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“Being Serena” Documentary To Debut May 2

March 31, 2018 by tennisbloggers

HBO Sports, acclaimed for its innovative programming, is teaming up again with IMG’s Original Content group for a five-part documentary series chronicling tennis icon Serena Williams at a pivotal moment in her personal and professional life. BEING SERENA debuts WEDNESDAY, MAY 2 (10:00-10:30 p.m. ET/PT), exclusively on HBO, followed by other new episodes subsequent Wednesdays at the same time.

The series will also be available on HBO NOW, HBO GO®, HBO On Demand® and partners’ streaming services.

BEING SERENA will provide viewers unprecedented access to Williams during her pregnancy, new motherhood and marriage, while documenting her journey back to supremacy on the court. Viewers will experience her life from every angle as the intimate first-person show delves into her landmark career, family life and expanding role as a businesswoman and investor in the worlds of tech, fashion, fitness and philanthropy.

“HBO is honored to work with Serena Williams on such a personal project,” says Peter Nelson, executive vice president, HBO Sports. “Even though she has been in the spotlight since her teenage years, Serena continues to capture the imagination. With our partners at IMG, we look forward to giving viewers a revealing, behind-the-scenes portrait of her life on and off the court.”

“Serena Williams is a force unlike any other,” said Mark Shapiro, Co-President of WME and IMG. “Her entire life is one of the hero’s journey, and it has been a privilege to work with her as she enters this next phase. HBO was an incredible partner in developing a unique look into Serena’s world, and we look forward to sharing this all-access story with the world in May.”

Serena Williams, 36, is one of the most dominant forces tennis has ever seen, with 39 Grand Slam titles, four Olympic Gold Medals and the most women’s singles match victories in Grand Slam history. Her supremacy on the court earned her Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year honors in 2015 and made her a four-time winner of the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year, first in 2002 and most recently in 2015.

In Jan. 2017, Williams bested her sister Venus in the final match of the Australian Open, marking her seventh time winning that singles event. Four months after her historic victory, Williams revealed that she and her fiancé, Alexis Ohanian, were expecting their first child, confirming she was eight weeks pregnant when she won her 23rd Grand Slam singles title. On Sept. 1, Williams gave birth to her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. Williams and Ohanian wed soon after in a stunning ceremony before family and friends in New Orleans on Nov. 16.
Williams will return to the tennis circuit this spring to compete in her first Grand Slam event of the year at the French Open in late May.

For more than a decade, HBO Sports has been responsible for some of the most compelling unscripted sports programming, with a stylish and contemporary approach marked by unrestricted access. “Hard Knocks,” launched in 2001 in partnership with NFL Films, has won 15 Sports Emmy® Awards, and the groundbreaking all-access reality franchise “24/7” has earned 18 Sports Emmy® Awards.

BEING SERENA marks the third collaborative docu-series for HBO Sports and IMG. The first was 2016’s “Gonzaga: The March to Madness,” chronicling the Gonzaga men’s basketball team’s march to its 18th consecutive NCAA men’s basketball tournament berth, followed by 2017’s Primetime Emmy® nominee “UConn: The March to Madness,” spotlighting the powerhouse University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team as it sought a fifth consecutive national championship.

BEING SERENA is executive produced by Mark Shapiro, Will Staeger and Michael Antinoro. For HBO: executive producers Peter Nelson and Rick Bernstein; supervising producer, Bentley Weiner.

ABOUT IMG
IMG is a global leader in sports, fashion, events and media, operating in more than 30 countries. The company manages some of the world’s greatest sports figures and fashion icons; stages hundreds of live events and branded entertainment experiences annually; and is a leading independent producer and distributor of sports and entertainment media. IMG also specializes in sports training and league development, as well as marketing, media and licensing for brands, sports organizations and collegiate institutions. IMG is part of the Endeavor (formerly WME | IMG) network.

Serena Williams
Serena Williams

Filed Under: Blogs, Featured Columns, Latest News, Lead Story Tagged With: IMG, Serena Williams

