SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY REPORTS

Fireworks Phil torches the bonfire of sporting vanities
RICHARD MOORE
IN THE seven-star Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai last year, the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) top brass held a meeting with the world's leading players, including Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Marat Safin and Andre Agassi. During the meeting, Agassi addressed the association's chairman, Etienne De Villiers, and posed a question that was brilliant for its - literal - sense of drama, as well as its sheer quotability.

"What I want to know," asked Agassi, "is whether we are in the same play with different characters, or do we have a new plot and actors?"

It sounds like a scene from a movie - you can imagine the dramatic silence and earnest eyeballing that followed the question - but, although the above meeting took place a month before Phil Anderton took up the post of chief marketing officer with the ATP, these are the celebrity circles in which the former SRU and Hearts chief executive now moves.

And he loves it. Indeed, many will say that Anderton was always destined for such a stage, among a cast that instead of Steven Pressley and Paul Hartley features the likes of Federer and Nadal, with a director, De Villiers, who appears just as willing to ruffle feathers as certain other of Anderton's bosses, but whom Anderton gets on with, respects hugely and trusts implicitly. Unlike certain of his other bosses.

It should be pointed out, incidentally, that the meeting in Dubai was a forum for positive debate and discussion rather than any kind of players' revolt, such as - for example - that of the "Riccarton Three" at Anderton's previous employers, Hearts. That it took place at all also highlights the unique way in which the ATP operates, with a structure that allows players to have a say, and indeed to wield actual power, given that they comprise half the board. Agassi's concerns notwithstanding, there seems, to the outsider, to be a sense of maturity about the ATP: it is an organisation that appears to be not too embroiled in petty politics and internal squabbles, but to have its eyes focused on the bigger picture.

Which makes it, some might say, a world away from Hearts, and from Scottish rugby. And so, these days, is Anderton. But he keeps in touch with goings on.

That much becomes crystal clear when his thoughts turn to recent events at Murrayfield and Tynecastle. "The Hearts and Scottish rugby stuff is always interesting to read," he says, before adding, rather ominously: "Your newspaper is one of the bookmarks on my BlackBerry, so I keep up."

Most of the "stuff" that goes on prompts, to use Anderton's own description, a "wry smile". But it can still raise his ire as well.

After two high-profile and acrimonious exits - first from the SRU, then from Hearts - there also remains some unfinished business. It should be settled in Edinburgh in October. "That's when we're having the court case with our friends from Hearts," says Anderton of his six-figure battle for compensation following his sacking in October 2005. "I'd rather it wasn't happening; it's a waste of time, frankly, because it's fairly black and white to me.

"But," he adds, with more than a hint of devilment, "I'll be looking forward to a re-acquaintance with Vladimir Romanov."

Anderton has always relished the big occasion - his job at Murrayfield (where he became known as Fireworks Phil after England coach Clive Woodward whinged about the level of pyrotechnics before one Calcutta Cup meeting in Edinburgh) and Tynecastle was to make the occasions bigger, to turn matches into "events"; and many, if not Romanov, would say that he was largely successful in doing so. These days, he appears to enjoy swimming with the big fish of one of the very few sports that can legitimately claim to be global. It makes, he says, a change from the small pond and the "petty bureaucrats" he encountered in his previous life.

It is when Anderton talks about Andy Murray that he steers the conversation towards the SRU, where he made a big splash as head of marketing - performing miracles, some would say, in attracting progressively bigger crowds to watch progressively poorer Scotland sides - before his appointment as chief executive and his subsequent sinking in the political waters of Murrayfield.

"I want to stay apolitical," states Anderton, "but I was pleased to see the SNP coming in and saying they're going to give sport a higher profile. I had a wry smile at the news that the alcohol ban is being lifted at Murrayfield. We had lots of meetings with [new justice minister] Kenny MacAskill about this, and I'm glad it's happened. He was always very positive but the petty bureaucrats in power at the time prevented it. I'm delighted they've pushed it through.

"We used to say, instead of the Executive wasting millions of pounds on these pathetic nanny state advertising campaigns telling people what they should and shouldn't eat, they should spend that money on Andy Murray, with a full marketing campaign using him as the role model. I hope the new Executive will grasp these kinds of opportunities. I think someone like Andy and other role models would be pleased to be part of positive campaigns."

Another wry smile greeted the news, when it flashed on to the screen of his BlackBerry, of the axing of the Borders professional rugby team. "Not many remember it, but just before Dave Mackay was forced to resign, we had a plan to move to two pro teams," says Anderton. "We wanted to move away from the regional focus and have powerful teams that would import the likes of - oh! - Stephen Larkham [the Australian star recently signed by Edinburgh] as well as the top Scots. And then we would have another team in London, and - oh! - they eventually say they want to do that as well! Yet we were derided for it by some members of the current set-up."

Changing tack, but hardly pausing, Anderton adds: "But I do also find the Borders griping and moaning a little bit rich, I have to say, after years of apathy towards the team, where local club sides would actively choose not to get behind the team. I find it a bit rich that, after all that, that they ask, 'What are the SRU doing closing our team?'

"The reason the Borders community didn't get behind it was because it was perceived as an SRU team, not a Borders team. Unless you change that, then no matter how you dress it up, the Borders community is never going to get behind it. If a Borders team was owned by people in the area, without the SRU coming and saying what could and couldn't happen, then you'd get support for it."

Clearly these are arguments that Anderton continues to follow closely, and about which he feels strongly. But it is a relief, he admits, to be detached from them, living, as he and his family now do, in London, and globe-trotting with the men's tennis tour. It must be nice to be out of the backwater. "Tennis does have its own politics," he points out. "You can get accused of doing something to favour America, or whatever, but working on a sport on a global scale, you do have a little smile when you hear people complaining about having to drive up to Edinburgh to watch a game of rugby. And it's 40 minutes! There's way too much parochialism, that's for sure."

