TENNIS CHANNEL AIMS TO SERVE ALL.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH The Media

There's faulty logic here somewhere. In fact, since David Meister and Steve Bellamy are both involved, you can call it a double fault.

Meister has been around TV for decades, adept at creating and launching new cable ventures. Bellamy is a youthful, brash tennis evangelist who spreads the good word through his teaching academies. And somehow, this odd couple has been formed, bent on making a 24-hour-a-day cable channel devoted entirely to the sport of tennis.

They're even going to call it The Tennis Channel, and plans are to have it ready for your cable and dish systems in about six months.

They'll pull out all kinds of stats and charts to prove to investors that plenty of people have been making a racket for something like this for years.

So what's the problem? Too much tournament action, instructional shows and news. With all that stuff in the way, how will there be any time left for extended coverage of Anna Kournikova?

``You're the first person to even bring that up,'' Meister said facetiously over a plate of pasta in a beachview Santa Monica restaurant just down the street from the network's temporary offices.

Meister, who helped shape HBO Sports, Cinemax, CNBC, The Learning Channel, Sundance Channel and was once Major League Baseball's top TV executive, knows that he and Bellamy have got something here far better than a vanity vehicle for a certain underachieving Russian vixen who only needs to show up to create a rating leap.

In case you haven't been told, there are some 70 million tennis enthusiasts out there - a demographic advertisers love to court - plus there's some 1,225 tournaments in the sport each year that can be televised.

Aside from Kournikova, there's a legitimate model for this channel. Comparisons to the 1996 launch of The Golf Channel are natural. Yet The Tennis Channel should have a better chance to make a more immediate impact - most importantly because of how it meshes with today and tomorrow's technology.

``It's the right time from a TV standpoint because we're in a digital world and we're more convinced after talking to everyone involved that it makes good economic sense,'' said Meister, who describes himself as ``one of the world's most mediocre players'' yet is convinced he'd be an investor in this even if tennis wasn't his game.

``We don't have any grand immediate expectations,'' Meister added. ``Because of that, we can control the destiny of this easier. I know from experiences that this makes an awful lot of sense.''

When Meister and Bellamy started volleying about this idea 2 1/2 years ago - Meister was a member at Bellamy's now-famous Palisades Tennis Center - they were surprised no one else had already put this concept into motion.

Meister, however, had seen enough channels die on the vine that, despite Bellamy's infectious enthusiasm for the sport, he convinced him that it made no economic sense at the time.

Now, it's not so risky.

The timing of The Tennis Channel also comes as Arlen Kantarian, the USTA's chief executive, has been making strong overtures to raise the profile of the sport in the U.S. through well-marketed, televised tournaments that would culminate with the U.S. Open.

``Tennis on TV needs to be fixed in the U.S.,'' Kevin Wulff, the Sanex WTA Tour's CEO, is quoted in the latest edition of Tennis Magazine.

Here's one way.

Since a formal press conference at the U.S. Open last August to announce the channel's planned arrival, Meister and Bellamy have led a steady progression toward a launch, which was going to be this summer but has been bumped to sometime in the fall - it could piggyback with the WTA's season-ending event at Staples Center the week of Nov. 4.

In a very smart business move, they hired Comedy Central's affiliate-relations team to help them sell The Tennis Channel to cable systems. As a basic channel, TTC will be priced at about 1/10th of what an ESPN currently charges cable operators per subscriber.

Lately, the priority has been to find a facility somewhere in West L.A. that will house their offices and studios.

While The Golf Channel calls Orlando, Fla., home, and Florida is a hot spot for tennis, establishing this area as a home base makes the most sense to them, aside from fact there's a the wealth of available TV industry people.

``Tennis happens in Southern California,'' said Bellamy, an Indiana native married to women's pro Beth Herr, the 1983 women's NCAA champion at USC. ``There are so many great events in L.A. and so many tennis people land here.''

And so many of them are Bellamy's students, including major music and entertainment industry folk whose connections will also be parlayed into event programming for the channel.

They've already been taping ``I Want My Tennis Channel'' promos with celebrities - some of them were done at last weekend's men's event at Calabasas.

Pete Sampras' involvement since December as an investor, advisor and host for instructional shows has also given the channel something to ride on in the meantime.

``Kournikova may blow everyone away on the Web sites, but to the tennis community, Sampras is like a god,'' said Bellamy.

Maybe so. But could the Pete Sampras Workout Video run on an endless loop between 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. and create the same sort of buzz as you-know-who?

It's not our fault if they can't make it happen.

THE TENNIS CHANNEL

--Offices: Currently in Santa Monica

--Key investors: Frank Biondi, CEO at Universial, Viacom, HBO and Columbia Pictures; Viacom executives Tom Dooley and Terry Elkes; Pete Sampras and IMG.

--Advisory board: Includes tennis figures Billie Jean King, Brad Gilbert, John Lloyd, Charlie Pasarell, Tennis Week magazine publisher Gene Scott and Tennis magazine publisher Jeff Williams.

--Planned programming: 40 percent on tournament coverage (it already has commitments from four ATP, three WTA and four senior men's tour events), 40 percent on equipment and instruction and 20 percent on news and personality features.

--Other sports: Plans are to include table tennis, paddle tennis, squash and badminton programming.

--More information: On the Web at www.thetennischannel.tv and [phone].

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

Steve Bellamy, left, co-founder of The Tennis Channel, tapes an interview with actor Matthew Perry during last week's men's tournament.

The Tennis Channel

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THE TENNIS CHANNEL (see text)