Steve Bellamy Tennis Quotations

Would we love to have had (Roddick)? Absolutely. But there's going to be a lot of great tennis played by some amazing athletes.

This unique racquet is symbolic of professional tennis' return to Las Vegas. It represents both the excitement and sizzle of the city and the great tennis fans will see at The Tennis Channel Open presented by Panasonic, the newest gem on the professional tennis circuit.

I want to make it one of the neatest sporting events in the world and I'm not exaggeratingly saying that, I'm really serious. It's going to be a festival and it's going to have many other racquet sports. Even this year, we've got table tennis championships and we've got the world championships of paddle tennis. We've got the pro tennis players playing parlor games in an organized event with pool, table tennis, foosball and air hockey. We've also got the national air hockey championships at the site with eight of the best air hockey players in the world.

My mission is always to grow the game of tennis. I didn't want to just put on another tennis tournament. I wanted to do something that was different. I wanted to do something that could bring people that wouldn't normally go to a tennis tournament and watch, and then sell them on tennis while they are there.

Next year, our aspirations are huge. We're going to have the world's biggest tennis tournament next year that's going to have tens of thousands of people that will play all over the country and they will all feed into Las Vegas. We'll have this big, mammoth draw the week before where probably 128 people all play for a chance to get into the main draw of the tournament and we're going to film it (for The Tennis Channel) and we're going to make it like an 'American Idol' type of thing. It's going to be cool.

She called just wanting to tell me about the facility and if she could get any kind of publicity on the Tennis Channel. She was telling me how neat this new facility was. She sent me some pictures and we came out and looked at it. We were like 'holy cow,' I can't believe this is a municipal tennis facility.