New Asian Tennis League Is Lining Up Big-Name Stars

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/sports/tennis/24iht-arena24.html

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PARIS — It remains far, far from clear whether Novak Djokovic is correct to call Mahesh Bhupathi’s would-be Asian tennis league “revolutionary.”

Tennis is a particularly tough nut to crack when it comes to bold new initiatives. There are too many factions, too many agendas; too many governing bodies and management companies prepared to quash outside-the-box thinking.

But Bhupathi, the 38-year-old Indian doubles star with a strong head for business, is nonetheless pushing ahead with his project. He believes Asia is underserved by high-level tennis and that many players, despite their long, grueling seasons, are genuinely prepared to surrender some well-earned rest in the quest for more earnings. And though it might seem that the last thing that tennis needs is another event, on Friday, in Paris, he and his partners plan to introduce to the public the International Premier Tennis League, or I.P.T.L., with the intention of starting play in late 2014.

It is to be a team tennis league with franchises in six, as-yet-unspecified Asian cities. It is modeled in part on something relatively new (the Indian Premier League in cricket, which began in 2008) and on something relatively old (World Team Tennis, the U.S. league founded in 1973).

For now, Bhupathi’s brainchild appears to have a surprising level of preliminary support from the people who matter most in tennis: the major stars.

Bhupathi said that those who have committed to the project include Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray, Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova and Victoria Azarenka. Roger Federer, for the moment at least, is not involved.

“I think it’s an incredibly ambitious project,” said Tony Godsick, Federer’s agent. “But if he’s got the people behind him who want to do it and he’s got a lot of top players who want to do it, then anything is possible. At the end of the day, you need the stars, and if he has a bunch of them willing to take part in the inaugural season, he has a chance.”

Bhupathi said that he expects Murray and Djokovic to have an equity stake in the league, and that investors include former players like Justin Gimelstob, a member of the A.T.P. board, and Boris Becker. Though skepticism is perfectly understandable, Bhupathi clearly has the contacts and the drive to follow through, and he also has a video in which most of the stars in question openly declare their enthusiasm (Djokovic’s “revolutionary” line features prominently).

Bhupathi, who will retire from the tour this year, recently became part of Murray’s management team, and in Bhupathi’s years on the circuit he has developed relationships that have allowed him the sort of face-to-face access to the leading players that an outside entrepreneur could only dream about.

“Tennis is a small world, and if an agency wanted to pull this off, all their competitors would make sure there are enough tacks under the wheel to make it not happen,” Bhupathi said in an interview last month in Singapore. “But I had access to the players and the agents, and luckily maybe for me, there was a transition at that time of the top couple of guys moving individually off on their own. So I spoke to them and everybody was intrigued about the idea. When I threw the concept around saying that this could potentially create a given amount of wealth in the league, everyone kind of said ‘I’m in if they’re in.’

“Andy didn’t want to be the only superstar playing, Novak said, ‘Are the other guys playing?’ Serena said, ‘Really? Novak and Andy are playing?’ And that’s how it went.”

If it actually happens, tennis’s governing bodies will clearly label the league as a series of exhibitions. But Bhupathi said he did not consider this exhibition tennis.

“This is a real league,” he said.

It does have quite a few of the trappings. This would not be just a few hits and giggles and the paychecks please. The league would have a 30-match schedule in its first year with home-and-away matches between each of the six franchises. A draft is planned for January of next year, and Bhupathi said each team would have a roster of six to 10 players, and their combined salaries would cost each team “between 4 and 10 million dollars.”

The thrills would be condensed. The format would be five matches a night, all just one abbreviated set: first to five games with a tiebreaker at 4-all. There would be men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, mixed doubles and legends singles with, according to Bhupathi, the retired American stars Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi already committed to taking part.

As usual, the superstars will receive special care and handling. Djokovic, Nadal, Murray and Williams would belong to a different category of players in the draft. “These guys will have the option to play only home matches and they will get paid per night,” said Bhupathi, who also said that reports of $5 million paydays for the likes of Murray were exaggerated.

“That’s too far away from the truth that it’s scary,” Bhupathi said.

The hope, until quite recently, was to play this year from No. 29 to Dec. 21, but Bhupathi said that difficulties in securing arena dates in the Asian cities they were targeting have pushed the projected start to November 2014.

“We couldn’t budget for booking stadiums out because at the beginning I didn’t know what cities would be involved,” Bhupathi said of the delay. “We have one shot of making this league work, and it needs to be right. We’d rather wait a year and make every night of the 30 matches a big night instead of doing it quickly and haphazardly.”

The cities being considered for franchises are Singapore, Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Hong Kong, Manila, Seoul, Dubai, Jakarta and Doha, Qatar. Australia has been ruled out because of travel distances, but Craig Tiley, tournament director for the Australian Open, said Tennis Australia was actively seeking to buy a franchise in the new league.

“This is atypical for us,” Tiley said. “We’re not in the business of owning assets. We don’t buy properties and that type of stuff, but we think this is a great concept, and it’s in one of the emerging markets so we think it’s good for everyone.”

You might think Tiley would be more resistant to the league’s charms: it could generate weary, perhaps injured stars for the Australian Open, which is held in January. But he said he instead views the new league as complementary: helping to generate interest regionally for the sport.

“We are on the doorstep of Asia,” he said. “So for us, Asia is our big growth market, and we are getting more and more people coming from Asia to the Australian Open.”

Though the matches would be quite short in the league, the travel in a region as vast as Asia would still be grueling: imagine a Doha-Tokyo road trip. And the question, of course, is whether all this is good for a game whose top players have complained for years that the season is too long and in which the W.T.A. and A.T.P. tours have only recently expanded the length of the off-season.

Initial reaction to the new league has been less hostile than one might expect. Stacey Allaster, head of the W.T.A. Tour, was more encouraging than critical. “What is important when it comes to off-season exhibition events,” she wrote in an e-mail, “is that our athletes strike the right balance between promotion and revenue opportunities on the one hand, and the critical priority of preserving a proper recovery period such that they can be fit and healthy for the new season on the other.”

Bhupathi is not, for the moment, feeling the least bit guilty and said most of the top players already are playing off-season exhibitions.

“It’s a free market,” Bhupathi said. “We’re not forcing anyone to play the league. If you want to play the league and want to monetize your time and opportunities, here we are.”