BackExcerpt | Advantage Hollywood
Ashok Amritraj's remarkable journey, from tennis player to Hollywood producer
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Ashok Amritraj, along with his brothers Vijay and Anand, formed a trinity that ruled over Indian tennis in the 1970s and 1980s. Ashok traded in his racquet for a career in Hollywood in the 1980s. After churning out several low-budget soft-core and action thrillers, Amritraj managed a seat at the high table through the box-office success of such films as Double Impact, Bringing Down the House, Premonition and Walking Tall. He shares memories, anecdotes and lessons from the worlds of tennis and cinema in his memoir Advantage Hollywood (HarperCollins India, ₹ 499). In an edited excerpt from the chapter “California Dream", Amritraj talks about participating in the World Team Tennis league, meeting Hollywood personalities, attending parties and generally scoring on the court and off it.
In 1975, when I first landed in California, I was full of awe and amazement. It was, to me, magical. In the 1970s, America was the centre of the universe.
India was a place far away and the only thing that America knew of India was from the Beatles, Ravi Shankar, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and perhaps the Bleeding Madras t-shirts. Most Americans could not find India, let alone Chennai, on the map.
As soon as I set foot in California and visited the studios, I knew that this was the place I wanted to live in, and this was the industry I wanted to be a part of, and be a success in.
Tennis has always been an individual sport. All the professional tournaments like Wimbledon, the US Open and the French Open, as well as the other events, give primary importance to singles with the doubles and mixed doubles being attended when there are no great singles matches being played. The only team event in tennis at the time was the Davis Cup, where generally a four-member team represented an individual country.
For the first time in the United States, as with other US sports like football, basketball or baseball, Billie Jean King and her husband Larry King decided to start a tennis league which they called World Team Tennis. It started in 1974 and continues to this day, but its extraordinary success was between 1975 and 1980.
Vijay and Anand were already playing in the US in 1974, and in 1975 they were signed to play for the San Diego Friars, which was a team owned by Jerry Buss and Frank Marianni, a couple of successful real estate mavericks and very passionate about the game of tennis. They knew about me, the third brother, who had shown great promise at Wimbledon the previous year and gone on to play extremely well the rest of the year. So when Vijay suggested to Jerry that he bring me out to San Diego as a member of the San Diego Friars, Jerry agreed and flew me out from London in the summer of 1975.
My brothers and I stayed in a condominium at Solana Beach, a wonderful development very close to the Pacific Ocean. In 1976 I was signed to play for Los Angeles, along with my brother Vijay and a top US Davis Cup player called Bob Lutz. Each team had three men and three women, and it was a total of five sets, the winning team having the aggregate number of games in the five sets.
We played at the fabulous Forum, and my journey and association with the entertainment industry really started. It was a time of meteoric rise for the game of tennis. Television and sponsorships had started coming in, and tennis had gone professional. The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) had been formed a few years earlier and we were a part of it, as were Connors, Borg, Nastase and all the other great tennis players of the era. However, there was only one family of three brothers that had ever played on the professional tennis tour, and once again, (the press and the public had not seen tennis players out of India) we were an absolute novelty, and extremely popular.
In the summer of 1976, playing for Los Angeles I got to meet many of my childhood heroes who enjoyed tennis: Sidney Poitier, Charlton Heston, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Buzz Aldrin (the astronaut), and many, many others. Between 1976 and 1980, when I finally made that fateful decision to enter the motion picture industry, I knew I needed to network, to develop these contacts so that I could make the transition. Tennis was the perfect platform to meet and engage with and, in some cases, learn from these iconic Hollywood figures.
In 1976 and 1977 we continued to play – after the World Team Tennis season that lasted about eight weeks, in the individual events all around the world. My parents would visit us twice each year in the US and Europe. We travelled together as a family and had great times. My parents were young enough to enjoy the wonder of the different states in America and we were popular, not just with the press and public, but also with the young ladies.
I found to my pleasant surprise that my darker skin was definitely an attraction. Young female fans at the tournaments came up to us wanting to be friends, and more than friends. They would come to watch the match, rush after us asking for autographs, shouting our names and clamouring for our attention – a glance, a smile, a word, sometimes an acknowledgement. And after one gave the autograph, a conversation could follow, and perhaps some talk about meeting again – a date. That was simple and always possible. And if it didn’t happen at the courts, they followed us to the hotel because when the tournament ended, there was always more play at the hotel.
In 1977, travelling both within the country and back and forth between Europe and India became excessive for all three of us and we decided to finally buy a place together, of course in Los Angeles, and where else but in Marina del Rey, a few minutes from The beach. The Marina, as it was called, was very much a place where singles and young couples lived.
While Vijay and I liked the ladies as much as the next guy, our favourite pastime was to go to the movies as often as possible, and have a coffee and discuss the merits or demerits of the film. Anand preferred, and was rather devoted to, discovering, befriending and entertaining young ladies.
It was the era just after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had discovered the wonders or, at least, the ‘costumes’ of India, and the craze had arrived in California with the hippie generation. We were far from being hippies or joining that movement in any way, but when we went to India Anand would buy a large selection of women’s kurtas, silver and bead chains, necklaces, bracelets and bangles and sandals. He’d come back to LA (Los Angeles) with a bag full of this stuff and whenever he had a young lady visiting him he would give her gifts. Vijay and I would come home to our condominium after the movies and there would be his lady friend in the living room, all excited. ‘Look what I got, look what I got’ was a refrain we got used to.
I played doubles with Vijay through that whole season, and having made it to the playoffs, Jerry Buss was incredibly keen and focused on us winning the playoffs and the championship. Vijay and I remained unbeaten in our doubles matches throughout the playoffs. Vijay and Nastase used to alternate playing the singles. We played Boston in the finals, and ended up winning an extremely close and difficult match.
Sometime in 1980 Anand announced that he was getting married. He was proposing to marry a non-Indian girl. To put it mildly, there was a lot of resistance (the shit hit the fan) from my parents who thought of Anand as our Prince of Wales.
But Anand and Helen were in love and love doesn’t always recognize boundaries of race, caste, religion etc. She was an American from an Italian background, both her parents being first generation Italian-Americans. They lived in New York. She was startlingly blonde and beautiful in the mode of Farrah Fawcett, one of the original Charlie’s Angels.
When Anand got married in October of 1980, that era of our life was over. As it happened, Vijay and I formed Amritraj Productions that same month.
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