Dukes Are Gone, but Bar Is Open : World TeamTennis: Members at John Wayne Tennis Club seem to miss the parties more than the matches.

NEWPORT BEACH — In 10 cities around the country, World TeamTennis begins its 15th season this week. For the first time in six summers, Newport Beach is not one of those cities.

But Steve Joyce, a regular at Duke matches, doubts there will be a moment of silence at John Wayne Tennis Club, the Dukes’ home for five seasons.

“I wouldn’t say that anyone would shed a tear that they’re not here anymore,” said Joyce, a longtime club member who now tends the bar, which once overlooked Duke matches on center court. Joyce did say that he and about 100 of his friends will miss the parties that went on during the matches, which started at 7 p.m. and lasted about three hours.

“It turned into a happy hour scene,” Joyce said. “After the third or fourth year, we kind of looked forward to it. It was a good party night out for a lot of us.”

But the parties got so out of hand that Dukes owner Fred Lieberman was forced to close the bar windows after the first season--a move Joyce said didn’t endear Lieberman or the team to the bar patrons.

“There was an anti-Dukes sentiment for the first couple years,” Joyce said. “It wasn’t until the end that we started cheering for the Dukes again.”

Tracy Cleveland, the club’s assistant manager for four years and manager during the Dukes’ final season, had the job of keeping the bar windows closed.

“That was a tough job,” said Cleveland, who has since moved to Seattle. “People were pulling out knives and trying to cut the rope that tied the windows shut.”

Occasionally, the windows would fly open and the noise from the bar would irritate the players. It seemed the player who was the easiest to irritate was Martina Navratilova, who once asked the bar crowd before serving, “Do you guys want to watch tennis or party?” Of course, the tipsy bar crowd quickly shouted, “Party!”

“When Martina would complain, it was like pouring kerosene on the fire,” Joyce said.

He never really understood how Dukes’ fans were supposed to act during the matches.

“When Fred Lieberman took over the team, I interviewed him for a local sports magazine and he mentioned how he wanted the fans to be interactive with a lot of cheering,” Joyce said. “Not like at Wimbledon where it’s hush, hush . . . but more like a Little League crowd.”

Cleveland also thought the fans were getting mixed messages from Lieberman, who could not be reached for this story.

“Part of the reason they never got full support from the members was that [members] were told it was supposed to be fun, and then in the same breath they were told they couldn’t have fun,” Cleveland said.

Joyce and Cleveland said inadequate parking facilities and high ticket prices were also turnoffs to club members. But club members who watched from the bar did not have to pay for tickets.

“If they had paid to get in, I don’t think [Dukes’ management] would have cared too much about the noise,” Cleveland said.

But Greg Patton, who coached the Dukes for their first four seasons and led them to two WTT finals, said the Dukes should have been more concerned with satisfying their younger fans instead of worrying about the bar crowd.

“I don’t think Fred [Lieberman] had a feel for the pulse of the tennis community,” said Patton, who now coaches the Idaho Sneakers of the WTT. “You need to excite the kids and then get their parents to come. We had to be a kinder, gentler product.”

With the Los Angeles Strings folding in 1993 and the Dukes in 1994, World TeamTennis is without a team in the Southern California market.

“If tennis is going to make it, they need Southern California,” said Patton, who has Laguna Beach’s Jon Leach and Newport Beach’s Brett Hansen playing for him in Idaho. “It’s the pot of gold of tennis. But we need to get the prices down and be more fan responsive. We need to be more of a rock ‘n’ roll kind of tennis.”

Ilana Kloss, executive director of the WTT, agrees with Patton and says the league needs to return to Southern California.

“It’s not a matter of if, it’s when,” she said. “But we want to make sure it’s the right owner and the right location. It’s a big market, but there’s a lot of competition. You need the best players and a strong owner.”

Kloss said the best scenario would be if the league could get John McEnroe to play in Southern California with strong ownership such as Disney.

“We’ve been trying to get John to play for years, and he has a place [in Malibu],” Kloss said. “Disney would be the type of ownership that could afford a player like McEnroe.”

Kloss mentioned Pepperdine as a possible site, but she didn’t rule out Orange County. Ken Stuart, new owner of the John Wayne Club, said getting another team tennis franchise is not a top priority.

“I haven’t thought about it,” he said. “I think the franchise lost money every year and to my recollection, they were the best team in the league. I think team tennis does better in smaller cities when it’s the only game in town. There’s 600 things to do in Southern California.”