THE thought of Pete Sampras prowling the grounds of a tennis stadium used to fill the opposition with respect and dread. The thought of him poring over the accounts of one of the richest championships in the world is an extraordinary development in the career of the greatest grand-slam title accumulator of all.

Sampras, Billie Jean King and Chris Evert, as part owners of America’s Tennis magazine, have become significant investors in the Indian Wells championship, helping to buy out the half share owned by IMG and, in the process, seeing off multimillion-dollar sorties from Shanghai and Doha, Qatar — two tournaments that wanted to purchase Indian Wells, take it away and dress it very differently.

Now, thanks in no small part to the trio — who have 42 grand-slam singles titles between them — it is preserved as a jewel of the Californian desert. “This is not a transparent effort,” Ray Moore, co-tournament director with Charlie Pasarell, who own the other 50 per cent share, said. “We’re not just using the names. They have all signed substantial cheques and we’re really excited to have them on board as partners.”

For a long time, it seemed the Pacific Life Open would be lost to the United States, a nation that too often treats with appalling disregard a sport that has bequeathed it so many sporting giants.

Pasarell said: “This has been one of the toughest years of my life. I’ve had sleepless nights, as have so many others involved, not knowing if we were ever going to be able to keep the event here.”

Sampras appreciated the fact, even though when we met five minutes down the road from Indian Wells this time last year, he did not have the slightest inclination to pop in and see for himself, such was his lack of interest in the sport he once dominated. In the space of the past 48 hours, the 34-year-old, who retired from regular competition three years ago, has announced he will play World Team Tennis in America and endow an event he won twice in the mid-Nineties with his own money.

“I walked the grounds with him last year,” Moore said, “and Pete said though he was playing a lot of golf, in some ways he was bored. He wanted to get back into tennis in a meaningful way. He said he’d been offered several opportunities but none of them intrigued him. The minute it was put to him about becoming an investor in Indian Wells, he stepped up to the plate.”

The event has grown from humble beginnings in 1976 to become one of the sport’s main attractions and not just because of its idyllic location, though that helps. The desire and drive of Pasarell and Moore, in league with the city’s elders, has produced an event they claim as the US Open of the West — and their attendance figures are second only in tennis terms in the United States to the New York grand-slam tournament at the end of August.

The first of the year’s Masters Series on the ATP Tour and a foremost Tier 1 event on the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, the 2006 championship starts a week today. Arlen Kantarian, chief executive officer of men’s professional tennis at the USTA, has described the new set-up as “the dream team of tennis” at the same time as he indicated progress on several fronts, including the prospect of a structured calendar, scheduling and TV packaging instead of the fractured manner in which tennis has gone about so much of its business in the past.

Indian Wells is a championship of enormous strategic importance and a huge boon to the local economy, to the tune of an estimated £80 million. And Andy Murray will be there for the first time next week — what more could it want? It almost certainly helped to secure the deal that Bob Kain, Sampras’s long-time manager, is one of the foremost strategists at IMG and helped to run the company in the vital period after the death of Mark McCormack, its founder, in 2003. As deadlines came and went and the pressure intensified, Moore revealed that several established IMG people, including Kain, “actively supported” keeping the event in Indian Wells — “ and gave us time to raise the funds and put all the pieces together, because this was a very, very complicated deal”.