By Brad Cook For most people, rock music and tennis go together like a Metallica concert at Wimbledon. For musician-turned-tennis-entrepreneur Steve Bellamy, they’re just the right mix. A former singer-songwriter with several solo albums under his belt, he opened the Pacific Palisades Tennis Center in Los Angeles and quickly grew it into one of the premier training facilities in the country. Its events are full of guest appearances by such tennis stars as Jimmy Connors and Patrick Rafter and, yes, even Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, an amateur player himself. Breaking Tradition Not surprisingly, this attitude permeates everything about him, from the name of his company, Atonal Tennis—breaking tradition to get people excited about tennis—to his computer of choice, the Power Mac. He and his employees do everything from letters to brochures on Macs, and key personnel are given PowerBooks. “By my estimate,” he says, “I’m on either my 23rd or 27th Mac. Every time you guys change, I change with you. In my first job, I worked on an Apple IIC. From there on every once in a while I would interface with a PC and I hated it. I wanted a kind of MTV-style tennis center, and Macs fit right into that mold.” Tennis by Power Mac Bellamy uses Power Macs as training tools and tracking devices when he’s working with a student, whether it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger or a young kid just learning the ropes. Using a digital video recorder, he records students playing and uses Final Cut Pro to compare that film to footage of a professional—all within 5 minutes. “We’ll go in and show their stroke production next to the most kinetically-efficient way to hit that stroke,” he explains. “So students can see themselves next to another player who’s stroking the ball perfectly. They’ll see that their backswing is way higher than the pro’s backswing, or they’re not stepping in as much. You can tell someone something like that until you’re blue in the face, but when they see it on a screen next to someone doing it right, they really learn.”		Bellamy also relies on Macs and Microsoft Excel for tracking, gathering information on a player’s next opponent from the Internet, and tracking a player’s progress over time. Since tennis can be as statistics-driven as any other sport, Bellamy looks at everything from wins and losses to the percentage of time the athlete is winning the first volley. Getting to the Core Daily activities at the center are rigorous. Attendees stop by to participate in workouts with others who play at the same skill level. Sessions, which typically last 90 minutes, are designed to give the player real-world experience. “Traditionally,” Bellamy explains, “tennis lessons have been: you come there, but you don’t really work hard, you just do what you’re told. We do a thing called a live ball drill. It’s an hour-and-a-half long point, and as soon as someone makes an unforced error or something like that, there’s another ball already in the air. It’s like an hour-and-a-half long challenge. You’re fighting to win a point, you’re using your skills, you’re using your brain. It’s very tiring physically, emotionally and mentally.” Helping Kids The tennis world has warmed up to Bellamy’s approach to the sport. Many industry publications have featured him in articles and the Los Angeles City Council will soon bestow on him an award for Best Business in LA. He feels most rewarded, though, by the number of children he has introduced to the game through programs such as Hope for Kids, which assists inner city youths. “It’s changed the lives of so many people for the positive,” he says. “We’ve taken kids who had a strong potential to be gang members and turned them into tennis players. It’s worked phenomenally well. Every kid we brought into the program last year has turned out to be a ranked tournament player, which is pretty prestigious in Southern California.”