Pros Play in Fund-Raisers
By Jack Graves

TENNIS
East Hampton Star
August 21, 2008

            Seven former top players on the professional circuit, namely Johan Kriek, Scott Davis, Luke and Murphy Jensen, Richey Reneberg, Jeff Tarango, and Chris Haggard, participated in fund-raisers here on Friday and Sunday that raised money for the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Md., and the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
            On Friday, the above-named pros, as well as Guillermo Vilas, David Pate, Gilad Bloom, and others, teamed up in the Old Boys Invitational with amateurs paying $4,000 to bolster the center’s scholarship fund.
            On Sunday, at the East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Tennis Club, amateurs paid $10,000 each to play in a tournament that, according to its director, Anthony Boulle, raised $800,000 for the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
            Overseen by the Junior Tennis Champions Center’s founder, Ken Brody, who lives in East Hampton, Friday’s tourney was played on private courts in the summer colony and on courts at the Racquet Club of East Hampton provided by Scott Rubenstein, whose son, Matt, an all-American when he played at East Hampton High School, once trained at the Junior Tennis Champions Center.
            “The idea of the Center,” said Brody. “Is to give kids who are very interested in tennis every chance to develop fully as players and as human beings. . . . In the last five years, we’ve had five number-ones in the juniors. We’ve got three 16-year-olds two of whom, Dennis Kudla and Junior Ore, played here who are among the top kids in the U.S.”
            “But what I want to tell you,” said Brody. “Because it’s a great example of how we’re developing our kids, is what happened last year to Junior Ore in a very tough match in the quarterfinals of the Easter Bowl.”
            “He had match point, the other kid hit the ball, and the umpire called it out. But Junior said that it had been in, and insisted that they replay the point. How many kids would do that? I think that story says a lot about the all-around good human beings we’re turning out.”
            “There are 100 players at the center,” he continued, “Ranging from 7 years old to 18, and a lot of them are on scholarship. It looks like the U.N. There are African-Americans, Asians . . . it’s very exciting.” Brody added that the center had been ranked by the Tennis Hall of Fame among the country’s top four, the others being in Florida.
            The center’s director, Martin Blackman, he said, “had been spectacular. He’s made the place really special. He’s got a great soul.”
            A Stanford graduate, former touring pro, and former coach at American University, Blackman was described by Reneberg, who’s known him since their junior tennis years, as “one of the highest quality guys in tennis, nationally and internationally.”
            In reply to a question, Blackman, who oversaw the tournament with Dana Evans, a former all-American at Wake Forest, said, “We do do some scouting. It’s a character-based program. The kids have to do community service, they have to have a good attitude, and they have to have a G.P.A. of at least 3.0. Character is first. Our motto is, ‘Developing champions on and off the court.’”
            Soon, he said, the center would enter into a partnership with the J.O. Wilson Elementary School in northeast Washington, D.C. “It’s sometimes hard for the kids to get to us, so we’re going to bring coaches and peer mentoring to them. It’s a pilot program.”
            “They’re developing very good young tennis players at the center by giving them good coaching, which they need,” said Reneberg. “The first time I saw it, 10 years ago, it was a shell. Now there are 27 courts. They’re doing all they can do to give these kids a chance to make it. Though, he added, “a lot of it has to come from them.”
            Friday’s final, played on a Har-Tru court at Brody’s house, was won by Tarango and Brody’s 6-foot-4-inch son, Charlie, a junior at Kenyon College, who plays third singles and second doubles on the team that made it this spring to the Elite Eight in Division III. Tarango, a hard-hitting left-hander, and Brody defeated Scott Davis and Eliot Bisnow 8-3.
            Haggard and Ralph Finerman defeated Rick Leach and Doug Campbell in in a tiebreaker to win the Prostate Cancer Foundation’s upper-level title, while Graydon Oliver and Peter Janssen defeated Luke Jensen and Wade Thompson in that tourney’s lower-level final. 
            “Some of the people playing today have prostate cancer,” said Michael Milken, the foundation’s founder. “One guy has had three different kinds, and is on chemotherapy!”
            Much progress in countering the disease had been made, Milken said, partly because of the fact that in its 12 years of existence the foundation had raised $350 million on its own, and had obtained $10 billion in grants, from the federal government, state governments, pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, and the Department of Defense.”
            “There are more than 70 different treatments for prostate cancer now,” he continued. “The incidence is high, as you would expect in an aging population, but the deaths are dropping.”
            Next year, he added, four Prostate Cancer Foundation pro/ams are planned, to be known as the Charles Evans P.C.F. Pro/Am Tour Ñ at Indian Wells, Calif., in March, at the Greenwich Country Club in Connecticut in June, in East Hampton in August, and at the Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla., in November.