Lobsters swim in uncharted waters
There’s a tour going on at the Ferncroft Country Club in Middleton. Small groups in standard country club garb are dawdling on freshly cut grass. The guides are selling time shares in three-hour blocks. Their pitch will bomb completely until the end.
Over here, a glimmering pool you can’t use. On weekends when you’re here - only on the hot days - kids will pop out in their floaties seemingly just to taunt you. And that, over there, a nationally-renowned golf course - not yours either! Sorry! Meals include beer for the adults, frozen candy bars for the kids. They’ll probably figure out a way to rig in some hot dogs.
And over there will be Serena Williams in a few weeks, grunting loudly, whirring fans into tizzies, getting the neighbors on the verge of calling the police for disturbing the peace, for all our owner cares. You’ll be close enough to talk to her, see the ball meld in half as her serve hits the concrete. You’ll be close enough - down this one-lane street hidden among all these trees, after you park in this 60-spot lot built for a pool at a country club in the North Shore suburbs - to touch a real, live, famous person. Not that we recommend it.
And then the pitch for the Boston Lobsters of World TeamTennis makes sense. They’re selling three hours of your time to see, over the course of the four-week season, Williams, or the Lobsters’ Martina Navratilova, or one of the tens of other WTA and ATP players trying to get a league that started in 1973 to work again.
The catalyst for the Boston Lobsters - a misnomer; Middleton is 21 miles north of the city - is Bahar Uttam, the team’s CEO.
“There’s nothing quite like a clear, beautiful night here watching tennis with 1,600, 1,700 people screaming,’’ he says, smiling. He’s in an un-air-conditioned room beaten down with sunlight, everyone is ready to peel the shirts off their backs, and he seems absolutely comfortable.
This is probably true, because he’s not just happy to be here in the team’s makeshift office behind the weight room at the Ferncroft, but happy to be where his team will actually draw fans. He’s happy not to be in Cambridge.
In 2005, Uttam bought the team and named it after the 1974-1978 incarnation that was owned by Robert Kraft. Uttam decided he wanted the team in Cambridge.
“For some reason, I was glued to Harvard. I don’t know why I was so set on it. I figured, I lived there, I worked there,’’ he says. “But I don’t know. We needed to get out of Harvard.’’
The Lobsters weren’t failing in Cambridge, but they certainly weren’t thriving. They played at the Beren Tennis Center, too often on one of the indoor courts, and there was no real sense that any sort of community was being built around the team. The curious would come and enjoy themselves, but not stick with them.
Then Uttam got some phone calls. “I kept hearing from Billie Jean King, and she kept telling me to move out to suburbia,’’ says Uttam. (King was the commissioner of the WTT from 1984-2001 and still serves as a league ambassador.)
“She said we should go to where the tennis is. There would be a lot more sponsors. There would be a community there,’’ he said. “So I started looking around.’’
Uttam thought about Manchester, N.H., a couple of cities in the Metrowest and the South Shore, and decided on the Ferncroft.
They set up a mini-stadium with some stock arena seats a couple of yards from the court and a few bleacher seats behind it.
It has the intimacy of a high-level high school match. But instead of watching gawky teenagers fumble around, ticket buyers will be watching the second-ranked women’s player in the world a week from today.
Oh, and Uttam wants to make another thing clear. Just because he moved the team out of the city, the team has not adopted the country club life.
“The whole concept is this: This isn’t Wimbledon. We’re not going to ask you to ‘Please, be silent.’ There’s a lot of noise,’’ Uttam says. “People will have fun.’’
They have ingratiated themselves into the “Happy Gilmore’’ generation of tennis. They’ve hired a comedian, Steve Calechman, to rile up crowds between sets, to make sure you “know which team to love and which team to hate.’’
Calechman has some material prepared, jokes that might not work on a stale crowd that wasn’t filled to capacity, jokes that might not have worked if the Lobsters were still in Cambridge.
“It was never like this. I’m hoping for seven sell-outs here,’’ says Uttam, whose Lobsters play seven matches at home and seven on the road, beginning tonight at St. Louis.
“It probably won’t happen very frequently, he says. “I just don’t want to take the rug out from under people.’’
That’s part of why he got hired. Schultz, who played in the ATP, founded Tenacity, an organization that hands out rackets to kids in urban areas. Since being named coach in March, he’s done 12 clinics at the local YMCA.
Uttam thinks this is the only way a team like this is going to work. “We need to build relationships from within,’’ he says.
He uses the example of other local professional teams, which have sponsors. The Celtics have an official bank, so do the Patriots and Bruins.
“That baseball team - what is that Boston baseball team?’’ he asks, jokingly. “They have an official hospital.’’
He thinks that, in this type of community, down that one-way street, they could build traffic and more lanes. The pool would be a nuisance, their season ticket-holder tours growing so big they’d form a line around it. They could have their own sponsored hospital.
And they might next week. He’s thinking about calling Beverly Hospital - already a sponsor - about becoming the Official Hospital of the Boston Lobsters.
“Around here,’’ he says, “we’re a big deal.’’
Correction: Because of a reporting error, the first name of the Boston Lobsters coach was incorrect in a story on the team in Thursday’s Sports section. The coach is Bud Schultz. 