ITS LEADERS are worried about their jobs, the tournaments are worried about their futures, the players are worried about money, no one trusts anyone. Tennis likes to promote the image of a happy family but, in reality, the siblings are at each other’s throats.

The International Tennis Federation (ITF) — the sport’s parent body — is wary of the two players’ associations, the ATP which lives in wary co-existence with its women’s equivalent, the WTA. While the men want a greater share of the profits from the four grand-slam championships, the grand-slam chairmen have met in Lausanne to consider their response and everyone waits for someone else to take the initiative. A month from now, the WTA, which lurches from one chief executive to another, will squeal about another year with no equal prizemoney at Wimbledon.

“The leaders aren’t leading and the governance of the sport is dysfunctional,” Bob Kain, president of IMG’s Americas division, said. As the largest private shareholder in tennis — IMG, the sports management company, has invested £120 million building the tennis infrastructure during three decades — Kain has a huge vested interest in the way the sport is run. “There are constant turf battles, nothing gets done without a huge argument,” he said.

It is against this backdrop of inefficient leadership, failure to promote the sport cohesively and the whiff of greed that someone has to inspire a sense of unity before the corrosive process does untold damage. As we sit in the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, an edifice to his magnetism and his money, it is possible to see that someone in Charlie Pasarell Jr.

Pasarell is remembered for his marathon match against Pancho Gonzalez at Wimbledon in 1969. The tournament chairman of the Pacific Life Open is an idealist but a pragmatist, too. As a member of the ATP board, he wants to lock everyone in a room to thrash out tennis’s problems and not to come out until they have reached an agreement. The problem is, how to agree on the room.

He is perturbed by the players’ dash for cash. “They want to go after the grand slams, that’s what it’s all about and it is not just a faction now, but an overwhelming majority,” he said. “They are telling Mark (Miles, chief executive of the ATP) and the board that we have to do something. We are saying, ‘Slow down, don’t just go to them saying you need more money. That is not a responsible way of doing it’.”

Why should the grand slams hand over a significant share of their profits (most of which goes to spread the tennis gospel) to the “professional” side of the sport in a constant state of internecine strife? The ATP has spent £300,000 commissioning a report into how it should run itself, the gist of which — surprise, surprise — was that tennis must unify. This comes against the backdrop of grievous recent errors. The grand slams are not alone in remembering the ATP’s gullibility in agreeing a $1.2 billion, ten-year deal in 2000 with ISL that handed the Swiss company total control of the marketing and sponsorship rights to men’s professional tennis.

When ISL went bankrupt a year later, having overstretched itself in several sports, the ATP’s insistence on bank guarantees when the deal was signed preserved its neck, though its handling of subsequent pleas for help from impoverished tournaments demonstrated the depth of a divided sport.

“The ISL deal promised millions, so the tournaments fired their sponsors and by the summer of 2001 they were high and dry,” Kain said. “They had gone from significant guaranteed sponsorship to zero. Sixty days later, it was September 11, and no one could sell anything after that. The Masters Series events went to the ATP and said they were going to lose millions of dollars and needed some relief in their prize-money levels.

There was none. That’s a partnership? After over a year of in-fighting, it was agreed to reduce prize-money this year.”

The tennis caravan leaves California today and heads for Florida, where the ATP is scheduled to hold what should be one of its most feisty meetings tomorrow. It is likely to endorse a message to the grand slams that can be condensed into: you make a ton of money from us, we want to make more from you.

“The players say they ‘make’ the tournaments and that’s bullshit,” Kain said. “The best players in the world were here this week and the revenue to this tournament from TV is five per cent of what Wimbledon and the others make. Did the top players ‘make’ Indian Wells? Wimbledon’s TV rights are enormous because they have spent years and years making their event important. The last thing the grand slams are going to do is hand money over to an organisation that’s always fighting.”