If the outgoing executive chairman of the ATP is correct - and if he is, one wonders why Etienne de Villiers should choose now to leave his post - Andy Murray is among those who are about to reap unprecedented rewards from tennis. Those earnings would have been unthinkable when the concrete colossus of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Centre was built on a patchwork quilt of old football fields called Flushing Meadows 30 years ago.

De Villiers has decided that three years trying to hack his way through the labyrinth of professional tennis and its enclaves of self-interest is enough hard labour and has quit while he is still ahead. The South African discovered to a cost that shook him to the core that talking change was one thing, but that carrying everyone with him on the bandwagon of change was something different again.

Murray may be too naive in the sport's politics to have a view on De Villiers's departure - the world No6 was tuned more into his two practice shifts yesterday in preparation for the US Open that starts on Monday. He has been drawn in the first round against Sergio Roitman, the 29-year-old Argentinian who is ranked No102 in the world. The US Open lauds itself as the richest of the four grand-slam tournaments. The winner of the men's (and women's) title will take home $1.5million (about £800,000) and Murray is as decent a hard-court player as anyone these days.

De Villiers was not involved in the allocation of prize-money at these championships but has pointed to his period in office having benefited the sport to the tune of $1billion in additional investment, a lot of which will find its way into the players' bank accounts. “I believe we have delivered the biggest modernisation of the ATP Tour since its inception and have begun to feed the growing appetite for men's tennis globally, both in established and emerging markets,” he said in his farewell speech yesterday.

So why did he feel that he had to go, especially after he had just taken on, and won by a stretch, a court case in which the Hamburg tournament sued the ATP over its demotion from Masters status to the second tier in a calendar he had fought tooth and nail to establish? He was deeply hurt by the demand of the sport's leading players - three quarters of the top 20 signed a petition in March - that the ATP not rubber-stamp a new contract for its chairman without identifying other candidates for the post.

De Villiers's predecessor, Mark Miles, spent ten years straddling the middle ground in an organisation that is shared between tournaments and players and had enough; De Villiers tried, perhaps a little too hard, to make his mark and alienated the players he sought so eagerly to befriend.

Few of the people who will walk through the gates of Flushing Meadows in the next two weeks would be able to pick De Villiers out of a one-man line-up, so little do they know of or care about the machinations of the sport. They only want to see Americans win the men's and women's singles events and if not, urge Rafael Nadal to a third grand-slam tournament title in succession.

Murray is one of those who could stop the Spaniard from adding the US Open to the French, Wimbledon and the Olympic gold medal he won in Beijing. They are potential semi-final opponents, although that is getting rather ahead of oneself. The British No1, whose year was turned by his heroics in the fourth round of Wimbledon, when Richard Gasquet, of France, served for a straight-sets victory and Murray hauled himself back to win, is in a decent section of the draw. Feliciano López, of Spain, is his first possible seeded opponent, in the third round.

Roger Federer is not the No 1 seed for the first grand-slam tournament in 18, having lost his status after Nadal's phenomenal sequence of results. Federer, the defending champion here, may face Radek Stepanek, of the Czech Republic, in the third round, one of the nine players to have defeated the Swiss this year.

Anne Keothavong, the British women's No1, playing in the main draw here for the first time as a direct entrant, faces a qualifier in the first round.