Hamilton Jordan made tennis better
President Carter's chief of staff, who died of cancer last week at age 63, worked his magic in the late 1980s to turn the disparate men's game into the lucrative ATP Tour it is today.
When politics was saying goodbye last week to Hamilton Jordan, so was tennis.
Jordan died at 63 after a long battle with cancer, and his obituaries correctly dwelt on the career of a man who, in his early 30s, designed the strategy that got Jimmy Carter elected president in 1976. By 35, the controversial, complicated Jordan was Carter's chief of staff.
After Carter left the presidency, Jordan eventually found his way into tennis. Sadly, few of those who play the game today and reap its lucrative benefits know who he was, or what he did.
Which was, to change the course of the game.
In the late 1980s, men's professional tennis was disparate and disjointed. The four Grand Slam events ruled, as they do today. But then, they did so with much more arrogance and disdain for their product, the players.
The ruling group was called the Men's Tennis Council, and it was split into thirds -- a third each to the Grand Slams, tournament directors and players. It basically made an annual schedule that led into the Slams. Tournament directors had no equity in their events, just a date. And the players, without whom there was no game, had a 33% say, or 17% less than they said they wanted.
In 1987, the decision was made to seek outside help. In charge of the search was Raymond Moore, then head of the Men's Tennis Council and now one of the owners and directors of the prestigious Indian Wells tour stop in March.
"I was interviewing people with [former player] Harold Solomon, and we had five candidates, all qualified," Moore said. "Then Hamilton Jordan came in. We met at the old Hyatt Grand Champions [in Indian Wells].
"We got an education 101. He blew us away. He had studied the sport, and came in with charts and graphs about players and movements. We had found a guy who could really strategize."
Among those Jordan hired in his new role of executive director of the Assn. of Tennis Professionals, which was to become the initials-only ATP Tour, was a marketing manager from Adidas, J. Wayne Richmond. Richmond said he has met few like him.
"He came along at a time when tennis needed somebody to shake things up," Richmond said.
As analytical as he was, Hamilton also had a short fuse, and it blew about a year after he took the tennis job.
