Changeover

The best thing about the Australian Open was that it was played in Australia. And the worst? It was played in Australia.

If you were there and interested in men’s tennis, the opening of the 2001 season couldn’t have been more sublime. It was Andre, Again. Andre Agassi, who has turned reinvention into high art, repeated as champion before record crowds, due to an addition of a second arena with a retractable roof.

A world away, at home in the United States, the tennis fan would have been frustrated. The men’s final was joined in progress on cable TV, angering viewers. Newspaper coverage was scant during Super Bowl week.

For a casual sports fan, Agassi’s victory may have slipped through the cracks.

Geography and timing conspire to put something of a delay to the start of the tennis season in the United States. There are smaller men’s events in San Jose, Memphis, Tenn., Scottsdale, Ariz., and Delray Beach, Fla., but the biggest domestic tournament since the 2000 U.S. Open in terms of prize money ($2.9 million), ranking points and prestige begins today--the Tennis Masters Series event at Indian Wells.

The tournament inevitably draws record crowds, produces entertaining story lines, sets up scenarios for the subsequent Masters Series event later in the month, the Ericsson Open in Miami, and leaves nearly everyone feeling that the men’s game is in fabulous shape, fitter than ever.

Whether that’s entirely accurate is worth examination. A cloud on the ATP’s much-heralded 10-year, $1.2-billion deal with the Swiss-based marketing company, ISL, appeared in January. The Sunday Times of London reported that the company overextended itself and, hitting severe financial trouble, had approached the ATP to get out of the deal.

One agent called ISL’s problems “an unmitigated disaster.” Indian Wells tournament director Charlie Pasarell predicted the parties would end up going their separate ways.

Larry Scott, the ATP’s chief operating officer, said Sunday that the parties were still negotiating and a resolution could be reached within a couple of weeks. The Masters Series events are protected by guarantees through this year and into next. Scott declined to offer more specifics.

Apart from the ISL issues, ATP officials point with pride to record-breaking crowds, plentiful television coverage and depth, leading to 18 winners in 19 tournaments in 2001. Gustavo Kuerten of Brazil, who is the top-seeded player at Indian Wells, is the only player to win two events this year, at Buenos Aires and Acapulco.

Domestically, San Jose drew 72,866, a slight increase from last year. Attendance at Memphis was up about 2,000 from last year, drawing 62,813 for 13 sessions. Mark Miles, the ATP’s chief executive officer, said he was pleased with the “activity and excitement” surrounding men’s tennis at his visits to the Memphis and Buenos Aires events. The Agassi-Arnaud Clement Australian Open final drew the second-highest rating for a tennis telecast on ESPN.

“So far, the year is off to a great start from our perspective,” said Scott. “Certainly with Andre doing so well, it created a lot of buzz. In Buenos Aires, it was the first time it took place in a long time and they were really pleased with the crowds. And Guga [Kuerten] winning two of the four Latin American tournaments was a big help because he is so popular down there.”

Closer to home, those without a stake in the sport are uncommonly blunt about the place of men’s tennis on the sports ladder in the United States. Bob Williams of the Chicago-based Burns Sports, a consulting firm that matches companies with athletes for endorsement opportunities, said that men’s tennis is taking “a beating” in the advertising world. He’s not going out of his way to slight tennis, placing the NHL and baseball in the same category, citing increased competition in the marketplace.

“In the advertising world, men’s tennis is on the list of the sports that are out,” he said. “It’s lacking the charismatic personalities it once had, which makes the perception even worse. The whole endorsement landscape for sports is changing rapidly. We have more female athletes winning national endorsements. There’s the influx of NASCAR, the WNBA, figure skating. There are half a dozen sports that were not major players 10 years ago in getting national endorsements. “

David M. Carter, a sports business professor at USC, said the audience has changed too.

“The fans, especially the younger generation, may not be inclined to take the time to appreciate the nuances of the game,” he said. “Tennis is not a game that plays well to that market of short attention spans.”

Endorsement deals are merely part of the larger picture. Williams predicted that none of the U.S. Olympians would cash in on their victories--he was right--but that doesn’t mean the Olympics or men’s tennis is on life support.

What did create a buzz two years ago in the United States, of course, was the renewed rivalry between Agassi and Pete Sampras. They played five times in 1999, and Sampras won four times, including the final at Wimbledon.

They have played only once since 1999, not at all since Agassi beat Sampras in an epic five-set semifinal at last year’s Australian Open.

Now that Agassi is almost 31--his birthday is next month--and Sampras will be 30 in August, the window is closing on the number of opportunities remaining for epic matches. Nevertheless, the ATP leaders haven’t been sitting still, crossing their fingers and hoping for more Agassi-Sampras finals.

Miles and Scott and their advisors didn’t wait until it became too late, recognizing the organization had to start promoting the personalities of the players. The ATP increased its marketing and public relations staff, hiring from the world of politics and the NBA. Shortly before the Tennis Masters Series tournament in Toronto last year, there was a concern that Agassi and Sampras would bypass the event.

“We were thinking, ‘How could we turn this into a positive?’ ” said Matthew Rapp, the ATP’s London-based vice president of public relations. “We thought about promoting the new guys. A bunch of us were sitting around in my office. My idea was we would do something like ‘The Magnificent Seven.’ Have the seven real young guns come riding in on horseback and have the music blaring.”

But, “We could never find anything for them to do that wasn’t incredibly hokey,” Rapp said.

And so, the “New Balls” campaign started last summer, featuring a poster of a dozen players, looking as bad as they wanted to be. Kuerten, the French Open champion, and U.S. Open winner Marat Safin look like the leaders of the posse. This led to posse-envy and generational rivalries.

“There’s a lot of talk in the locker room now, ‘Are you old balls or new balls?’ ” Rapp said. “It’s not like you ask and you are in.”

The campaign cost the ATP a little less than $1 million last year and will run about half that this year, Rapp said. Scott said the ISL issue won’t force the ATP to curtail the “New Balls” marketing.

“Particularly in the U.S., where tennis is not one of the top sports, you really do have to cut through the clutter,” Scott said. “In the U.S. it’s more challenging than it is in some of the other markets, especially when a lot of our top players coming up may not be American, it’s more important to do something creative and provocative, to get the players out there.

“A guy like Marat Safin will have to win more major championships in the U.S. to really become very well known in the U.S., and Kuerten [too]. The results will have to back up the campaign.”