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by Pete Bodo
Madrid, as most of you know, was the brainchild of Ion Tiriac. That he was able to turn his vision into reality ought to give you a pretty good idea of the degree of the clout and expertise - promotional, financial and political - that this most enigmatic of tennis impresarios has accumulated. Tiriac himself probably would bridle at the suggestion that he's a deft politician, and that would be justified. For unlike some other event-shapers and infighters, his approach has relied less on schmoozing, manipulating and relationship-building than a healthy regard for that simple and vulgar maxim: Money talks, BS walks.
Tiriac has spent his life as the black sheep in tennis; as a player, this reformed ice-hockey star from gritty, industrial, Brasov, Romania, never came anywhere near a Top 10 ranking in singles, but he was better than No. 840, which is where he ranks today on Forbes magazine's list of the world's. . . billionaires.
Yes, tennis - and banking, car dealerships, insurance agencies, commercial building and leasing operations, and various other business interests have been very good to Tiriac. And Tiriac, in turn, has been very good to tennis. As he recently told Chris Clarey of the New York Times: “This is the only business I’m truly at home. I might be a banker or have a huge insurance company and so on, but those are specialists that I hired as partners to get into those businesses. I don’t want to be very arrogant, but respectfully, I say in tennis I did everything a human being can do: from player (Tiriac and his first protege, Ilie Nastase, won the French Open doubles in 1970) to coach (in addition to Nastase, he's coached, among others, Guillermo Vilas and Boris Becker) to manager to organizer.”
By "organizer," Tiriac means "promoter." His expertise brought us, among other events, the star-studded WTA event that once took place in Stuttgart, as well as the ATP Tour Championships in Hannover, Germany, and the since-abandoned Grand Slam Cup in Munich. He still has an ATP 250 event, the Romanian Open, and, of course, the Mutua Madrilena Madrid Open, or Madrid Masters.
I had a long conversation with Tiriac a few weeks ago, which was the basis for the profile that runs in the current issue of Tennis magazine. Trying to explain why, having become one of the most successful men on the planet, Tiriac still can't keep his hands off small potatoes (tennis), he told me: "For me and others like me (meaning eastern Europeans living under the Communist thumb) tennis was water in the desert. In my time (the 1960s and early 1970s) 99.9 percent of the people in my part of the world did not the same privilege as I - to be an athlete, to travel, the see the world, and also to come home again. Tennis made my free. My friend, I cannot forget where I am coming from."
In other words, he grew up when having even small potatoes was a big deal, and he's never quite gotten over the joy of having them.
It's mildly ironic that this forbidding man (a writer once described Tiriac's head as something found on Easter Island) who as a player was without doubt one of the greatest - and most despised - of gamesmen, would be the man to issue such a heartfelt, accurate testimonial. It reminds us of what what tennis has done for so many people, in times more difficult than our own and in varying contexts,for over a century now. If you want to judge sports by the influence they have on the lives and fortunes of people, tennis scores high.
Tiriac is proud of his abilities as a promoter. He was a guest at the Super Bowl here in the U.S. earlier this year, and he was astonished by the relative lack of sophistication at various functions and hospitality venues (of course, some aspects of American life won't ever be understood by elite Europeans). By contrast, Tiriac has always taken pains to provide champagne-class hospitality; that, as much as anything, has become a trademark of his promotions, and it helps explain why his Madrid tournament is considered as much of a fixture on Madrid's social calendar as the athletic one.
While obsessions with status and the trappings of luxury leave me cold, Tiriac's target audience of business class clients and corporate entertainers embrace them. Ask Tiriac about the sight of empty seats in Madrid's "Magic Box" venue and he shrugs it off, noting that his luxury boxes and premium subscription plans to the Madrid tournament are overbooked. That's where the real money is. I wouldn't be surprised if Tiriac just gave away the tickets to the cheap seats, and if he doesn't, it might be only because crowding at the site would be unwelcome. Like most impresarios, Tiriac knows what he needs in order to succeed; then he figures out what people who can fill that need want and gives it to them.
Although Tiriac claims to have no beef with the establishment - he's certainly taken more than one licking from the folks at the International Olympic Committee and the International Tennis Federation - you can sense in the resigned tone of this nakedly commercial man an ongoing, simmering discontent with the status quo. Although he's over 70, he still has a very active mind and a healthy willingness to ask, "what if?" - as if, what if there were no unwritten rule saying that the world can have only four Grand Slam events? What if we changed the rules to make tennis more exciting? What if we distill to product to present just its essence at the most critical moments of the year?
