los Angeles area--the men’s Mercedes Benz Cup at the Los Angeles Tennis Center at UCLA and the women’s estyle.com Classic at Manhattan Country Club. The Los Angeles Tennis Center at UCLA seats a maximum 7,000, Manhattan Country Club 5,300.

Leiweke said the goal is to “convince one or hopefully both of the tennis tournaments in town that we can now give them an environment that will allow them to grow, without having a negative impact on, in particular, the UCLA program. . . . This is not in competition with what UCLA is doing, but rather a resource to enhance L.A.’s position within tennis.”

The proposal, which Leiweke and Cal State Dominguez Hills officials presented Tuesday to the California State University board of trustees finance committee, calls for mostly private financing.

“It will be similar to financing Staples Center,” Leiweke said. “This will be geared toward naming rights, founding partners, suites and generating enough revenue to pencil this out.”

An additional $20 million will need to raised for the soccer training center bid. Leiweke said $12.5 million has already been raised for the bid and expects U.S. Soccer, the national federation, to contribute $5 million from its foundation.

That would leave $2.5 million to be raised locally and, according to Leiweke, “we think we know how to do that.”

Plans call for the soccer-tennis complex to be built on a site now occupied by the Olympic Velodrome. Steve Meiche, president of the Southern California Velodrome Assn., has requested the Galaxy build a new velodrome at a nearby site--at a cost of nearly $1 million--but Leiweke offers a compromise: The Galaxy would form a 50-50 partnership with the Los Angeles Sports Council to construct a cycling track if Los Angeles were awarded a future Olympic Games.

“This is not soccer versus the velodrome,” Leiweke said. “If it was soccer versus the velodrome, guess what. There’s 2 million people that play soccer in Southern California, there’s 200 people that use the velodrome in Southern California. It’s not even close.”

Of course, the project is still in the blueprint phase. Tuesday’s presentation to the board of trustees was only the first step in a long and uncertain process that could eventually yield a miniature version of the master plan, a simplified complex--or, possibly, no complex at all.

“Within the next 60 days, we’re going to figure out if this is going to happen or not,” Leiweke said.

“In our world, there are four big pieces. There is the soccer stadium, the tennis stadium, the United States soccer federation national training center and the [tennis] training academy. We’re convinced that soccer and the training academy make great sense, so, worst-case scenario, we’ll go on that. It saves us a lot of money, quite frankly.

“But this is probably the best shot L.A. is going to have at building a world-class tennis facility too.”

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* BUILDING MOMENTUM: Proposal for sports complex at Cal State Dominguez Hills gets preliminary approval. Page 10