Can His Team Become Red-Hot?
Entrepreneur Bahar Uttam hopes local sports fans will welcome the return of pro team tennis and the Boston Lobsters.
Bahar Uttam has a simple, and rather entrepreneurial, tennis philosophy: Attack from the base line. "I only come to the net to shake hands," he says. Uttam, 61, is equally determined off the court. Good thing. As the new owner of the Boston Lobsters, one of 12 franchises of the World TeamTennis league, Uttam will compete for the attention of a Boston sports fan who already has the Sox, Pats, Celtics, Bruins, and suddenly successful Revolution on the brain. Fan loyalty will have to be earned. "If the Lobsters do well, we'll have non-tennis players following them," Uttam says. "I don't just want a team. It's got to be a winning team."
World TeamTennis is an unusual mix of professional athletics and entertainment. Teams draw from the multigenerational ranks of the game's best-known, including Martina Navratilova for the Lobsters and Venus Williams, John McEnroe, and Boris Becker on other teams. The season lasts three weeks, and in Boston, it kicks off July 5 at Harvard's 3,500-seat Bright Arena. Matches include men's and women's singles and doubles, plus mixed doubles, and the atmosphere is jollier than what you'll see at major tournaments; though the tennis is competitive, the players tend to interact and joke with one another and the crowd.
Uttam, the founder of Synetics Inc., a Wakefield technology company with revenues of $50 million when he sold his interest in 2002, says the time was right to bring pro team tennis back to the city. The Boston Lobsters last competed from 1974 to 1978; the owner in 1977 and 1978 was Robert Kraft, long before he bought the Patriots. Navratilova, 48, was on the original roster, too. Boston has been in a pro-tennis drought since 1999, when Longwood Cricket Club, which for decades hosted the US Pro tournament, demolished its amphitheater.
Some might conclude that Boston isn't interested. Not Uttam. For a model, he could do worse than Kraft's Patriots, a franchise that was once an NFL laughing-stock and now has three Super Bowl wins and 50,000 people waiting for season tickets. Uttam expects the Lobsters to lose money the first year, but he has lined up several sponsors (including The Boston Globe) and made a deal to televise two contests next month. In mid-July, a matchup of great Martinas - Navratilova and her 24-year-old namesake, Martina Hingis, who plays for the NY Sportimes of Mamaroneck, New York - should be a draw.
Uttam, who was born in Calcutta, grew up in England, and lives in Cambridge, says team tennis hooked him when he saw his first Davis Cup match, between the United States and Czechoslovakia, on Sanibel Island, Florida, in 1992. He has seen more than a dozen since. "To see Agassi, Sampras, and Courier - major rivals - all on the same side was delightful," he says. "They were high-fiving and hugging each other. The team was the key thing."
When Uttam plays tennis, however, he prefers singles. "I'm a bit of a control freak," he says, grinning. "If I make a mistake, it's my fault." Yet doubles isn't completely off-limits. In 2001, he watched Andre Agassi win the Australian Open in Melbourne. At the airport the next morning, the ticket agent asked Uttam if he would mind changing seats so a couple on the flight could sit together. No dice: He and his longtime partner, Kathryn Soderberg, were traveling together. The agent mentioned that the couple in question was Agassi and Steffi Graf. "Well, we have our tennis rackets with us, and it's a couple of hours before the flight," Uttam says he replied. "If Steffi and Andre want to play doubles, the winners can have the two seats." Indeed, the entrepreneurial mind never rests. 