From Grassroots to Boardrooms: Ray Benton is a Statesman for the Game

March 2, 2012 by tennisbloggers


by Steve Fogleman, Special for Tennis Grandstand

TCCP/JTCC Chief Ray Benton ©Steve Fogleman

When I arrived at the Tennis Center at College Park to speak with its CEO, Ray Benton, he was finishing up a lesson with former U.S. Congresswoman Jane Harman. He’d agreed to speak with me after the practice and he was still stretching when our conversation began. I admit that at first I was bemused by the notion of a crossroads of politics and tennis. You don’t see that every day. But for tennis statesman Ray Benton, it was business as usual. He’s as comfortable on court with children as he is in the halls of power in Washington. Legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill used to repeatedly insist that all “politics is local”. Witnessing the VIP lessons he’s giving and the expansive, state-of-the-art tennis training facility he’s managing (largely funded by the former Chairman of the US Export-Import Bank), you realize that Benton is the embodiment of O’Neill’s mantra. Benton’s career arc has taken him from local to national to international and now, to some degree, back to local tennis. With that breadth of experience, he brings with him the uncanny ability to cultivate a major-league presence even in the deepest of grassroots tennis.
His office substantially resembles the International Tennis Hall of Fame in miniature. The walls of his paper-piled workspace are adorned with posters and photos from tennis events from the last forty years. With all of his energy, it is difficult to believe he is 71. He still competes in senior tournaments “when my body’s working”, he said.
Benton is an Iowa native who moved to Washington in 1971. He started playing the game at 15 and “really took to it right away”. Later, he spent two years with the Iowa Hawkeye team in Big Ten play. While attending college, law school and a year of business school, he worked in the summer as the tennis pro at Dubuque Country Club in Dubuque, Iowa. He was brought in to start a tennis program at a “golf wacko club where tennis was a nuisance”. It had “two broken-down courts and 35 tennis playing club members”. He was up for the challenge, and within a few years, Benton had installed six lighted courts, attracted 500 players and even trained 20 state-ranked juniors there. “That’s when I figured out maybe I should be in the business”.
©Steve Fogleman

Even after he was drafted and sent to Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabama in 1966, he managed to stay active in the game, serving as head pro at the Gadsden and Anniston Country Clubs and varsity coach for Jacksonville State University in Alabama. He then spent a couple of years in Colorado running that state’s Youth Tennis Foundation and putting on professional events before Washington called. Then, Benton’s call to DC came to Denver. Through Dubuque.
“As I was finishing business school, a guy I knew from Dubuque had hit it big, Bob Lange. He invented the plastic ski boot. I went into business with him to develop the first plastic tennis racquet. We had a prototype and I suggested that we have a tournament in Denver. And in order to get any American players there, I had to talk to the Davis Cup captain named Donald Dell. We worked together and a year later, I moved here.”
Dell was looking for partners in a law firm that would eventually morph into sports management company ProServ years later. During his early days in Washington, he also served as the first National Executive Director of the National Junior Tennis League.
From DC, the firm represented big names in tennis like Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl and Tracy Austin. They also managed top athletes throughout the world of sport, including Michael Jordan, Boomer Esiason, Dave Winfield and Payne Stewart. Yet the firm’s focus stuck with tennis for an important reason.

Mark McCormick started IMG and based it around golf and Donald started ProServ around tennis. After all, he was the Davis Cup captain and Stan Smith and Arthur Ashe were on his team.
As a law firm, we couldn’t solicit clients. We could write a letter to a company saying ‘I’m writing on behalf of Arthur Ashe to see if you might have interest’. We couldn’t put out a promotional brochure for Arthur, so we started the company Proserv. It was an affiliated marketing company to the law firm. When our firm split in ’83, Donald and I kept the name ProServ and made it the major identity.

Benton created the Nuveen Tour ©Steve Fogleman

During the nineties, Benton founded the Worldwide Senior Tennis Circuit. He secured more than $35 million in corporate sponsorships at a time when interest in tennis had started to wane. He also saw the events as more than a tournament, but an “entertainment event” with theme nights, contests and celebrity matches.
After spending most of the last decade doing marketing consulting for clients like the ATP, the PGA, the Vic Braden Tennis Academy and national mentoring advocacy group MENTOR, he was hired as the CEO of the Tennis Center at College Park. Once again, politics and tennis intersected, as banker and Clinton Administration appointee Kenneth Brody needed someone to market the tennis facility he had built in College Park. And he went straight to Benton to market it.
So, now that this writer knows he’s talking to the right person for the question, is DC a tennis town?

It is, but it needs to regain the stature it once had, and not only Washington, but many other area of the country. Tennis is totally a bottom-up sport. The great majority of energy comes from the grassroots. And that’s what advances tournament play, pro play, collegiate play. Frankly, I think we got lazy in this sport. We had so much momentum, so much success and great stars and I think the leaders of tennis, everyone became deluded that tennis was driven by Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe. And the fact of the matter is in the days of Connors, Borg and McEnroe, participation in tennis in the United States decreased. We didn’t develop the next generation of Nick Bollettieris, of Vic Bradens or Dennis Van Der Meer or Peter Burwash. Who are the biggest names of teaching pros these days? Still those guys. If I asked you that same question 35 years ago, you’d have the same answer.

