Ojai Serves a Tournament of Tradition

OJAI, Calif. —  It took more than 100 years, but the people who run the oldest amateur tennis tournament in the nation finally traded in their living rooms for a real office.

They’ve even got a home page on the Internet.

But that’s about it for modernization at the Ojai Valley Tennis Tournament, one of the largest amateur tournaments in the country.

In this event, built on tradition since the late 1800s, most things never change. People like it that way.

“It’s sacred to many people,” said Joe De Vito, Ojai’s mayor pro tem and president of the Ojai Valley Tennis Club for the past five years. “Being that this is such an important tournament in the tennis world, it would have been very easy to commercialize it. But the people that run this tournament don’t want that to happen. They want the tradition to remain here.”

Take the year someone suggested organizers actually charge money for the traditional, fresh-squeezed Ojai orange juice served every morning, and the tea and cookies served in a Libbey Park tent every afternoon.

Or the year a large company offered cash for the right to put its name atop the downtown tournament sign that stretches across Ojai Avenue.

Suffice to say the juice, tea and cookies served under the stately oaks of Libbey Park remain free. And nothing more than a plain green-and-white sign stretches across downtown, with nary a corporate sponsor in sight.

This is the tournament a whole city built, more like a community project than the prestigious tournament it has become.

Year after year, the people in this bucolic town of 8,075 make the Ojai happen.

More than 600 volunteers--including 200 students from Thacher High School, the private school where the tournament was born--do everything from the planning to the ticket-taking to the cleanup.

To handle the hundreds of players in the early rounds today and Friday, 30 homeowners in the Ojai Valley have opened their stately houses and backyard tennis courts, along with public and private courts across Ventura, Oxnard and Camarillo. Dozens of residents open their guest rooms to host junior players.

The Ojai tournament was the brainchild of William Thacher, a Yale graduate and tennis champion who moved to the Ojai Valley to help his brother, Sherman, run his private school.

Tony Thacher, William Thacher’s great-nephew, said Sherman tried to get his brother to leave his tennis rackets and white court threads behind. Ojai was a place for hard work and horses, as the story goes. Not tennis.

But William Thacher had other ideas. He carved out a tennis court on the school grounds and challenged tennis players in Ventura to a match in 1895. In the following years, the tournament evolved into a challenge between the best tennis players in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, then the best in the region, then the state.

This is the 97th tournament, which has been played in all but five years since it began. In 1928, hoof-and-mouth disease kept horses and buggies from carrying players and spectators up the hill to Ojai. The tournament also was canceled four times during World War II.

This year, the tournament will draw about 1,400 of the best amateur players from grade school through college from across the Western states. Regarded as one of the top junior tournaments in the Southland, the Ojai also is home to the Big West, Pacific-10 and community college championships.

More than 25 finalists at the Ojai have gone on to win Wimbledon, including tennis greats Bill Tilden, Billie Jean King, Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith, Jack Kramer, Tracy Austin, Bobby Riggs, Pancho Gonzalez, Maureen Connolly and Jimmy Connors.

“Part of the charm of this tournament is you get to rub shoulders with the players,” said Tony Thacher, who has been volunteering since about age 10.

The Ojai could not have survived so long without all the volunteers, she said.

Aside from the umpires and match officials, there is no paid staff. Virtually all the nonprofit organization’s revenue comes from tournament entry fees and ticket sales, she said.

This year, the organization spent $9,000 to resurface the courts at Libbey Park, where all the finals will be played Saturday and Sunday.

On Tuesday in the tournament’s new office, tournament secretary Caroline Thacher scrambled through piles of scheduling paperwork and wished the phone would stop ringing. Tournament draws were to be announced that afternoon, and every few minutes, someone else called for an update.

For the first 18 years she did this job, the headquarters was run out of her Ping-Pong room and kitchen.

It wasn’t exponential growth or some financial windfall that put organizers in an office this year. It was luck. After 50 years, the Ojai Festivals Thrift Store closed. Just a stone’s throw across Signal Street from Libbey Park, the spot was ideal. So now they have an office.

Thacher has tried to retire and pass on the torch. But the Ojai tournament rule is that before volunteers can retire, they’ve got to find and train their own replacements.

“I retired 10 years ago,” she said with a laugh, “but unfortunately, my replacement took flight to Alaska and has never been seen since.”