- !Dby Pete Bodo*
Just yesterday, I was chatting with John McEnroe Sr., who spawned the icon that shares his name, about the search for a new ATP CEO. John felt very strongly that the new CEO ought to be a trained lawyer, and he suspected that the silence out of the ATP in recent days suggested that one of the two ATP insiders up for the job would get it. They were Mark Young, the ATP's long-time top lawyer and CEO/General Counsel for the Americas, and former player Brad Drewett, CEO of the international group.
We learned today (there goes my story) that Drewett got the job, despite the fact that he has no law degree and almost all of his business experience has been within the ATP (I came across one mention of Drewett having worked in the tennis club business, but it couldn't have been a major resume item).
This seems like an extremely conservative move by the ATP, made less risky because of the cushion provided by the outgoing CEO, Adam Helfant. According to Bloomberg, Helfant boosted the ATP's revenues by a staggering 80 percent through sponsorships with a diverse menu of companies including Corona Extra, FedEx Corp., and Johnson & Johnson’s.
"I wish Brad the best of luck," John said today. "But I still think it's a job for a lawyer."
I pay attention to McEnroe's opinion on these organizational issues, even though his second campaign for the ATP CEO job came to naugh—much like the first, a little over three years ago. Despite still being of counsel in the corporate division of the Park Avenue law firm Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, his vast store of experience in the tennis business (as manager of his two sons), and over 50 letters of recommendation from everyone from Donald Trump to Ion Tiriac, he was never even considered for the job.
That's understandable, if not particularly wise. As John's wife Kay told him, and more than once: "You have the wrong name, and you're too old." The sad fact is McEnroe's day in this enterprise has come and gone and nothing is likely to change that. Which is too bad.
Always combative, McEnroe is 76 but still sharp as a tack. Among other things, his knowledge of all things linguistic is formidable, and his skills as an editor are in my experience unmatched. And "tough" doesn't begin to describe McEnroe's reputation as a negotiator and advocate.
I don't know much about how sponsorship deals go down and have no real opinion of what Drewett brings to the table as a dealmaker. But here's an instructive story for those of you who think this calendar issue (let's call it the chronic player-fatigue issue) can be successfully resolved now that the ATP has a relatively young (Drewett is 53) former player behind the wheel.
In 1978, Bob Briner was the head of the ATP (this was before the "parking lot press conference" and the subsequent birth of the ATP tour—in other words, it was back when the ATP was actually a player's union), and Marshall Happer III was the head of the Men's International Professional Tennis Council (MIPTC), which was the ruling body of the game and had representatives of the players (ATP), the tournament directors, and the ITF.
Anyway, the ATP decided to adopt X-number of "hard designations" for each of the top players, in order to build the tour by spreading around a degree of talent comparable to what we have today in the ATP. The players didn't at all like the idea of being told where and when they had to compete. At the time the top 5 were, in descending order, Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, Guillermo Vilas, John McEnroe Jr. and Vitas Gerulaitis.
John McEnroe Sr. got all five of them into the same room at the U.S. Open to discuss what, if anything, they were going to do to express their displeasure. They decided that they would agree to play X-number of those big (Masters-type) tournaments, but each of them—not Briner or anyone else—would decide which tournaments those would be. They went back to Briner and co. and presented the decision as a fait accompli. As McEnroe recalled, "We weren't looking for a fight. We told Briner to call them anything he wanted, including 'hard designations.' We had no desire to make him or anyone else look bad. As long as he understood that each player was ultimately going to decide where he would play."
In other words, hard designations became hard self-designations.
Does Drewett have the kind of personality and personal power of persuasion to pull something like that off—should the issue really make it onto his agenda? It's hard to say. You want to give the guy a chance, but the fact that the players are still fighting what is essentially the same battle (how often must they play, and who decides where?) is not a good omen. Nor is the fact that after all that crowing and complaining at the U.S. Open, the top players never got together. Not once.
One reason for this, McEnroe says, is because of each player's personal obligations and interests. "If you have a big contract with Nike or Adidas, with all those incentive clauses, you may not think it wise to challenge the system," McEnroe said. "It seems unlikely, but if the top players decide to take some kind of concerted action, it could jeapordize some of their other obligations. It isn't just the ATP demanding that they play certain tournaments."
Ever the player's guy, McEnroe said, "If the top five guys said, 'This is what wer're going to do,' it would happen. No question. And if they got the top seven or eight lined up, they could dictate whatever they wanted, but—that doesn't address all those other contract-related issues."
For what it's worth, McEnroe doesn't see any move to create a player's union on the horizon. "It would inevitably lead to litigation," he said. "I've heard that the one lawsuit over Hamburg (a few years ago) cost the ATP something like $16 million. Nobody could afford such a shake-up."
McEnroe believes that the present ATP tour rules are a violation of U.S. anti-trust laws. The players are required to play too many tournaments, he says, and if the tournaments insist on some kind of guaranteed participation (a critical component in the present system) then at least it ought be up to the players to work out how to make that happen—as they did in 1978.
None of this seems like rocket science, and that goes to show how much maneuvering and wheeling and dealing goes on behind the institutional facade. Everyone, including the voluble top players, has obligations, caveats and conflicts. It would take a true act of collective will and a fair amount of diplomatic skill and negotiation to effect any significant change. But something like that happened in 1978, and maybe it can happen again—if that's really what the players want. The ball is in Drewett's court now.