Tombstone
Born: February 1978 – The Cleveland Nets relocate to New Orleans
Folded: November 10, 1978
First Match: April 22, 1978 (W 30-26 vs. Indiana Loves)
Last Match: August 17, 1978 (L 25-23 vs. Boston Lobsters @ Birmingham, AL)
World Team Tennis Championships: None
Arena
Louisiana Superdome (76,000)11978 World Team Tennis Media Guide
Opened: 1975
Marketing
Team Colors: Red, White & Blue21978 World Team Tennis Media Guide
Ownership
Owner: Joseph Zingale
Attendance
We have a partial record of New Orleans Nets attendance from World Tennis. We are still seeking a league-wide attendance average for the 1978 season.
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Source: Craig, Jack. “Lobsters to quit WTT for a year”. The Globe (Boston, MA). October 28, 1978
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New Orleans Nets
Team Tennis T-Shirt
Nets owner Joe Zingale was from the ‘Go Big or Go Home’ school. In both the Nets’ original home in Cleveland and the team’s final resting place in the Big Easy, Zingale booked the league’s largest arena each season, first at Cleveland’s Richfield Coliseum and later at the NFL-sized Louisiana Superdome when the Nets arrived in 1978.
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Background
The New Orleans Nets were a six-person, co-ed professional tennis team that played out of the Superdome for the final season of the original World Team Tennis (WTT) league during the summer of 1978. The franchise started out as the Cleveland Nets during the debut season of WTT in 1974. The team played in Cleveland for four seasons and major international stars of the era including Martina Navratilova and Bjorn Borg. But the Nets never did great box office in Ohio. Owner Joseph Zingale, a Cleveland radio station owner, split his 1977 “home” schedule between Cleveland, Pittsburgh and one-off matches in a handful of neutral sites, including New Orleans.
In February 1978 Zingale announced the team would move to New Orleans when the 1978 WTT season opened in late April. The team was known both as the “New Orleans Nets” and the “Sunbelt Nets” following the move. World Team Tennis franchises played in a number of enormous NBA arenas that were fundamentally ill-suited to its typically small crowds. But no other club even approached the gargantuan dimensions of the Nets’ home at the 70,000-seat Louisiana Superdome.
1978 Roster
Borg, the Nets’ top gate attraction in 1977, would not move south with the team. Nevertheless, the 1978 Nets featured a fascinating international roster:
- Helen Gourlay Cawley (Australia)
- John Lucas (United States)
- Andrew Pattison (Rhodesia)
- Renee Richards (United States)
- Marty Riessen (United States)
- Wendy Turnbull (Australia)
John Lucas was a pro basketball star with the NBA’s Houston Rockets. At the University of Maryland he was an All-American in both basketball and tennis in the mid-1970’s. Lucas was able to join the Nets for the 1978 season after the Rockets failed to qualify for the NBA playoffs, which would have conflicted with the first six weeks of the WTT schedule.
For the Nets, Lucas paired in mixed doubles with Dr. Renee Richards, a 43-year old trans woman who had sex re-assignment surgery in 1975. Richards was a pioneer for transgender rights and a cause celebre during the mid-1970’s after she was denied entry to compete in the 1976 U.S. Open as a woman. Richards would overcome player boycotts, efforts to force her into chromosome testing and courtroom battles with the United States Tennis Association to successfully gain entry into the U.S. Open in August 1977. She joined the Nets less than a year later.
World Team Tennis took a break each June for its top stars to compete at Wimbledon. During the break, Nets star Wendy Turnbull won Wimbledon’s female doubles competition with her partner Kerry Reid.
Demise
World Team Tennis began to implode in October 1978. After five seasons of play, the league still lacked a television contract and struggled to generate sufficient revenue to pay for the large NBA and NHL arenas it rented or the salary demands of top stars like Navratilova, Borg, Chris Evert and Ilie Nastase. The teams collapsed one-by-one through late October and early November. The Nets bit the dust on November 10th, 1978. The league was effectively through by Thanksgiving.
A re-booted World Team Tennis returned in 1981 on a less ambitious scale, playing primarily in country clubs rather than NBA arenas. This more modest version of WTT plays on today and will enter its 38th season in 2018. Though the new WTT has cycled through countless cities and franchises in the past four decades, it has never returned to New Orleans.
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Editor's Pick
Bustin' Balls
World Team Tennis 1974-1978, Pro Sports, Pop Culture & Progressive Politics
by Steven Blush
Bustin’ Balls tells the strange but true story of World Team Tennis (1974-1978) that attempted to transform the prim and proper individual sport of tennis into a rowdy blue-collar league. Billie Jean King and her partners merged feminism and civil rights with queer lifestyle, pop culture and a progressive political agenda to create a dazzling platform for the finest tennis players of the day to become overnight stars.
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New Orleans Nets Video
The Nets take on the Anaheim Oranges. HBO broadcast from the 1978 season.
In Memoriam
Nets owner Joseph Zingale passed away after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease on March 10, 2014 at age 80.
Links
“Rocket with a racket“, Melissa Ludtke, Sports Illustrated, May 29, 1978
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One Response
Unusual combination of sports played by John Lucas in one calendar year – tennis and basketball.