• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, June 5, 2008

Yes. It's true. The next big thing for me is tennis. It was announced earlier this week that I am the new chairman and partner in The Tennis Company, the owner of TENNIS and SMASH magazines, TENNIS.com, and a partner in the Pacific Life Open and the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.

A little bit surprised? You're not alone. I know that a lot of folks were expecting me to announce a venture focused on advancing online advertising technology, along the lines of my last two companies, Real Media and TACODA. While I'm certainly not ruling out a return to that space at some point, I believe that the very best opportunity out there today is to build a truly integrated global enthusiast media company and help consolidate a very valuable, but very fragmented industry, tennis.

Why tennis? No. I am not a super-committed tennis player and fan who wants to be able to live out his passion in his professional life. I barely play tennis, though I have become a fan of the pro game over the past few years. I'm taking over the chairmanship of The Tennis Company because it's a great business opportunity. Here's my thinking:

Market opportunity. The tennis industry is dramatically under-leveraged. It is under-marketed and under-sold. It had a real heyday in the 1970s and '80s, but has fallen off the map for most in the media industry, in spite of very strong participant and fan growth over the past eight years, particularly outside of the U.S. It's underleveraged not because there aren't a lot of tennis enthusiasts or marketers wishing to reach them, but because the industry is extraordinarily fragmented. While tennis enthusiasts represent maybe the world's largest and most passionate audience of active, affluent and loyal audiences, the alphabet soup of different federations and tours and diluted media rights around the world means that no one is effectively serving either the enthusiasts or the marketers trying to reach them. This is a problem tailor-made for a digitally driven integrated media company that can attack it with a ruthless focus on serving enthusiasts, surrounding them with content, commentary and community.

Great assets. In TENNIS and SMASH, the Tennis Company publishes the only tennis magazines in the U.S. of any kind of real scale, along with top-ranked tennis.com. It is partners in Pac Life, the largest independent tennis tournament after the four Grand Slams, and The Indian Wells facility, which includes the world's second largest tennis stadium after Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Great people. My partners in The Tennis Company are George Mackin and Bob Miller. George was the founder of Globe Media and of Custom Marketing Group, is one of the best respected and most loved media marketers in the world and is a very good friend. Bob, who I have gotten to know well over the past few years, needs very little introduction. He is a former publisher of Sports Illustrated, created Time, Inc. Ventures, where he helped launch magazines like Martha Stewart Living and Vibe, and, more than twenty years ago, famously tried to get Time, Inc. to buy ESPN and rebrand it The Sports Illustrated Channel; to no avail. Chris Evert is our publisher and Pete Sampras and Billie Jean King are key investors in our businesses, so there is no shortage of extraordinary knowledge of tennis in the company.

Among my jobs will be to lay out a strategy and plan, and help recruit a team, to move the company very quickly into market-leading positions serving tennis enthusiasts in three core areas; digital, global, and video. I can't wait. It's going to be a lot fun.

I'm also going to be taking some time off from writing this column. In addition to learning the tennis industry from scratch and serving on two boards, I'm going to spend most of the summer in Spain and Mexico with my family. For six years, I've been promising my wife, who is Mexican, that I would learn Spanish. Now, with daughters that are four-and-one-half and three-and-one-half years old and fully bilingual, I need to learn it or be forever left behind. That is now my first priority. I plan to return to this column at the end of the summer when we return to New York City and hopefully will bring some fresh perspectives. Have a great summer!