Why he matters
Scottsdale’s resort story is mostly told in golf. For a quarter century, though, the most exclusive sports address around the city was a cluster of courts and casitas on Camelback’s north slope, and it carried John Gardiner’s name. He did not invent Arizona’s resort business, but he brought it a new product: a vacation built around getting better at something, with sweat as a status symbol.
The personal record here is thin. The ranch he ran, and the people who played it, are well remembered.
Where to find his mark today
Sanctuary Camelback Mountain. The resort on the ranch’s 53 acres kept five courts and a pro program that descends from his.
The ranch’s own history. John Gardiner’s Tennis Ranch covers the 1956 club, the Gardiner years and the Senator’s Cup.
The corridor he played in
The ranch sat in the Camelback corridor, technically Paradise Valley, where Scottsdale’s grandest resorts lined up along the mountain. The entertainment crowd drifted between it and Mountain Shadows, and when tennis boomed, the Registry Resort staged pro matches on a stadium court while Gardiner’s ranch taught the establishment how to play.
To see it now, you have to book something. Sanctuary is a private resort, so the honest ways in are a clinic on the old courts, a spa appointment or a sunset table at the bar and Elements restaurant. Hikers get a free version: the Echo Canyon trailhead is minutes away on the same mountain, and the climb shows you the slope the ranch’s guests were paying to look at.
The full story
The site opened in October 1956 as the Paradise Valley Racquet Club, a private postwar playground on a mountainside nobody else could build on. In 1967 John Gardiner, the Carmel Valley teaching pro who had built the tennis-resort format there, bought it and renamed it John Gardiner’s Tennis Ranch. The timing was perfect: the Open era began in 1968, and the tennis boom of the early 1970s made intensive instruction a luxury product.
The formula was total immersion. Morning clinics with demanding pros, casita living on the mountain, social doubles into the evening. At its peak the ranch ran up to 18 courts, and clinic weeks sold out years ahead. Its signature was the Senator’s Cup, charity doubles that put Democratic and Republican senators on the same courts for Hospice of the Valley.
By the late 1980s golf and then spas had taken the executive calendar, and Gardiner sold his interest in 1993. The ranch cycled through owners until Westroc took over in 1999 and reopened it in March 2001 as Sanctuary, keeping five courts where a less sentimental developer would have poured casita foundations. His years here run from the 1960s into the 1990s.