Joel Drucker<\/a> suggested that it might have been the year Joseph was refused entry to the Cairo Open thus demonstrating that a sense of humor is necessary in the face of centuries of conflict.<\/p>\nNo one\u2019s saying but it looks like the organizers of the Dubai tournament couldn\u2019t get visas for the players. Erlich and Ram refuse to talk about the incident. Canter did say that he hadn\u2019t planned to go to Indian Wells last week but he traveled there to take up the Dubai issue with the ATP.<\/p>\n
Norman Canter is an interesting guy. He made his first million in his twenties designing packaging for Revlon Cosmetics. He moved on to safety equipment, then the oil business and, after that, energy conservation. He says he introduced the first fluorescent light bulb to the U.S. in 1985.<\/p>\n
In 1994 Canter got involved in tennis management so that he and his partner, Richard DeVries<\/b>, could, as he put it, \u201cgive people an opportunity to live their dream.\u201d He also views himself as someone who is \u201ctrying to right the wrongs that are in tennis and fighting a losing battle.\u201d In his view, tennis is an extremely corrupt sport.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s he talking about? Let\u2019s start with Donald Young<\/b>. A few days ago I mentioned that Young lost 11 straight ATP matches at one point. At the time, he was a client of IMG, the huge sports management company that represents players and owns tennis academies, tennis media, and tennis tournaments. Four of Young\u2019s 11 losses came as a wild card entry in the tournaments at Miami and Indian Wells. IMG owns the Miami tournament and used to own half of the Indian Wells tournament.<\/p>\n
If the same company represents the players and owns the events, who does it work for: the player or the event? Young suffered a confidence crisis in his budding career as his management kept feeding him to the lions and he kept losing. IMG certainly didn\u2019t represent Young very well in that case.<\/p>\n
IMG shouldn\u2019t have trouble getting wild cards for any of its clients because it also works for the ATP. One of its subsidiaries markets the broadcast rights to the Masters Series events. IMG not only represents players and owns events, it also works directly for the tour.<\/p>\n
The ATP has a similar conflict of interest. It used to be the players union but now it represents both the players and the ATP tournaments. You can see where the ATP\u2019s interests lie when they sell a tournament to Dubai even though Israeli players can\u2019t play in it. Clearly the ATP was representing tournaments, not its players. The ATP deserves credit for pushing political change in Dubai, but it\u2019s doubtful that political change was the guiding principle when the ATP accepted Dubai\u2019s bid to buy a tournament.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a scary thought. IMG owns the Miami tournament and Canter said he heard that the tournament in Miami was up for sale. My stomach flipped when I heard that. What if a foreign country buys it? Could we lose our third largest event after the U.S. Open and Indian Wells? I haven\u2019t been able to verify Canter\u2019s information and even if a foreign country does buy Miami, it doesn\u2019t necessarily mean they\u2019ll move the tournament.<\/p>\n
Doha owns part of the Masters Series event in Hamburg and it still resides in Germany. That part ownership, though, could be causing some problems for the ATP because Doha has some very deep pockets built up from its oil economy. The Hamburg tournament is currently suing the ATP to avoid losing it Masters Series designation and according to Canter, the ATP has spent $8 million dollars in legal fees on the case so far.<\/p>\n
The tournament in Monte Carlo is also being demoted and the organizers of the tournament also sued the ATP. Monte Carlo accepted a settlement that keeps its Masters Series designation but drops it from the list of required tournaments. Would Monte Carlo have settled the case if it had Doha\u2019s deep pockets backing it up?<\/p>\n
Canter\u2019s management company, Renaissance Tennis Management<\/a>, currently represents Erlich and Ram, Benjamin Becker<\/b>, junior player Lera Solovieva<\/b>, and a few other players trying to make their way up the tennis rankings. It\u2019s a small, independent management company at this point and Canter probably feels like he\u2019s tilting at windmills given the nature of the tennis world, but IMG also started small so there is hope.<\/p>\nAnd if Canter\u2019s management company does grow into a large organization, maybe Canter will have the opportunity to right some of those wrongs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Conflict of interest abounds in the incestuous world of professional tennis. After the Israeli doubles team of Jonathan Erlich and Andy Ram won the Australian Open in January, the ATP asked them to play the tournament in Dubai. The Arab emirates of Qatar and Dubai are a big deal in professional tennis. Both the ATP […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}