ATP Tour
In 1989, I became the Director of Communications for the men’s professional tennis tour. We managed 80 tennis tournaments around world with offices in Sidney, Australia; Monte Carlo, Monaco; and Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida that serviced the media needs at the grand slam tennis tournaments in Australia, England, France and the U.S., and fielded all media inquiries from reporters from all over world.
With the need to travel frequently on the Tour, I had a chance to see much of the world. Tournaments were held in places where the beauty of the environment was an additional draw to large, chic crowds. When I could, I would schedule a day or two on either side of the time I had to be at the tennis venue to see the area. I got to jog in Sidney Park and in the municipal parks of Melbourne, Australia just across the Yarra River from the Australian Open Facilities. While there I was very impressed by the art in National Gallery of Victoria. I traveled to the Great Barrier Reef near Cairns and fought the very strong currents underwater while scuba diving to see the fish and coral.
In London, the players and Tour staff stayed at the St. James Court hotel about a block from Buckingham Palace where I ran in the mornings in St. James or Green parks. During the Wimbledon tournament, we had all l night jam sessions at the Hard Rock Café that was only open to the tennis family, rock and roll musicians, movie starts and models. There we bumped into Sting, Keith Richards and others while the band Genesis that backed Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel supported the awkward efforts of tennis players who sang and played with them in an infinite variety of songs. About every fourth song somebody sang another rendition of “Honky Tonk Women” each one worse than the previous. Believe me John McEnroe, Pat Cash and Jim Courier would not do well as musical entertainers.
Talking to Grand Slam Champion Matts Wilander and his coach.
International Management Group, founded by golf super-agent, Mark McCormack,
was the management company for the Word Championships in Europe and many of the larger tournaments on the Tour. IMG followed an old European tradition of seeding the venues with packs of young female models acting the role of courtesans. This bevy of beauties dressed in diaphanous pastel colors, would rush into a room in a twittering frenzy, causing the attention a flock of flamingos invading a beach of octogenarians might have had.
In part because of the popularity of the German player, Boris Becker, and also the wealth in his native Germany, we had many tournaments there and held our year-end indoor World Championship tournament at the 100-year-old Festhalle in Frankfurt, the civic arena of the city. Consequently, I flew to Frankfurt about once a month to make plans for the tournament. I frequently had to get up early to call someone in Europe where the time was 6-7 hours earlier than we were in the Eastern time zone and then call someone in Australia or Japan late at night when it was still early in the morning there.
At an ATP Tour dinner on the opening night of the office in Monte Carlo
It was interesting spending a lot of time in Germany fifty years after WWII where there were still signs from the conflict. Some of the people I met and had to do business with had lived under Nazism. As I wandered the halls of the Festhalle, I saw marketing photos of past events held there including a room filled with German soldiers playing chess in tournaments or riding dressage on beautiful horses. I also had work in Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Berlin, and Munich who had been attached to that earlier time in one way or the other.
In Paris we stayed in a hotel near the Bois de Boulogne, and I cold jog through the woods where Parisians for centuries had enjoyed the benefits of nature on their way to Versailles further to the west of the city.
The ATP Tour staff traveled the world and stayed in the best hotels in the best cities in each country. At night, often our hosts would take us to wonderful restaurants and places where the wealthy and beautiful people hung out and partied. For example, after an elaborate dinner hosted by Prince Albert II of Monaco when we opened our office in Monte Carlo, a few of us including certified wild man and former tennis great, Ilie Nastase, went to the famous nightclub, Jimmy Z, located just off Avenue Princess Grace on a peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean. I brought along two of our hostesses from the dinner in their carnival outfits and we ordered Champaign at $500 a bottle. Our bar bill was over $10,000, fortunately paid by the ATP Tour. Actually, that night was a bit excessive.
Our hotel in Monte Carlo was the Monte Carlo Beach Hotel, an exotic boutique lodge a short walk from the Monte Carlo Country club, where each room had a balcony/porch open to the Mediterranean sea and the nearby beach was topless.
I incorporated many of these memories and some of the specific European locations mentioned above into the book “Casting Stones”