But there are significant challenges in his current job. The structure of the tour, and of the ATP itself, makes its smooth running a delicate balancing act.

Theoretically opposed "sides" must be brought together; conflicting interests must be managed. Yet it seems to work remarkably well. "The way the ATP is set up is that it's effectively a players' union," explains Anderton. "The players have got half the positions on the board [the tournament organisers comprise the other half] and they're an integral part of what we're doing. I can't think of any other sports that have this structure, and it is an enormous challenge to satisfy everyone.

"For example, say you have the player ranked 250 in the world, who's a clay court specialist based in Europe. He has a completely different agenda to the number five-ranked player who's a hard court specialist based in the States. But we have lots of communication with the players; we're concerned about player health, about increasing prize money and reducing the travelling demands."

De Villiers' reputation as a dynamic leader of the organisation - or, if you prefer, someone who isn't afraid to ruffle feathers - means that he is an unstinting ally of Anderton's. The pair have similar business backgrounds, Anderton cutting his marketing teeth with Coca-Cola, De Villiers as senior executive at Walt Disney, among numerous other big brand roles. The Edinburgh-born and educated Anderton was appointed by De Villiers just two months after the South African assumed a much bigger role with the ATP, stepping up from non-executive to executive chairman. Anderton was the organisation's first head of marketing, a fact that gave him a blank canvas, and, 15 months on, the brushstrokes are beginning to take shape.

"First of all, there's a great team of people here," he says, stressing that he can't take sole credit for some of the changes that have been introduced, or are on the way.

"Andy Anson [former commercial director at Manchester United; now chief executive at ATP Europe], Richard Davies, Etienne, they're good people. But in the last year revenues have gone up 15%; we have record on-site attendance for ATP tournaments, with four million spectators; prize money has gone up for the first time in seven years, and it's now at record levels. It was $50m when I started, it's up to more than $63m now [he stated on his appointment that his aim was to double it to $100m by 2010]. It's a good start."

Another of his ambitions was to raise the profile of the players, using them to "sell" the game on that global stage. The recent challenge match in Majorca between Federer and Nadal - with half the court on the former's favoured grass, the other half on the local boy's beloved clay - seemed to have Anderton's fingerprints all over it, but that was an IMG promoted event. It is the kind of thing Anderton supports, though.

"Any stunt or exhibition or innovation that raises the profile of the sport, and its uniqueness, is fantastic. The rivalry between Federer and Nadal is great, but the younger players are important, [Novak] Djokovic, Andy Murray, Tommy Robredo. We've just had Tommy appear semi-naked in Cosmopolitan magazine. We're proactively seeking opportunities like that, and that's when the marketing starts to kick in behind these guys.

"In fact, Tommy Robredo is an interesting one - he's called Tommy because his dad was a big Who fan. So we're taking him and his dad to a Who concert [at Wembley on Wednesday] and he'll meet Roger Daltrey and the band. It'll be covered by Rolling Stone magazine ... there'll be lots of that sort of thing."

And the players presumably won't mind too much if the prize money continues to rise. Anderton admits that this is key to keeping their most valuable assets on-side. But one of the perennial problems faced by the ATP is that the Grand Slams loom as giants, not coming under the control of the ATP, but offering ranking points, and vital in terms of raising the players' profiles, as well as that of the game in general.

Outside the Slams and the Davis Cup - which comes under the auspices of the ITF - there are 64 ATP events. It imposes a relentless schedule on the players, as a glance at Murray's schedule confirms.

The problems posed by that are also laid bare by a review of the injuries suffered by Murray in his short career, with the suspicion that the demands of the circuit are at least partly responsible. "Sixty-four is a lot," agrees Anderton, "and it's a big thing for us to look at. There are options - a dramatic one would be cut the number to 40, say, but when we looked at it we thought that wasn't the right thing to do.

"We have something that's unique - it's a global sport. Cutting out so many tournaments would effectively be saying that a whole bunch of countries won't have tennis at professional level, and we then wouldn't have the opportunity to showcase the sport around the world. What we propose instead is that the way we structure the tour will channel premium events and players to a more limited number of tournaments.

"We want our top players at the top events; in return for which, they would receive real financial bonuses. And if they don't make the commitment, injuries aside, then suspensions and penalties would come in. But the really big changes to the tour we're hoping to bring in for the 2009 season. It's a very good sport, but the potential is so much bigger."

The ATP is not without its challenges, as Anderton acknowledges, but it appears a more stable ship than the two he skippered in Edinburgh. Yet while he clearly relishes the global stage that tennis provides, there must be part of him that yearns for the old play, with its familiar plot and cast of actors.

In October, he confirms, he will be reunited with some of them - Pressley and George Burley, respectively the captain and manager of Hearts during Anderton's time there, will be called to the stand as witnesses when his case against Hearts comes to court.

As for Romanov, Anderton - who hopes to catch a Hearts game when he is back in October - has noted the owner's frequent absences from Tynecastle this season. "When things are going well people like to be seen; when they're not going so well they like to blame other people.

"We've called Pressley and Burley as witnesses, and we'll get the truth out one way or another," he continues. "I left Hearts at the end of 2005, so it'll be almost two years since it happened. It does seem a bit of nonsense that it's dragged on. I'll be glad when it's done. But I expect there may be a modicum of press interest when it finally comes to court in October."

This article was posted on 24-Jun-2007, 07:11 by Hugh Barrow.