In two years, Hamilton Jordan has made the once-weak Association of Tennis Professionals a force to be reckoned with. [Photo: Pam King] |
There’s something disarming about Hamilton Jordan. Part of it is his warm Southern drawl and good ol’ boy demeanor, part of it is the way he looks. With apple cheeks, bowed legs and a budding potbelly, Jordan seems as threatening as a sleepy hound dog.
But as Jordan’s opponents have learned, assumptions based on appearances can be not only deceiving but also defeating. In 1976 he taught that lesson to those who underestimated his plan to put a peanut farmer in the White House.
Recently, Jordan again made his opposition pay for underestimating him. The arena this time wasn’t politics, though it was one rife with political infighting: the men’s professional tennis tour. In May 1987, Jordan took over as chief executive officer of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), a Ponte Vedra Beach-based organization that does not engage in collective bargaining but otherwise serves as a union for the players. The 500-member organization represents 99% of the players competing on the men’s tour.
Like an executive coming into a company for the first time, Jordan came into tennis as an outsider. He knew little of the business of tennis, its nuances or the groups within its power structure. And he quickly discovered that he was not dealing from a position of strength. The ATP Jordan inherited was weak, economically and politically. But the mastermind of Jimmy Carter’s campaigns understood the mechanics of power — planning, developing, executing — and believed he could bring order to a business fragmented by years of weak rule and a tangle of selfish factions.
Today, Jordan stands as one of the most powerful figures in tennis. How he accomplished this — and how he’s reacting to retaliation from tennis’ old
guard and fending off questions about his leadership — is a lesson in how to get power and keep it.
The ATP’s headhunters contacted Jordan about the job in January 1987. At the time,
Jordan was living in Atlanta and working as
a strategic planning consultant. Although he was making a lot of money, he was unhappy. “My
life was too fragmented,” he says. “I was doing too many things without a specific focus.”
After he left the White House as Carter’s chief of staff in 1981, Jordan taught at Emory University, wrote a book about his final year in the Carter administration and ran for the U.S. Senate in Georgia in 1986. He also was successfully treated for a form of lymphoma at the National Cancer Institute. His involvement with politics ended with the unsuccessful senatorial bid. He occasionally speaks with Carter but is not active in state or national political circles. “I don’t miss it,” he says. “If I did, I would have figured out some way to stay involved.”
At first, tennis didn’t seem to be the answer to his unsettled life. Although a fan and a
player, Jordan had as much interest in
running the ATP as fund-raising for Republicans. But the more he found out about it, the more
his interest grew. “My friends told me, ‘Don’t get involved, it’s crazy, it’s all screwed up,’“ he says. He grins slightly, as if embarrassed to acknowledge his penchant for taking on seemingly hopeless tasks. Then he admits, “That kind of turned me on.”
Jordan wasn’t on the job long before he learned that his friends were right. Tennis was screwed up. In theory, the game was run by the Men’s Tennis Council (MTC), a body consisting of three representatives each from the ATP, the International Tennis
Federation (ITF) and the Grand Prix tour. The ITF controlled the Grand Slam events, such as the U.S. Open, through organizations such as the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA), while the Grand Prix ran some 30 smaller tournaments.
The system was a failure. Instead of working in concert, the council was split by turf battles over television revenues and tournament schedules. Says Bob Green, a former pro player who retired in 1988 to work at the ATP, “There were all these initials floating around out there, but nobody was really in charge of moving the game forward.”
In this structure, the ATP suffered. The union received none of the millions in television revenue that the game generates, its players had to play a crowded tournament schedule that had no off-season, and most demoralizing of all, its players had little say in how their sport is run.
Into this fray jumped Jordan. Green says Jordan’s background gave him instant credibility among most of the players. But he wasn’t as well received by the ITF and tournament directors. One insider says the establishment snubbed Jordan and considered him a meddler who eventually would lose interest and go
away.
Jordan wasn’t about to back down. He realized, however, that he couldn’t go in, snap his fingers and change the tennis world. So he put himself in the role of a student and learned the system. He listened to players, agents and tournament directors, assessed the strengths and weaknesses of all groups involved and made friends and forged alliances.
“It was very complicated,” he says. “It took me a year to get an understanding of how it all worked.”
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