The United States Tennis Association

In this book, Warren F. Kimball offers a history of a unique voluntary organization, the United States Tennis Association (USTA). Formed in the late nineteenth century by a small group of white male players who belonged to socially exclusive clubs in the Northeast, the organization initially concerned itself almost solely with standardizing the rules for what was then called lawn tennis. In less than a century and a half, it became technically a not-for-profit national sports body governed by a cumbersome combination of volunteers and paid professionals with annual revenues exceeding $300 million and with three-quarters of a million members. Today, the association owns and operates the annual U.S. Open Tennis Championships in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York City, one of the most prestigious and profitable sporting events in the world. Apart from the rules of play and tournament management, no issue surfaced on the association's agenda more often than that of how to maintain tennis as a strictly amateur sport. Early in the USTA's history, star players began to receive paid travel expenses plus money for appearance in tournaments; in the 1920s the goliath of tennis players, Big Bill Tilden, became the focal point of these and other issues. Still, until 1968, the association was able technically to exclude professional players from its premier national tournament. Without completely changing its governance, the decision to open its annual tournament to professionals propelled the USTA into a big business. In addition to the pay-for-play issue, the association's leadership repeatedly confronted challenges from outside the Northeast (in particular California) and from international tennis (in particular the International Lawn Tennis Federation). It also debated about the degree to which its volunteers and its paid personnel would determine policy and engage in daily decision making

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