Play Meter

PEPPARD: It wasn't a question ofthe mistakes, it
was a question of the learning process as far as the
rules and the tournaments were concerned. Players
today would not tolerate what happened on the
quarter-million-dollar tour, and we know that. The
development of the match card system, for
example, which seems today to be an obvious way
of running a tournament, was actually a major
breakthrough for us as far as good efficient
management of the tournament is concerned. So
the development of the actual tournament system is
one of continual evolvement rather than of
correcting mistakes because, back then, there were
no guidelines to work from.
ROGERS: I can give you a pretty good idea of our
progress. We ran our first tournament with ten
rules. And those ten rules were things like "Be a
nice guy" and "Serve the ball carefully" and "Don't
jar the table." Today we have, with the WTSA, a
rule book that is comparable to the size of the rules
of baseball. We actually went into that quarter-mil-
lion -dollar tour with ten rules, but it became
apparent to us as we played for more and more and
bigger and bigger dollars that there was no room
for haziness in the rules. This came clear about six
or eight weeks into that first tour. It was at the
Wichita, Kansas tournament. That tournament was
a fiasco; people were really abusing the rules. So on
a plane to Reno for our next tournament, I wrote
the rules which I had to present for acceptance to
the WTSA. So the rules we had at that time grew to
twenty -two.
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GREENWALD
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PLAY METER: And you're constantly adding to
these rules?
ROGERS: They're constantly being expanded on.
This is in any sport. We've added time limits and
special rules for passing, and that sort of thing. So
when you talk about the mistakes it's more along
the lines that we started off very naive, and we've
gotten very sophisticated. The same thing is true
for the number of events we now present. Our first
tournament had two events-a doubles and mixed
doubles. Today in a $10,000 tournament, we'll
present ten events-four pro events, four novice
events, and two specialty events. So we bring the
sport to every skill level. That way a guy who can't
compete against the pros can still come to the event
and practice and play against his skill level. And
we'll do things like add clinics where, maybe on a
Saturday afternoon, everything at the tournament
stops for one hour and everybody crowds into the
bleachers, and these pros give lessons. This way
the novices and rookies in the area get that much
more excited about learning the techniques, and
they go back to their bar and keep playing until the
tour comes back around the next time .
PLA Y METER: What other types of promotions do
you run?
ROGERS: First, there's our professional promo
teams. They are constantly on the road doing
exhibitions. We have five fulltime traveling promo
teams- four domestically and one foreign. Each is
fully outfitted with a customized van. There are two
people on each team. To date, we have been lucky
PLAY METER , May, 1978
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