In Memoriam: Jim Westhall Sr.

Jim Westhall Sr., who headed the Volvo International in its days in New Hampshire, Vermont and ultimately Connecticut, passed away on Nov. 26th in North Conway, N.H., the very town that played host to the tournament during its most roseate years. He was 88.

A graduate of Duke University, Westhill began his career in radio and television, including doing play-by-play for Dartmouth football. He was an assistant to New Hampshire Congressman Louis C. Wyman, and later worked for a communications law firm and a national airline. As owner/tournament director, Westhall took a fledgling event that Bud Collins dubbed “Wimbledon of the Woods” and Rod Laver called “a little old country hit” and transformed it into a showcase for some of the world’s top players. Among the titlists during Westhall’s run were Laver, Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl, John McEnroe, Andre Agassi, Stefan Edberg and Boris Becker.

The Volvo International was originally played on the outdoor clay courts of Bretton Woods (1973-74) and North Conway (1975-84) in New Hampshire, before moving to the hard courts of Stratton Mountain Resort in Vermont (1985-89).

“He had no experience in tennis, but he clearly had a mind for promotion,” said longtime Haverford College men’s coach Sean Sloane, who served as Westhall’s head referee and adviser from the very start. “He was quite an innovator. I think a lot of other tournaments have copied stuff that he started.”

“Jim Westhall was a showman,” said Bill Norris, a longtime trainer with the ATP World Tour. “He had great ideas. He really made his mark in tennis in the early ‘70s. There was really no template for being a tournament director back in those days. It was the infancy of the professional game.”

In 1990, Westhall was instrumental in moving the event, later known as the Pilot Pen International, to New Haven, Conn., making it the state’s first major tennis tournament. In its first two years there, the US Open tune-up attracted 265,000 spectators.

Westhall led a push for expansion of the Connecticut Tennis Center at Yale (today the Cullman-Heyman Tennis Center), which upon completion was the second largest tennis stadium in the world (15,000 capacity).

“When he moved to Connecticut, that was huge,” said Sloane. “He wanted to stay in upper New England, but he also wanted the tournament to continue to grow. He knew the risk he was taking by going to New Haven.”

“North Conway was the most special place — at the bottom of Mount Cranmore,” remembered Norris. “He used to transport players by helicopter from the tournament hotel because traffic was so heavy. It really had a circus- or county-fair-type feeling. All these great names were playing — Connors, Guillermo Vilas.”

In was at the Volvo International in 1979 that Connors had to be shuttled from North Conway via helicopter to catch a flight to Los Angeles, arriving with only hours to spare before his wife, Patti, gave birth to their son, Brett.

Westhall’s promotional stunts were legendary. He held live draws on the top of Mount Washington, on a boat at sea, with veteran official Frank Hammond in a dive tank, and with help from a skydiver. During his tenure in New Haven, the event was the first to introduce music during changeovers. In 1995, he famously settled a bet with Agassi. The wager? His hair. Westhall said that if Agassi won the title he would allow the future Hall of Famer to cut his famously long locks on court.

According to the New Haven Register, Agassi called it “the thickest, nappiest head of hair I’ve ever seen.”

“I never thought it would happen to me,” said Westhall, who in 2004 authored Nonsense at the Net: A Rags to Riches to Rags Story (Or…How a Little Backwoods Tennis Tournament Made it to the Big Leagues). “But here we are. I’ll do anything to get this tournament to be the best in the world.”

In April 1997, he sold the tournament to a partnership group headed by Butch Buchholz.

He is survived by his wife, Vera, their three children, James, Jr., Suzanne and Lisa, two grandchildren and a great grandson.