Posted by Peter Bodo, TENNIS.com
The ATP has a new executive chairman and president, former Nike honcho Adam Helfant. The relative youth of the new EC tells you something right off the bat: The ATP was looking less for a presiding senior strategist than a young pup eager to build a reputation … and perhaps an empire.
One of the most striking aspects of this choice is that, once again, the ATP has decided to go outside the game for its leadership. Tennis always faces a dramatic dilemma in this regard: Do you recruit a leader (an "insider") who knows his way around the halls of power and has a bulging Rolodex containing the names of all the key suits and administrators, or do you go for someone who has neither friends nor enemies, neither debts owed nor debts to collect?
That's a tough choice, and I've always been a little skeptical of the "shake things up" school of thought, partly because the personal power of the ATP EC (whatever happened to the CEO title that was attached to the name of the man Helfant replaces, Etienne de Villiers?) is drastically limited. The leader of the ATP must be a consensus-builder, and that requires a fair amount of background knowledge about the constituents, alliances, conflicts of interest and political agendas.
And let's keep this in mind: de Villiers was brought in as a "shake things up" outsider, and in the end, the thing most badly shaken was de Villiers' reputation within tennis. By contrast, the WTA scored a direct hit when it hired Larry Scott, who could be described as the ultimate insider. He played on the men's tour and prepped for his role as the WTA leader in the trenches of various tournaments and the ATP. Scott has been a success, and he managed to sell the WTA on his vision of the path the organization needs to take into the new century.
Still, Helfant's résumé doesn't exactly scream "visionary." He held a number of senior positions at Nike, a company that, just like tennis, does a brisk business on an international stage. To lift from the ATP's official press release announcing the appointment: "Most recently [Helfant] served as Nike's corporate Vice President, Global Sports Marketing, a role in which he was responsible for Nike's relationships and contracts with athletes, clubs, teams, universities and sports governing bodies throughout the world."
Clearly, Helfant understands some of the unique problems associated with tennis' status as a global game. What more he understands -- or doesn't -- about the game is something we'll find out incrementally.
Helfant will have to grapple with issues like the overcrowded calendar and how it affects the actions of the top players, but with the Hamburg-Madrid controversy now resolved, the horizon is fairly clear. If the operative word at the dawn of the brief de Villiers era was "vision," the buzzword for the Helfant era might be "focus."
Given his relative youth, Helfant will have time to develop the insights and operational expertise of an insider. It's something he'll need in order to focus on doing the right things at the right time in the right way. If I were in his shoes, the first person I would call for advice on the road ahead would be Larry Scott.
Peter Bodo
