http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/columnists/sfl-0618brickertennis-column,0,1812530.column
Players taking control of ATP, but future in jeopardy
Charles Bricker | Sports Columnist
3:46 PM EDT, June 18, 2008
Step by step, dagger by dagger, the ATP Players Council is taking almost complete control of the men's tennis tour, and the tipping point that could lead to the end of the ATP as we know it could come at an absolutely critical meeting on Saturday at Wimbledon.
The 10-member Council, which is primarily advisory to the ATP Board of Directors as a sort of conduit between players and management, has tired of the cajoling and pleading for more communication and more influence in major decisions.
The only major power the Council has, and it's using it, is to replace the men who are empowered to make financial and policy decisions - the ATP Board and, by extension, the chairman and chief executive of the ATP himself, Etienne de Villiers.
There will be no more shots over the bow of the boat.
Gone: Jacco Eltingh, who held the European seat on the board and whose alliance with de Villiers made him a prime target.
Gone: Perry Rogers, Andre Agassi's longtime friend, agent and confidante, who held the Americas seat, dumped a month ago by the Council because they couldn't communicate with him and because he, too, was a strong de Villiers ally.
Gone: By Saturday, the international representative to the board, Iggy Jovanovic, who will step down. That's three of the six board members.
At the Saturday Council meeting, there will be more emphatic moves.
The Council probably will elevate its chairman, the highly-esteemed player and tour elder statesman Ivan Ljubicic, to one board seat. The other two places undoubtedly will be filled by people whose goals match those of the players who have revolted against de Villiers' controversial decisions over the past two years.
Once that's done, de Villiers will be stripped of board support.
The international seat on the Board will come down to either Mahesh Bhupathi, the Indian doubles player, or David Egdes, senior vice president of the Tennis Channel.
There are seven men running for the Americas seat, but only two are believed to have realistic chances of winning - retired player Justin Gimelstob, who thought he had the seat won a year ago when he contested Rogers, and Norman Canter, managing director of Renaissance Tennis Management.
Once the Council partisans are in control of the board, it's very difficult to see how de Villiers, whose contract is up Dec. 31 anyway, can survive the rest of the year.
In fact, sacking de Villiers could lead to an out-of-court settlement of the devastatingly expensive lawsuit that was filed by the German Tennis Federation in March of 2007 after de Villiers, as part of a plan to redesign and streamline the ATP schedule, moved the Masters Series event at Hamburg to Madrid and downgraded Monte Carlo. That lawsuit, which will be heard beginning July 23, already has cost the ATP an estimated $7 million in attorneys' fees and, says Ljubicic, that number will be significantly higher when the case is adjudicated. It could bankrupt the ATP.
Here are a number of scenarios that lie ahead for the ATP:
· No longer backed by a friendly Board of Directors, de Villiers resigns and the ATP settles the Hamburg suit. The deal to take the Hamburg event to Madrid as a combined clay-court tournament with the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, is cancelled and Hamburg goes back to its original May date in Germany, retaining its Masters Series status.
· de Villiers stands fast as a lame duck the rest of the year and is replaced Jan. 1 by a new CEO, even if the ATP wins the Hamburg suit.
· Financially ruined by the cost of the suit, the ATP disbands and the players reform a union and recreate the men's tennis tour.
· Finally, this very intriguing possibility. The ITF, which runs the Grand Slams, and the various Slams themselves, financially bail out the ATP if the Hamburg suit is lost. No one is going to advertise it, but there have been key conversations along this line already, involving some of the most important international executives in tennis.
When the history of these past two turbulent years of men's tennis is written, one of the crucial questions will be, "Why did all this happen?"
It happened because de Villiers, who spent 15 years in executive jobs for the Walt Disney Company, including president and managing director of Walt Disney International, was brought in to kick the ATP into the 21st Century and the players didn't like his management style.
Rank and file players, particularly those in the top-20, wanted heavy influence over streamlining the tour and de Villiers discovered early on that if you ask 20 players for a view, you'll get at least 15 different answers.
No leader can function trying to please every constituent.
U.S. and European players in general want more hardcourt tournaments. Spanish and South Americans want more clay. Some players were outraged that they could be suspended if they didn't play a Masters Series event, another of de Villiers' proposals.
He inherited an almost impossible situation because the job of professional tennis player has no long-term guarantees. As a result, about 95 percent of the players never see the big picture of what could make the tour better. They see only their picture.
Nevertheless, here's where I think de Villiers got into trouble. At Disney he had only to report to a Board of Directors and, once in awhile, have a sitdown with Mickey and Donald. The ATP is a completely different animal.
It was a mistake to think he only needed to deal with a board. There are over 1,000 independent contractors (players) out there who demand to be more involved in his decisions, and they have a lot more at stake than your average stockholder.
de Villiers never made the management style adjustment from Disney to tennis.
There were early mistakes. His 2006 round-robin tournament system that was designed to keep top players in the draw, even if they lost in the first round, was widely opposed by the players from the start.
There was his misfire over a rule that should have allowed Russia's Evgeny Korolev to come out of the round robin and into the quarterfinals at the Tennis Channel Open in Las Vegas. de Villiers ruled that James Blake, a much bigger draw, would get that spot.
He admitted those mistakes, and that's to his credit. But that's where the disconnect with the players began, creating just enough doubt in players' minds about his ability to understand their needs that almost everything he would do after that was open to question.
"I still have a lot of respect for Etienne. I think he's a very good leader," Players Council member Tommy Johansson told me on Tuesday. "But I have to say he's got to have the right people around him.
"He's a great businessman. His knowledge about tennis is not that big, but it has improved a lot since he came on board. It's just a very tough job because you can't please everybody."
Johansson went on to talk about the communications disconnect, an issue that has left me perplexed.
I asked: "OK, you're not getting enough information from the Board of Directors or you feel that Etienne isn't meeting with players enough to answer questions. How simple is it to just let them know, as a Council, that this is a serious problem and it needs to be corrected right now?"
"I don't know," Johansson replied. "We're still working on it."
And it will be settled on Saturday.
"I still think Etienne is a great leader," said Johansson. "But if he would have just had the right guys next to him. Maybe a guy like Jim Courier or Mats Wilander. Not to work for the ATP, but to just pick up the phone and call them and ask for their opinions. Things would have been smoother."
If anything good comes out of this mess, it is this: "This is pretty much the first time in the history of tennis that the players are united," Johansson said.
This was not, however, the way anyone wanted to unite the players.
Charles Bricker can be reached at
cbricker@sun-sentinel.com His blog can be read at sun-sentinel.com/sports.
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? Because that is exactly what ATP wants to prevent with the new calendars and sanctions when players do not play in the required tournaments. 
