With days to go before the U.S. Open begins at the National Tennis Center in New York, workers are racing to finish the ‘‘Court of Champions,’’ a walkway inspired by Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park. They’re installing and polishing plaques honoring the great stars of tennis past: Tilden, Court, King, Evert, Connors.Nearby, in a suite of offices inside Arthur Ashe Stadium, Arlen Kantarian and a band of high-powered marketers, drawn from organizations such as Nabisco, the NFL and MTV, are looking in the other direction, to the future of the sport. They’re plotting strategy to raise the profile of tennis in a world of all-sports-all-the-time, where entertainment values outweigh tradition.Subway posters for the Open, which begins next week, capture their irreverent view of the game. They feature Venus and Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova and Lindsay Davenport with the headline ‘‘Hit Like a Girl’’ and the tag line ‘‘at 120 mph.’’Marketing the marquee personalities of tennis such as the Williams sisters, Sharapova and Andre Agassi is one obvious route to enlisting fans.But Kantarian (51), the intense chief executive of professional tennis, says, ‘‘Part of our job is to create a must-see event that isn’t simply contingent on who gets into the finals.’’The deep blue courts, set in a green border, that viewers will see at the Open for the first time this year are a symbol of the changes Kantarian has spearheaded in his five years at the USTA.Kantarian is a detail-oriented executive whose background includes a spot at Colgate-Palmolive, where he was around for two colorful milestones in the world of consumer products: the introduction of football, baseball and Superman themes on bandages, and the start of sparkly gel toothpaste for children. It’s all of a piece with blue courts.‘‘We’ve been testing better visibility for the players and for the TV viewers,’’ says Kantarian. ‘‘With serves at 140 miles an hour and forehands at 100 miles an hour, it’s sometimes tough to pick that ball up. So the visibility of the yellow ball and the blue court takes it up a notch.’’He reasons that there’s nothing sacred about keeping courts green, because the color only comes from the now-rare grass court. The USTA tried three other combinations of colors and more than 20 color shades before deciding. ‘‘Players seem to love it,’’ says Kantarian. ‘‘Fans like it. A couple of purists will continue to tell us, ‘You ruined the game.’ We need to shake it up.’’Purists were also unhappy, at least at first, with other Kantarian innovations: huge video screens in the stadium and a nighttime women’s final, to grab the attention of prime-time viewers. A more recent innovation is the U.S. Open Series, an effort to link 10 midsummer tournaments into a regular season of tennis leading up to the Open as a championship.His approach wins praise from sports marketing experts. Peter Stern, president of the Strategic Sports Group, which advises companies on sponsorships, says the U.S. Open Series is a step forward: ‘‘It allows the other events to have more importance and meaning. One of the reasons the NFL does so well is that every weekend counts.’’Scott Rosner, a director of the Wharton Sports Business Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, gives Kantarian credit for moving in the right direction to make tennis more competitive with its rivals, such as golf. He says golf has benefited from a surge of participation by young people drawn by the dominance of Tiger Woods and that tennis suffers from a relative lack of emerging American stars.(LA Times-Washington Post)The Kantarian EffectWINNERS• U.S. Open revenues are up roughly 40 percent, to $190 million, since Kantarian joined the organization• Attendance is up about 9 per cent, to 636,000 for last year’s Open• Ratings on ESPN for the first two weeks of the Open Series were up 30 percent, according to USTASECOND SERVE• The number of Americans who play tennis has been roughly flat for the past five years, at 24 million
