KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. -- Butch Buchholz has traveled the world as a tennis pioneer, player and promoter. The journey nearly ended over the Indian Ocean one night in the early 1960s.

	Butch Buchholz stands in the tennis stadium in Key Biscayne, Fla., which is the home of the tournament he founded in 1985.

Buchholz and other top touring pros -- Ken Rosewall, Pancho Gonzales and Lew Hoad among them -- were campaigning for open tennis by barnstorming the globe when an engine caught fire on their flight from Madagascar to Australia.

"We look out the window, and these huge flames are coming out the left wing," Buchholz recalls. "All of professional tennis is on this airplane, and there's nothing down there but water and sharks."

The plane dropped 7,000 feet but the fire was extinguished, and 11 hours after takeoff the pilot made it to Perth. Lucky for Buchholz and lucky for tennis because he's still bucking the status quo four decades later, trying to make the game better.

The tournament he founded in 1985, this year renamed the Nasdaq-100 Open, begins Wednesday on Key Biscayne with most of the top players entered. That includes defending champions Andre Agassi and Venus Williams, Jennifer Capriati, Martina Hingis, Pete Sampras and Lleyton Hewitt.

The event was the Ericsson Open the past two years, and before that the Lipton Championships. But while the title sponsor keeps changing, Buchholz's creation is the fifth-largest tennis tournament in the world, trailing only the Grand Slams.

The tournament's early years survived two moves, bad weather, complaints by top players and opposition from Key Biscayne residents.

Buchholz dropped out of high school to join the tennis tour, became the No. 1-ranked American and had played Wimbledon three times by age 19 before turning pro in 1960.

At the time, pros were banned from the Grand Slam events and Davis Cup.

"It was the Olympic mentality -- you can't be a dirty old pro and play these tournaments," the 61-year-old Buchholz says.

He and the game's other top players fought the ban for nearly a decade. Sometimes they stayed in one city long enough to stage a tournament. Sometimes their schedule was a series of one-night stands in the United States, Europe, Africa or Australia.

"One time I played 29 matches in 31 days and slept in 30 different beds," he says.

Often they traveled by station wagon, lugging their own canvas court to install, usually in a fieldhouse.

"We'd put it over ice, wood, concrete, almost anything," Buchholz says.

The prize money wasn't great; the biggest check Buchholz cashed was less than $9,000. But eventually he and his fellow pros prevailed. Wimbledon invited them to play in 1968, marking the start of the Open era.

Injuries began to slow Buchholz that year and in 1970 he retired.

"I didn't make any money, really, out of the sport," he says. "But what I got out of it, and it has been invaluable, has been a real passion."

Following retirement, he ran tennis clubs and worked as executive director of the ATP before resigning in 1983 to start a new tournament in Florida.

"This guy has done it all," ATP Tour chief executive officer Mark Miles says, "from being the best player in our country and a world-class top-level professional throughout his career to being an administrator and running the men's game -- and he has been an inspired promoter."

These days, dismayed by the state of professional tennis, Buchholz argues for an overhaul.

"We have such great assets, but we are so fragmented," he said. "If we could ever put our assets in one basket and market the sport collectively, our equity in the game would increase dramatically."

Buchholz sees tennis declining in popularity in the United States as Agassi and Sampras approach retirement, and he sees a failure to capitalize on the unprecedented celebrity of the top female players.

He lobbies for more tournaments featuring men and women, like the Nasdaq-100. He argues for the merger of the ATP and WTA offices. He supports replacing the fifth set at Grand Slam events with a tiebreaker to make matches more TV friendly.

Wish him luck: In the alphabet-soup world of tennis, it's a challenge just to get the ATP, WTA, ITF and USTA into the same room.

"I'll become a pain in neck," he promises. "I learned from the '60s that you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and eventually somebody is going to wake up."

Buchholz plans to continue as chairman of the Key Biscayne event for at least six more years. He'll keep campaigning for change and most likely log a lot more miles -- hopefully none as harrowing as that flight over the Indian Ocean.