Courting Trouble as Net Profits Shrink

Imagine the best golfers in the world, led by Tiger Woods, unhappy with their representation, breaking away from the tour they’d created for themselves.

Imagine a 13-year battle between the ruling bodies of golf, and looming possibility of a boycott of the U.S. Open.

OK, replace the golf club with a tennis racket, and golf’s recent boom times with tennis’ economic malaise, and imagination is reality.

The problems threatening the sport’s future carry significant implications on the eve of its showcase event, Wimbledon, which starts Monday.

“Tennis has shot itself in the foot and doesn’t act like a business; it’s all so separate,” Butch Buchholz said of the ruling bodies of men’s tennis, the Assn. of Tennis Professionals (ATP); women’s tennis, the Women’s Tennis Assn. (WTA), and the four Grand Slams, Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the French Open and the Australian Open.

Buchholz, a former player and the tournament director who has turned the NASDAQ-100 Open in Miami into the most prestigious event after the four Slams, believes professional tennis needs to be restructured.

“Until everybody recognizes we need to start thinking as one and not separate, we’re going to continue not to be as competitive as we should be,” he said.

Something of a watershed moment occurred at the most recent Grand Slam event, the French Open, when Mark Miles, the ATP’s chief executive, approached the Grand Slam Committee and asked for $50 million for his players. Interestingly, he did that without support from the WTA.

His request was quickly rejected, touching off a back-and-forth baseline game of rhetoric.

French tennis federation chief Christian Bimes said that the ATP was in the “wrong role,” should limit itself to being a players’ union, and that the Slams should seize control of the sport.

Perry Rogers, the longtime agent of Andre Agassi, No. 1 in the world rankings, characterized Bimes as a “lone wolf” and termed his comments “irresponsible” in an interview with The Times.

The Slams had tweaked Miles and the ATP by holding a meeting in Paris with the new breakaway players’ trade association, the International Men’s Tennis Assn. (IMTA), whose most prominent member is defending Wimbledon champion Lleyton Hewitt. IMTA, though, supported the ATP’s request for more money and its leader, Wayne Ferreira, worried about catching the blame if the move ultimately failed.

Welcome to Tennis Politics 101.

Rogers’ depiction of Bimes as a lone wolf was not entirely accurate. Though the United States Tennis Assn. and its leaders, looking for unity, may be at the other end of the spectrum -- Miles was negotiating with USTA official Arlen Kantarian this week -- there are Slam officials who share Bimes’ sentiments.

“No matter what you think of what Christian said, he created this sense of urgency,” Paul McNamee, the Australian Open’s tournament director and chief executive, said from Melbourne. “The key parties have to get around the table. We [the Slams] do not think we should continue to be a bystander in those discussions. That’s not right for tennis.”

McNamee comes at tennis’ problems from a position of considerable experience. In 1988, as a just-retired player, he took on a leadership position, serving on the ATP’s board and becoming deeply involved when the players broke away from the Men’s Tennis Council; he held a famous news conference in a parking lot just off the grounds of the U.S. Open.

In 1990, the ATP Tour started with tournaments and players as equal partners. Thirteen years later, McNamee maintains it is time for a new model, considering the spectacular collapse and bankruptcy of the Swiss firm ISL Worldwide, which had signed a 10-year, $1.2-billion marketing agreement with the ATP in 1999. The ISL fallout and resulting cash crunch have caused the tremors in tennis.

“It’s more than a little rumble, and it needs to be,” McNamee said. “It’s the right time for tennis to have a look at where it heads. [ISL] was an experiment in a form, and we know what happened. And that’s fine. People tried hard to make it work, no fault there. Obviously, when a party is throwing a billion dollars on the table, you’d be crazy not to look at it. But the marketplace didn’t support it.”

Said Bill Babcock, administrator of the Grand Slam committee, “We should agree that the separation hasn’t worked. I think we can do better.... The concept of unified governance was always right. We just haven’t had it. But this could be larger than that, about the whole sport.”

Buchholz, although an ATP tournament director, echoed the idea of unification.

“We basically threw the Slams out, 12-13 years ago, and we didn’t do a heck of a lot to bring them back,” he said. “There is some movement in the Slams’ sitting down to talk and being part of governance and part of the calendar, that’s a great step.”

The issues of money, governance and scheduling will come to the forefront, starting with an ATP players’ meeting today at Wimbledon, and the ATP’s next move probably will be dictated by the tone of those discussions. The Grand Slam Committee will meet during the second week of Wimbledon.

Miles, having otherwise declined comment, issued a statement Thursday when the U.S. Open’s prize money was officially announced.

“The USTA’s increase in this year’s U.S. Open prize money by $1 million is nearly twice the amount of the Open’s average increases over the past few years,” he said. “Many players view this as a constructive preliminary step and it confirms the importance of our ongoing dialogue with the USTA regarding financial issues and other initiatives to grow the game.”

The possibility of a boycott by the men in New York is considered remote, and U.S. Open officials, as well as McNamee, aren’t particularly worried about their events being targeted.

