Jerry Solomon got his start staging events fresh out of college in 1979 by working with Colgate-Palmolive in its sports and recreation department. The personal hygiene company sponsored the men’s and women’s tennis tours, and that cemented Solomon’s deep ties to the sport. He later worked as an agent and then formed his own events company, StarGames, in 1994. It puts on ice shows, volleyball tournaments and, of course, tennis exhibitions. This week features the eighth annual tennis exhibition at Madison Square Garden in New York, featuring an undercard of Monica Seles vs. Gabriela Sabatini, followed by Roger Federer vs. Grigor Dimitrov. Solomon, known in some circles as husband to Olympic ice skater Nancy Kerrigan, expects to sell 16,000 tickets for the event, about the average number that’s been sold over the exhibition’s first seven years.
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I wasn’t a skeptic, but I wasn’t thinking we would still be doing this eight years later. The first event, which was Federer against [Pete] Sampras, had a lot of intrigue; it was a historic matchup. … We were hoping to get to 7,500 tickets and we ended up selling 20,000.”
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Photo: COURTESY OF JERRY SOLOMON
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On why the annual event has found success: I knew the long history of tennis at MSG [as host to tour championships in the 1980s and 1990s], and I knew the potential that people would come to the Garden if they got used to it. I figured there would be reasonably well pent-up demand.
On payments to players to participate, figures reported at $1.5 million and above in recent years: We start with a pretty healthy cut of payments to the players, who make these things happen. And we always thought we had to offer the players a really reasonable fee. [Note: Solomon declined to comment on any specific figures.]
On keeping a tennis exhibition attractive year after year: Every year there has been something. We had Bill Clinton one year; we honored Billie Jean King another. Every year there has been something that has made the event a special night.
On whether tennis in America can return to its standing of the ’70s and ’80s: Tennis is a very healthy business on a worldwide basis. You are not going to see the days in the U.S. of the 1980s, when there were 55 tournaments, men’s and women’s. It’s way more than us now.