Establishment types have always considered Tiriac a threat, and they've accused him in the past of trying to horn into their template with a fifth Grand Slam. He told me he has no issue with the four majors - in essence, he insists, they are what they are. But there's a hint of fatalistic contempt in his voice when he adds, "Let them do the same they've been doing for another hundred years."
Translation: Why not change, if it makes sense?
In Tiriac's "perfect world," the best events (read: the majors) would have a draw of 32 players. But like his counterparts at the Grand Slam events, he also believes that in today's amped up game, players must have a day off between matches. "I don't know how many cars are in the Indianapolis 500," he said. "But in Formula I, you have 18 cars and 18 drivers, not 128. You have just the best in the world." Tiriac believes you could create a tournament system featuring an unquestionably elite group of top players - it would have to number something like 20 players - who would automatically be entered in top events. Everyone else would either have to qualify, or be content to play lesser events. He believes that qualifying events for a select number of truly elite events could generate enough prize-money and general interest to create a viable second tier.
Despite Tiriac's sympathy for the workload undertaken by top players today, he's less compassionate when it comes to the familiar lament that pro tennis ought to be more fun. "I believe the tennis player who is saying he wants to enjoy himself is not understanding his job. I say to him, 'The enjoyment in tennis is finished. It's a business, for better or worse. It's big money that you make now, and you are very lucky to be able to do so well in it for a short period of your life.' If this is true, let's at least create good working conditions for them."
Those sentiments may send chills or shivers of revulsion through those who cleave to the romantic notion that pro tennis can be a life-enriching, agreeable profession. It's not that it can't be that - one man's source of satisfaction is another's idea of drudgery. It's more that Tiriac, having fought his way through the barricades surrounding the establishment, has little use for the kinder, gentler approach to any profession. Almost anyone engaging Tiriac must walk away thinking, This is one hard, hard man. His defense, of course, is that he's a realist. Why sugar-coat the truth, or pretend that things are different from what they seem?
Tiriac was present at the recent gold medal hockey game at the Vancouver Olympic Games. As a former Olympic competitor in that sport, he professed astonishment at how much the game has changed - how much better and more demanding it now is. "It had nothing to do with my ice hockey," he told me. "It's another sport now."
But Tiriac also was amazed when he discovered that in the overtime period, each team had to play with one less player. This tweak of the rules floored him, and got him thinking about tennis. He literally went to sleep that night after the game wondering just how many significant changes tennis has made to accommodate the changing times and the needs or desires of the audience, and media purveyors of tennis. "The tiebreaker was a big revolution, and of course nobody wanted it at the time. But then, after two years, everybody love it. But what else we made. The rest is, what, Hawkeye?"
Well, yes. Hawkeye is certainly an enormous innovation. But it's also true that Hawkeye was less a change meant to improve the intrinsic quality of the game or the spectator experience than a technological solution to a problem that everyone has wanted to solve, since forever.
Naturally, Tiriac would be tempted to go a few steps further. One idea he floated to me, which would certainly be interesting to test, is eliminating the second serve during tiebreakers. Tiriac feels that changing that rule would reduce if not entirely eliminate the automatic advantage the server enjoys in each tiebreaker point. Why allow power to enjoy such a big advantage over skill? It seems counter-intuitive, given Tiriac's nature, and it certainly conflicts with the image he projects (and wants to project, I've always felt), but I've always felt that Tiriac has a strong sense of aesthetics and an appreciation of beauty. It's just layered beneath layers and layers of scaly matter.
As Tiriac sees it - and he certainly isn't the only one of this opinion - the game has arrived at a state of gridlock. Each faction has staked out its turf, and it would take a lot more than a vague desire to implement change to bring it about. And about that idea that tennis needs a commissioner?
"It's a discussion without a subject," Tiriac said, in one of his signature linguistic constructions (this is also the man who said, among other things, that "Monica Seles does not have two lungs, she has two hearts," reinforcing that notion that a poet lies buried beneath that crusty surface). But then he couldn't help adding: "Maybe if the Grand Slams say, 'Okay, we choose a leader,' then the ATP and WTA would accept that. If that happen, the ITF is going to join because it has no choice. But this is not going to happen."
It was a typical assessment by Tiriac: sober, realistic, blunt. Those are trademark Tiriac characteristics, and while in others the qualities have been an impediment to advancement, they've served Tiriac well because he knows that when your wallet can speak, your other mouth can say anything it wants.