 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.”
Early in the summer of 1988, during Wimbledon, Jordan tried to take some action at a meeting of the council in London. He fell flat on his face. He introduced a plan for some joint marketing with the ATP players and the tournaments, but the council quickly rejected it.
The rebuff capped what was an emotionally trying year for Jordan. In March, his wife’s parents died in an auto accident, and one month later, his deputy, Ron Bookman, was killed when a car struck his bicycle. With the council’s rejection of his proposal, he fully understood how weak the ATP was.
Fed up, Jordan shocked the tennis world. He quit his post on the council and returned from Wimbledon with thoughts of resigning from the ATP. “But I really couldn’t,” he says. “I had made commitments. I had made a deal here for the ATP (in exchange for moving its headquarters to Ponte Vedra Beach, the ATP received a $6 million relocation package that included 11 acres of land and a facility valued at nearly $3 million). I couldn’t just leave.”
He couldn’t accept the ATP’s runt-of- the-litter status in the tennis world, either. With nothing to lose, Jordan decided to fight back. He recalls his decision and the ensuing maneuvering fondly. “It was like guerrilla warfare,” he says. “A few people, not enough money. It was fun.”
To prepare for the battle, Jordan drew on his greatest strength, which he describes this way: “I like to develop a plan that’s conceptual and turn around and implement it. That’s what I did in politics.” And that’s what he did in tennis. The plan was this: Either the players are given more say in the tour, or they start their own tour.
In August 1988, Jordan quietly began developing the foundation for his plan. He arranged hundreds of one-on-one meetings with the players, upon whom the plan depended completely. The players had been talking about a system with greater player input for a long time, and like a campaigning politician, Jordan promised to give them what they wanted.
“Once we got the players, we began to woo the tourneys, which were skeptical,” Jordan says. But in exchange for their support, Jordan cut the tournament directors a deal, giving them a 50% interest on the players’ tour board. This situation seemed similar to the play rs’ position on the council, but Jordan made sure the players had an ace to play. In case of a stand-off between the players and the tournament directors, the CEO of the ATP would cast the deciding vote.
With this support behind him, Jordan penned “Tennis at the Crossroads,” a document addressing the players’ complaints with the sport: lack of leadership, self-serving views of the ITF, lack of player input, crowded tournament schedule. The document, aimed primarily at the ITF, concluded with this ultimatum: Give the players’ union more say in the tour and a cut of the television revenues or the players will start their own tour.
Ever the tactician, Jordan waited until the start of one of the ITF’s prized Grand Slam events, the U.S. Open, to deliver “Tennis at the Crossroads” to the ITF’s leadership. Not surprisingly, the ITF rejected the proposal. That didn’t deter Jordan, who planned to release the document to the press. But on the night before he planned to do so, the ITF tried to block him — and in doing so it made a terrible mistake. The ITF’s arm, the USTA, told Jordan he couldn’t use its press room. This was no small dilemma, for the international tennis press is huge. Jordan couldn’t very well talk to several hundred reporters one-on-one. Still, he didn’t panic; instead, he invoked a lesson learned from his days in politics: Use your opponents’ weapon against him.
“I thought about it and said, ‘Let’s turn it into an issue,’“ he says. “It became symbolic of our complaint against the system. While our players were making their event great, they wouldn’t give us access to their facility. That became a metaphor for everything we were doing.”
Drawing on a keen sense of drama, Jordan scheduled the press conference for the U.S. Open’s parking lot. With such tennis stars as Mats Wilander, Yannick Noah and Tim Mayotte surrounding him, he told the press that the players are taking over the game and forming their own tour, effective 1990.
The next day, headlines trumpeted news of a “war” within men’s tennis, but none took place. Virtually overnight, Jordan became one of the most powerful persons in tennis.
Of course, he could have done it in a less theatrical way. For when the USTA got wind of Jordan’s plan to hold the press conference in the parking lot, it quickly reversed its earlier position and sent word to him that he could use the press room. But it was too late.
“Somebody woke up and said these guys are ready to hand us our heads,” Jordan says, laughing. “They were right. We had them. They had underestimated us.
ITF spokesman Bill Babcock declined to comment about Jordan or his parking lot ambush.
By early 1989, the ATP Tour was set up. Jordan had turned the ATP into a money-making machine. In its old form, the ATP grossed about $4 million annually and received no television revenues. Now, Jordan expects the ATP to gross about $70 million in 1990, largely due to the $45 million in television contracts that the union has sealed.
Surprisingly, the ITF failed to react to Jordan’s ambush — at least, until recently. “They pretty much let us take it (control of tennis) away from them,” Jordan says. “If I’d been them, I would have gone out and started another tour and said, ‘Here, top 10 players, here’s $1 million apiece if you play in our tour.”
Now the ITF is battling back. In what Jordan describes as an attempt to divide the top players from the rest of the union — a move that, if successful, will seriously damage Jordan’s fledgling ATP Tour — the ITF has announced plans for a Super Bowl of tennis called the Grand Slam Cup. If it takes place, the tournament will feature the top eight performers from the four Grand Slam tournaments and offer a staggering prize of $2 million to the winner.
The Grand Slam Cup would be held in West Germany, just three weeks after the ATP’s own world championship, which also happens to be scheduled for West Germany. Despite the scheduling conflicts this creates for players, the ITF’s Babcock insists that the Grand Slam Cup is not a retaliatory strike at Jordan, and was created only to “help the players and the game.”
So far, the Grand Slam Cup has drawn little support from the top 10 players, with the exception of Ivan Lendl. That doesn’t bother Jordan, who says that “Lendl will play for a nickel.” But Jordan concedes that the ITF’s ploy is “a step backwards for us.”
Lendl isn’t the only star player Jordan is having trouble with. Although he has come out against the Grand Slam Cup, John McEnroe recently attacked Jordan in the national press, saying that he wants Jordan’s job because “it’s time for someone with vision to carry it into the 21st century. Hamilton Jordan is a politician. He doesn’t know anything about tennis.”
How does Jordan deal with the threat posed by the Grand Slam Cup and McEnroe’s challenge to his authority? The same way he told Carter to deal with the threat Ted Kennedy posed in the primaries in 1979:
Mind the store. Be a good chief executive. And let your work speak for itself. “What we’re doing is bigger than one player,” he says. “Everything will be fine if I do my job.”
By Jordan’s own decision, however, the job won’t be his for much longer. He recently hired a search firm to find a successor for himself and plans to leave his post as CEO by the end of 1990. He will stay on with the ATP as chairman of its board. “One of my strengths is that I know my weaknesses,” he says. “I’m good at organizing and launching a plan, but I’m not good at staying around five or 10 years to administer it. I’m not good at day-to-day administrative minutiae.
“By the end of 1990 I’ll have a lot of scars because I’ve had to butt heads with a lot of people, but my political skills have helped me accomplish what I wanted to do.”