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Phil Anderton has swapped Hearts for a new role selling the ATP. Natasha Woods reports

THE new chief marketing officer of the ATP looks distinctly out of place. It is sweltering on the rooftop terrace of the Millennium Building at the All England Club, but Phil Anderton arrives looking like a reservoir dog – black suit matched with dark shades.

He may not have grasped that the dress code on the tennis tour is considerably more casual than that at Tynecastle or Murrayfield, but he seems to have a firm grasp of the demands of his new job.

“Basically we need to get the millions of tennis consumers around the world to start caring about the sport outside of the Grand Slams,” said the man who earned the sobriquet ‘Fireworks Phil’ thanks to his role in putting the spark into the pre-match entertainment at the home of Scottish rugby.

There were fireworks aplenty when he left Hearts last October, sacked after season ticket sales had soared and the team had risen to the top of the league. Subsequently Vladimir Romanov, the club’s owner, was to bizarrely claim that his former chief executive had harmed the club every day of the seven months he was in post.

In such circumstances, Anderton could be forgiven for seeking the easy life after attempting to drag the Scottish Rugby Union kicking and screaming into the 21st century and then falling foul of the unpredictable regime at Tynecastle.

Instead he has taken on a key role with the body that runs the men’s tennis tour, where the politics can be just as complicated, and intransigence has often been more evident than enterprise. The fact the ATP did not have a chief marketing officer before Anderton arrived says much about the organisation.

“It is amazing that within the ATP, which is a global body, there was no marketing function at all and the marketing budget was zero,” observed Anderton.

It was a situation that Etienne de Villiers, the ATP’s new executive chairman, was keen to redress. The South African honed his commercial skills within the Walt Disney Company. In Anderton, with both Proctor & Gamble and Coca-Cola on his resume, he found someone who speaks the same language, and who was also in the job market.

The problems – or “challenges” as such marketeers prefer to describe them – have been obvious for years. The calendar, which currently runs to 64 tournaments in 31 countries, needs to be shortened and repackaged so tennis fans and broadcasters alike know what they are buying into, and the game’s stars turn up and produce as billed.

But the constitution of the ATP and intricate structure of tennis in general has always hindered rather than helped facilitate change. The Grand Slams are run by their respective national federations, the Davis and Fed Cups fall under the aegis of the International Tennis Federation, while the players are essentially free agents, able to pick and choose where they play.

Meanwhile the ATP’s own management board is split equally between three representatives of the players and three from those who organise the tournaments. Talk about self-interest. For instance, getting the tournament directors to agree to cut back the programme is akin to asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.

Mark Miles, De Villiers’ predecessor, was not one for confrontation. He never voted in board meetings. Now things are very different.

“Now you’ve got really strong leadership. There cannot be stalemate because Etienne votes,” explained Anderton.“Not everyone is happy with his decisions, but once a decision has been made we go forward with it. He is a smart guy who comes up with logical stuff and he is very persuasive. But when push comes to shove he will vote and he will make the changes that are needed.”

Last week at Wimbledon, the one topic which Anderton warmed to more than any other was the marketing of the tour’s major assets – its players. He revealed that the ATP recently conducted research among tennis fans in France and Germany. Frighteningly, only 35% of the German respondents had heard of Rafael Nadal, the game’s brightest young star and the world No2.

“It was unbelievable, but I could relate to it because I had an embarrassing experience of my own in my first week in the job,” recalled Anderton. “Etienne invited me over to Miami and when I walked into a meeting, this guy came over and sat beside me. I looked around and said ‘I’m Phil Anderton from the ATP’ and I was a whisker away from saying ‘what do you do?’. It turns out it was James Blake, a top 10 player and I had never seen him before. And I’m a pretty big sports fan.”

“That’s the issue. The French Open wasn’t even shown on the BBC. Our stars aren’t well-known enough, and I don’t just mean as tennis players, but as characters.

“It is one of our big challenges because, unlike Scottish rugby or Hearts or a lot of other sports where the players are effectively employed by the organisation and you can tell them what to do, tennis players are independent.

“But one of the things we will be pushing strongly is that we want the players to fully understand they are in the entertainment business and that playing the game and promoting it are both very important.”

There are other changes in the pipeline too. At the US Open later this year, Hawk-Eye technology will be used in a Grand Slam for the first time to aid in officiating. Anderton reckons it’s a “superb” development since big screens could enable fans to engage in events in the same way they already do in sports like rugby league and cricket.

There is also talk of round robin stages in some competitions so broadcasters and fans are guaranteed more than one chance to see the big names, more best-of-three-set encounters rather than five-set ones since it’s a format which works better for broadcasters, and more tournaments which feature both the world’s top men and their female equivalents.

“There are other questions like should we allow the on-court coaching of players because it might make it more entertaining. These are all things we can look at, but what we won’t do is undermine the fundamentals of the sport,” he stressed.

Courtside fireworks? “Potentially,” he replied, smiling. But by now the shades have been put back on so it is unclear whether he is joking or not. However, given his track record, the answer is probably not.

Taken from the Sunday Herald