“Boycotts and strikes don’t do anyone any good,” USTA President Alan Schwartz said. “You only have to look at baseball and see how attendance has dropped off [since the strike of 1994-95]. That’s the filter, the lens through which I see things.

“I don’t think it has to be blown up for progress. I’ve spent 48 years in business where negotiating acquisitions and mergers have been an important part of my career. I’ve found out that creative solutions can be found.”

So, why are the men standing alone against the Slams?

The WTA has more pressing issues and its biggest concern remains equal prize money at Wimbledon and the French Open. For now, the women are not with the ATP in its dispute with the Slams.

Former world No. 1 Lindsay Davenport said it would be a “tricky fight” for the ATP, noting that a first-round loser at the U.S. Open makes a “ridiculous amount of money.”

Larry Scott , former No. 2 executive at the ATP behind Miles, has taken a conservative approach since being named the WTA’s chief executive in March. Even before leaving the ATP, he was an advocate of working with the WTA, seeking a more cooperative approach.

Scott has not taken a position on the ATP’s dealings with the Slams; he told The Times he wanted to get a clearer picture of his players’ thoughts on the issues.

Davenport called Scott the best communicator of the tour CEOs she has dealt with in her 10-year pro career.

“I think we have a CEO that doesn’t want to be seen as, ‘We’re going to follow the men,’ ” she said. “He’s going about it very deliberately, trying to figure out what all the players want and see how it pans out. If he had been in there a year or longer, we may have taken a different approach than just waiting to see what happens.”

When Monica Seles and, in particular, Steffi Graf were No. 1 players, they weren’t interested in off-court politics. Davenport, second-ranked Kim Clijsters of Belgium and former No. 1 Venus Williams all are representatives on the WTA Tour Players’ Council, and Williams and Davenport discussed the ATP’s dispute and equal prize money at the French Open.

“She’s definitely all for women and thinks we deserve equal prize money,” Davenport said of Venus Williams. “It’s not necessarily about money, it’s just about, for her, equality, just sharing her opinions.”

Although the men may have good reason for moving forward, and the women an equally strong one for hanging back, the development illustrates the sport’s painful fragmentation, said Dick Dell, a longtime tennis insider.

“That’s a perfect example,” he said. “All these little elements inside of tennis are fighting over their piece of the pie, trying to get a bigger piece, and the pie is shrinking instead of growing.”

Dell, a former player and agent for Gabriela Sabatini and Andres Gomez, joked that he’d had “the pleasure or misfortune” of serving on both the ATP and WTA boards. He has been a marketing consultant in Orange County in recent years, first working with the Acura Classic, now at La Costa, then matching Newport Beach company Pacific Life with the Indian Wells tournament, saving it from a world of hurt after the ISL debacle.

The economic struggles and tumult have another well-liked former insider willing to return to a position of tour leadership. Vijay Amritraj, former president of the ATP Board, is running for the spot on the board of directors to be vacated soon by player representative Gary Muller.

“I’m just looking at the scenario and status of men’s tennis,” Amritraj said from London. “I wanted to get a feeling of what the council is thinking.”

Amritraj believes there should be more events in Vietnam, China and other emerging markets.

Which brings up other issues that have received little attention since the $50-million request by Miles.

“I think they’ll move from monetary issues to calendar issues because that sets the philosophy of the sport,” McNamee said. “The players have got to address the calendar issues.”

McNamee wants to move away from the Masters Series structure, in which there are no other competing tournaments in weeks Masters events are staged. The Slams also have made it clear they do not want more 10-day or two-week events on the schedule.

In the meantime, the USTA’s Kantarian remains at work on a proposed summer series of hard-court events as a lead-in to the U.S. Open that ideally would have the men eventually joining the women at the new Carson complex.

That’s already done in Australia, starting with the Hopman Cup in Perth and finishing with a combined one-week event in Sydney, setting the stage for the Open in Melbourne.

“There’s a way to help tennis,” McNamee said of Kantarian’s proposal. “That’s fantastic. The concept of 32-draw, men’s and women’s tennis, that’s a powerful, sexy product.... But once you go into that model, you can’t have only 32 men and women playing in the world in that week. You’ve got to have other tournaments in other parts of the world.

“We believe in freeing the system up. That’s not a controversial point. We see the sport as being global, not globalized. There’s a big difference.”

Kantarian is fond of saying that tennis has four Super Bowls or four World Cups per year, and continues to point out they can be better used as a lifeline for other events, using a cohesive television package as the glue.

“From a scheduling standpoint, we can take advantage,” he said. “It’s four books with a final chapter, so we build up leading to each Slam.”

Still, changes, even small ones, do not occur with great speed in tennis.

“If the ATP model prevails and there are more two-week events, and that’s the direction, well ... I can’t see how we’ll be wanting to invest in that model,” McNamee said.

“If the model for the sport does change, there is a chance the Grand Slams will have a stronger representation. It won’t necessarily be as Christian Bimes said, but it will be more appropriately represented.”