WTA Ready for Power Shift

Gary Bettman had his Marty McSorley and now, Tie Domi. Bettman’s mentor, David Stern, had Latrell Sprewell and more recently, Charlie Ward. Vince McMahon has low ratings and He Hate Me.

Let’s change that last has to had.

Don’t envy the leaders of sports organizations. Their jobs--whether it’s dealing with suspensions, drugs or lawsuits--seem to have less to do with actual sport than ever before. But one particular job may lead the points race in terms of frustration and toughness.

Of course, it’s a sweeping generalization to say the head of the Women’s Tennis Assn. has the most difficult job in professional sports. (After all, there is travel to Melbourne, Australia; Paris; and London.) But Bettman doesn’t have to deal with mothers in the locker room. Even the ATP’s Mark Miles doesn’t have a player--in the middle of a tournament--announce he is pulling out of a tournament in two weeks because of a knee injury.

The two top officials of the WTA--chief executive officer Bart McGuire and chief operating officer Elizabeth Garger--announced their resignations within the span of a month. McGuire will leave at the end of the year and is leading the search for a successor.

Those departures suggest an organization in dramatic transition. The WTA will consolidate its headquarters in the Southeast in 2002, and the board knew this move would require new leadership.

“The handwriting was on the wall when we decided to do this consolidation,” said Harold Solomon, a member of the WTA’s board of directors. “We knew Bart wasn’t going to move [from corporate headquarters in Stamford, Conn.]. As we knew that, we knew we wanted to take the next step, to build on Bart’s legacy but look for a different type of individual. Someone with similar qualities to Bart but some additional qualities.”

McGuire was the right leader for the right time, navigating the organization through turbulent times when he became CEO in early 1998. The tour was involved in litigation among its players. He solved those legal problems, brought on new sponsors and expanded television coverage.

The Australian Open offered the women equal prize money this year, and the pay gap narrowed at the other two Slams where it wasn’t equal, the French Open and Wimbledon. But there is a feeling McGuire had done as much as he could under the current structure, and the WTA faced issues of credibility at Indian Wells when Venus Williams withdrew with an injury five minutes before a scheduled semifinal against her younger sister Serena.

In the aftermath of Indian Wells, one tennis publication wrote that the inmates were running the asylum. But, in all fairness, there has long been the perception that teen stars and their families have called the shots, whether it was Grafs in the ‘80s, the Capriatis in the ‘90s and the current cast of prodigies in 2001.

Gerry Smith, former executive director and CEO of the WTA, dealt with many of the same issues when he spent five years with the organization. He has kept a close eye on the tour, from his job as an executive in Dallas.

“I think it’s an extremely difficult job,” Smith said, chuckling. “Speaking from practical experience, it is a tough job to manage all the varied interests that you really are responsible for and to strike the right balance.

“The players are terrific but where a lot of the conflict arose was when they were getting advice that sometimes was conflicting advice from various people. Occasionally, it was parents, agents or sponsors.

“You ended up trying to deal with many different viewpoints. When you add the elements of various other parties to that mix, the true stories don’t always surface. You don’t get the true feelings of the players. To some degree you have to accept that because the players are very young and they are not in the position to make the judgments that need to be made.”

Smith thought McGuire was adept at handling the various demands of the job.

“There are a lot of factors,” McGuire said of his resignation. “The longest I would think about staying around is the end of next year, that was the max date. If there were reasons to step down earlier, I would do that.

“This is a very taxing job, for one thing, and four or five years of it is a lot. It entails a lot of separation from my family. A lot of things I set out to do, we’ve accomplished here. It may make sense to have somebody with a little more marketing and sales orientation than I have.”

For his part, Solomon said he was not interested in the position.

“This kind of a job is a 24-7/365 job,” he said. “I see how much Bart travels, how much Mark Miles travels, and that is not something I’m prepared to do. There are tons and tons of much higher qualified people that are out there.”

The board hired a search firm on Friday, and Solomon hopes a new CEO will be in place by the U.S. Open. Ideally, he would like to see a “Lee Iacocca-type person” in charge of the organization.

“An immediate persona that immediately says something to people. We want them to say, ‘How were they able to get that guy?’ ” Solomon said.

Notable

* The Acura tournament has increased its prize money from $565,000 to $750,000 for this year’s event at La Costa. It is the largest purse for a Tier II event. Among the players on the initial entry list are Martina Hingis, Venus Williams, Lindsay Davenport, Monica Seles and Anna Kournikova. Williams won the title last year, defeating Seles in the final.

* Patrick Rafter withdrew from this week’s Masters Series event in Hamburg because of a right elbow injury. Rafter is scheduled to start his clay-court season next week at the World Team Championships in Dusseldorf, Germany.

* The Basque with the exaggerated grip and painful-looking forehand, Alberto Berasategui said last week he is retiring. The 27-year-old Spaniard won 14 tour titles--all on clay--and reached the French Open finals in 1994. His last big run at a Grand Slam was the 1998 Australian Open. He beat Rafter and Andre Agassi and lost to Rios in the quarterfinals.