After Etienne de Villiers vacated his spot atop the ATP men’s tennis bureaucracy last year, tour officials saw a pressing need for an ace salesman and diplomat to replace him.
They found their man in Adam Helfant, a former Nike executive. The ATP named Helfant, 44, as its executive chairman and president Monday. He already has begun working at the group’s London office.
Tennis insiders see two overriding goals for Helfant. “There’s the obvious challenge of finding sponsors,” says USTA board member John Korff. “And then there’s the ongoing juggling between keeping tournaments and players happy, two groups that don’t necessarily go hand in hand.” [Editor's Note: Korff left the USTA board at the end of 2008.]
On the sponsorship side, job number one is attracting a successor for Mercedes, the tour’s top sponsor until the end of 2008 at the tune of $13 million per year.
Last summer, the tour appeared poised to snag London-based Aviva, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, as a replacement. But given the meltdown in the financial services sector since then, that deal is likely dead.
Given the restraints of the global financial crisis and recession, the ATP might have to be creative in its sponsorship quest. “They may want to divide the big package into smaller, cheaper sponsorships among different geographic regions,” says Phil de Picciotto, president of Octagon sports agency.
Helfant will also have to cut costs to stanch the ATP’s bleeding finances, de Picciotto points out. It lost $1 million in 2007 and probably a lot more last year.
As for players and tournaments, many events seek freezes in prize money as the recession squeezes their profit opportunities. Obviously, that’s not to the players’ liking. And they aren’t too pleased with how the ATP downgraded the status of a tournament in Hamburg, replacing it with one in Shanghai.
“It’s a crucial time to patch up the scars of the past couple years,” says Pam Shriver, a television commentator who also runs an annual tennis exhibition. She cited the Hamburg tournament’s unsuccessful lawsuit against the ATP, which cost the tour $18 million.
Mark Levinstein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly who has worked on tennis issues since 1985, says, “The question is whether Helfant can find a way to advance the sport while keeping all of the separate constituencies happy…. The same issues have plagued tennis for 40 years.”
By all accounts, if anyone can solve those issues and sell major sponsorships, it is Helfant. As vice president of Nike’s global sports marketing until last year, he was responsible for Nike’s relationships and contracts with athletes, teams, universities, and sports governing bodies around the world.
Of course Nike has sponsorship agreements with many of those entities. “His job was a lot more than spending Nike’s money,” Levinstein explains. Helfant essentially managed a business unit in charge of the company’s biggest sponsorships around the world.
“He knows what type of sponsors to target with a global reach and the right alignment with tennis as a sport,” says Brian Jennings, executive vice president of marketing for NHL hockey. Helfant worked with Jennings as a lawyer at the NHL, and the two have been friends for more than 10 years.
At Nike, Helfant negotiated deals with Andre Agassi and Maria Sharapova and has come to know the ATP’s top three players – Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. Their opposition to de Villier’s agenda helped ensure the South African’s resignation after just two years on the job.
“Adam’s personality is as a consensus builder,” Jennings says. “He certainly is decisive, but he would build a consensus between event operators and players.”
Helfant doesn’t lack for credentials. He earned an engineering degree at MIT and is a graduate of Harvard Law School. In addition to his time at the NHL and his 12 years at Nike, Helfant served as an attorney for four years at the powerful New York law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton.
“He’s one of those people with a razor sharp mind, but he’s never pretentious about anything,” Jennings says.