Tennis, Anyone? Anyone??

When Lenny Lindborg opened his Huntington Beach tennis club in the late 1970s, the golden era of tennis was in full swing.

Some 36 million Americans had rackets in their hands, boys and girls dreamed of being the next Jimmy Connors or Chris Evert, and millions were mesmerized by John McEnroe’s volatile but winning style.

Court time was so coveted at the Lindborg Racquet Club that he charged $1,200 for a membership. But as golf began to overtake tennis as the sport of the upwardly mobile and America’s fascination with 24-hour fitness clubs and action sports grew, Lindborg’s courts emptied.

“During lunchtime, you could shoot a cannon through the place,” he said. “Nobody’s there.”

In 2004, Lindborg sold his 4.6-acre property to Seabreeze Church for $5.2 million -- 10 times his original investment. “I didn’t want to sell,” he said. “But the land kept going up in value. I had no choice.”

Lindborg’s story is a familiar one. During the sport’s peak in the mid-1970s, developers couldn’t build private clubs fast enough to satisfy the public’s urge to whack a fuzzy yellow ball.

The building boom continued through the 1980s, even as the number of recreational tennis players fell by more than half and cheap-to-build suburban public courts flooded the landscape.

Faced with these pressures, owners of private clubs nationwide have found salvation in the real estate boom and cashed out, selling their acres of courts to the highest bidders -- usually developers looking to build homes or shopping centers.

“When private owners can put that land to a different use because of the red-hot real estate market, it’s a tough thing to combat,” said Henry Talbert, director of the Southern California Tennis Assn., the sport’s local governing body.

The demise of the private tennis club has touched nearly every region of the country, from San Francisco to Kansas City to New York, where four Manhattan facilities recently closed.

Hardest hit is Southern California, where private clubs, once only for the rich, proliferated after World War II to serve a growing upper-middle class.

Half of Orange County’s 22 tennis-only private clubs have been bulldozed and replaced by shopping malls, condos and homes in the last 15 years.

In San Diego, four private clubs have closed in the last two years, and only a few remain. The Los Angeles area recently lost private clubs in mid-Wilshire, Northridge and Thousand Oaks.

“Southern California was for a long time the vineyard of tennis,” said Bud Collins, the Hall of Fame tennis writer, who noted that the region has produced some of the game’s greatest stars, including Jack Kramer, Bill Tilden, Pancho Gonzalez, Billie Jean King, Pete Sampras and Tracy Austin.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, many of the region’s elite players honed their skills at the Los Angeles Tennis Club and played in the year’s biggest amateur tournament, the Pacific Southwest Tennis Championships.

The L.A. Tennis Club was a place where hoi polloi could rub elbows with Hollywood stars such as William Powell, Errol Flynn, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who were regulars.

The club is still thriving, with about 400 members and a waiting list. So is the Jack Kramer Club in Rolling Hills Estates.

But the Kramer Club was forced to become a member-owned cooperative in the mid-1960s and the L.A. Tennis Club has always been member-owned. Had making a profit been the goal, it is unlikely that either one would still be open.

“It’s a hard business to make a profit,” said Kramer, who won Wimbledon and U.S. Open singles titles in the 1940s. “Paying for the maintenance of the courts, the clubhouse, the parking area -- that’s expensive.... We couldn’t make any money.”

Kramer, 84, remembers the glory days of tennis, when a galaxy of stars prompted fans to join clubs, where they would wear pressed white skirts and hip-hugging white shorts, swing wooden rackets and adjourn for cocktails at courtside. It was a civilized venue for a regal sport.

“It’s a sad thing when a club closes,” Kramer said. “It’s like a ship going down.”

Alan Schwartz, chairman of Chicago-based Tennis Corp. of America, which owns more than 40 private clubs, has saved several from going under in recent years and resurrected others that were in foreclosure.

“I’m sitting here with two clubs myself that are barely hanging in there,” he said. “I know if I didn’t care deeply about tennis, there’d be a financial opportunity to use the land for other things.”

Some clubs have survived by moving beyond tennis and offering aerobics, yoga, swimming and basketball.

“Back in the 1970s, tennis was one of the best ways to stay fit,” said Annette Buck, director of adult and senior tennis for the Southern California Tennis Assn. “But people are making other choices now. You can do yoga, Pilates or hire a personal trainer. I don’t think it’s fun to go on the treadmill, but you can do it in a more concentrated period of time, and at any time. People’s lives are much busier.”

As recently as a decade ago, Sunny Hills Racquet Club in Fullerton was one of the busiest and most prestigious on the West Coast. It held youth, college and professional tournaments, and its academy produced several pros.

In 1970, original owner Stan Pyron sold memberships on a dirt lot with the help of tennis legends Rod Laver and Roy Emerson, who played an exhibition on the club’s only court.

Membership grew to 900 in the mid-1990s. But by 2003, it had dwindled to 300. Jack Chou, who had high hopes for the club when he bought it 20 years ago, couldn’t cover the mortgage.

The place looked like a “ghost town,” he said.

“We played all kinds of tricks to attract new members -- two-for-one deals, family bargains -- but nothing worked,” said Chou, who shut down the club in 2004.

Sunny Hills, now a mix of weeds and white-lined asphalt courts, has become a target of vandals and a temporary shelter for the homeless. There are plans to build apartments for senior citizens on the property.

Joe La Torre, a Fullerton attorney who belonged to Sunny Hills for five years, said the club’s closing hit him hard.

“I felt a personal sense of loss,” said La Torre, 58. “There were some great friendships and relationships that were shattered the day the club closed.”

He misses the perks of membership: arranged matches, dinner and drinks at the bar, swimming. But he doesn’t miss spending $160 a month to do all that. Now, La Torre pays $5 for 90 minutes of court time at a public tennis center in La Habra.

“I pay as I go,” he said.

Tennis isn’t dead. Nearly 25 million Americans play the game, and sales of tennis balls -- a key indicator -- were up slightly in 2004 after years of decline.

Schwartz, the Tennis Corp. chairman, believes the problems facing private clubs have more to do with real estate than tennis. Overbuilding in the 1970s and ‘80s saturated the market, he said, and today’s shakeout is driven by sky-high land prices.

“If the [land] is worth two and three times what it’s worth as a tennis club, you have to reevaluate,” Schwartz said. “But this trend is a rogue wave in a sea of good news about tennis.”

Others aren’t so sure. Ken Stuart, who owns the successful Palisades Tennis Club in Newport Beach, says the decline of private clubs is a bad sign for a sport that even boosters concede has struggled to broaden its base beyond the affluent.

Without the social benefits offered by the private club -- parties, road trips, post-match cocktails -- Stuart wonders whether the game itself will be enough to keep even fervent followers interested.

“People need more than just a court,” Stuart said. “There is a cultural value to private clubs.”

Palisades has 1,500 members and a waiting list. But Stuart realizes his club has benefited from the closings of others, as well as from its zoning, which prevents the land from being developed as anything but a recreational facility.

“Clubs like the Palisades are dinosaurs,” he said. “This land has almost zero value because it can only generate so much money as a tennis club. If it didn’t have land-use restrictions, you could build a high rise or some condos.”