Tennis Gets Reset

Just five months into his job as president of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), Etienne de Villiers faced a hostile crowd of doubles pros at the Masters Cup in Shanghai to explain to them why he would have to curtail their sport to save it. The players had already filed suit against the ATP, and there was De Villiers last November, back swinging just four months after cancer surgery, telling them he was going to go ahead with a shortened, no-ad scoring system; a super tie-break instead of a third set; and a rule that doubles players must qualify for singles, thus making it harder for doubles specialists to get into doubles draws. The outraged pros viewed the move as a cost-saving effort to kill that form of the sport--one that out-of-shape executives love to play but rarely pay to watch.

A year later, doubles, which had been losing money for the past 15 years, is thriving using most of those new rules. The ATP signed its first doubles-only sponsor, Stanford Financial Group, and the players have dropped their suit. Through frank talks and fulfilled promises of more doubles promotion and center-court matches--made possible by shortening the format and attracting more top singles players to doubles--the former Walt Disney exec has turned some of his harshest critics into his biggest fans.

Resolving the troubles in doubles is the most visible example of how the straight-shooting South African is reinventing this most conservative sport. Bob Bryan, one of the pros who initiated the lawsuit along with his twin brother Mike--they're the top doubles team in the world--now lobs compliments via e-mail: "He's a cool guy who doesn't need this gig. He just wants to help tennis and the tour."

The structure of the men's professional tour practically begs for a brawl, with lots of competing interests steeped in tradition and little incentive to work together. Unlike many professional sports leagues, which are made up of a collection of more-or-less cooperative clubs, De Villiers represents a coterie of competing constituents. The ATP oversees the maze of tournaments around the globe and is co-owned by the tournament directors and the players, groups whose interests often clash.

The pros are free agents, choosing to play the events they like, while each tournament director scrambles to woo top names. De Villiers is the referee, trying to strengthen tennis while balancing the needs of tournament directors and players. To complicate matters, national or local tennis federations govern the Grand Slams--the Australian, French and U.S. Opens and Wimbledon, the sport's biggest events--and the International Tennis Federation oversees Davis Cup matches between countries. The result is a scheduling nightmare in which even the smallest changes become political.

But De Villiers, 57, may be the perfect candidate to turn tennis around because he has nothing to prove. He's rich and secure. At Disney for 14 years, he most recently ran its international TV business, then he moved on to a private-equity fund. "I've had a great career, and I don't care if I lose my job," says De Villiers, whose cancer is in remission. "So I'm prepared to do the right thing and go to the edge to get there."