Benton’s approach to bringing the game back is simple. “A kid should be introduced to tennis the same way they should be introduced to basketball, which is they should have fun, be on a team, and compete the first day. And then they get hooked on the fun. And when they improve, then you offer them instruction. How many kids would play basketball if they were required to take three weeks of dribbling lessons and two weeks of shooting lessons before they were allowed to play the game? You’d have a lot fewer basketball players, wouldn’t you?”
He’s already building JTCC for the future. “You need leadership from the bottom. We’re going into schools now. We have a program called “Game On”. We’re trying to spread this game as far and wide as we can. We’re working with Prince George’s County Parks. We’ll have five sites in the summer. I see a lot more highly-ranked kids. I see a lot more inner city stuff. Five years from now, I see a much larger percentage of our kids coming from the inner city. I see considerable expansion here. We can expand. We’ve got room.”
As far as accolades the Tennis Center and the Junior Tennis Champions Center have received recently, he’s not wasting any time basking in the glory. “Attention is fine, but substance is what counts. We were very under marketed when I got here. There’s no question about that. One of the main reasons to get your name out is to attract the best athletes and do fundraising, because we’re a non-profit. We depend on it.”
Benton is audibly proud of the hundreds of kids who have been a part of the program. When he talks about the JTCC talent, it’s as if he is the proud grandfather of all of them. You almost expect him to have a photograph of every one of them in his wallet. “Denis Kudla is #184 in the world right now. There are only one or two players younger than him who are ranked higher. Mitchell Frank is excelling at Virginia. Trice (Capra) is at Duke. Skylar Morton graduated from here in three years and is playing very well, #3 or 4 at UCLA. She should be a senior in high school.”
Then there’s the next class of Junior Champions. After we spoke about Riverdale’s FrancisTiafoe and Reisterstown’s Yancy Dennis, he was more than ready to talk up the local girls climbing the ladder. “We have a girl named Elizabeth Scotty, who’s 10 and 16th in the country in under 12s. We are really strong in the 14 girls, including three girls from Baltimore, NadiaGizdova (Columbia, MD), Raveena Kingsley (Parkton, MD) and Jada Robinson (Reisterstown, MD). And next week, we’ll have a girl that is as good as any of them. Usue Arcornada. She’s coming with (longtime JTCC Coach) Frank Salazar. She’s originally from Argentina, but grew up in Puerto Rico. And she is a tiger.”
 

Steve Fogleman is a Baltimore, MD-based attorney when not covering tennis. He manages the website Tennis Maryland and can be followed on twitter @TennisMaryland for further updates.

Filed Under: Lead Story Tagged With: Arthur Ashe, ATP, beatrice capra, bob lange, boomer esiason, congresswoman jane harman, dave winfield, Davis Cup, denis kudla, Dennis van der Meer, Donald Dell, dubuque country club, duke tennis, grassroots tennis, house speaker tip o'neill, IMG, International Hall of Fame, iowa hawkeye tennis, Ivan Lendl, Jimmy Connors, michael jordan, mitchell frank, national junior tennis league, Nick Bollettieri, payne stewart, pga, plastic tennis racquet, proserv, ray benton, skylar morton, Stan Smith, tennis and law, tennis and politics, tennis center at college park ceo, Tracy Austin, ucla tennis, vic braden tennis academy, virginia tennis, youth tennis

Mark McCormack To Be Inducted In International Tennis Hall Of Fame

July 9, 2008 by Randy Walker

On Saturday, July 12, the International Tennis Hall of Fame will induct its Class of 2008 – Michael Chang, Mark McCormack and Gene Scott – in ceremonies at the home of the Hall of Fame, The Casino in Newport, Rhode Island. Hall of Fame journalist Bud Collins profiles all three inductees in his just-off-the-press book THE BUD COLLINS HISTORY OF TENNIS ($35.95, New Chapter Press, click here for 39 percent discount). Today, we present to you the profile of Mark McCormack, the founder of the International Management Group.
Mark McCormack
United States (1930-2003)
Hall of Fame-2008-Contributor
By founding IMG (International Management Group) as a young man of 29, Mark Hume McCormack would revolutionize sports agentry and marketing on a world-wide level, much of it to the benefit and growth of tennis.
McCormack, a lawyer and an exceptional golfer who quali­fied for the U.S. Open and British Amateur, first turned his atten­tion to that sport. Tremendously imaginative, a business genius, he sensed new opportunity on the links. It was in the forms of three men who would become all-time greats: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player. Through their play and his man­agement they became wealthy and kindled increasing interest in golf.
When tennis became “open” in 1968, blending amateurs with the previously outlawed professionals, McCormack was quick to act, realizing that this game should attain far broader popularity, and that he could be a positive force in its rise.
Immediately, he signed on to represent the world’s foremost player, Australian Rod Laver, also to represent the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (aka Wimbledon), a relationship that continues to this day.
Laver was the first of a long line of tennis players to select McCormack’s IMG as their agent. Among them other Hall of Famers Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Bjorn Borg, Jim Cou­rier, Pete Sampras.
Mark’s thoughts and ideas flowed in all directions in sport, and beyond. IMG became the world’s largest independent pro­ducer of TV sports programming. His system has spread and promoted economic advances for players, tournaments, ten­nis institutions and the game’s industry as a whole. In 1992, the Times of London named him one of “A Thousand People Who Most Influenced The 20th Century.”
Born Nov. 6, 1930, in Chicago, he grew up there, graduated from William and Mary College (’51) and Yale Law School (’54), and served a year in the U.S. Army in 1956. He was inducted into William and Mary’s Athletic Hall of Fame for golfing prow­ess in 1958.
IMG acquired the Nick Bollettieri Sports Academy in 1987, continuing Nick’s successful tennis “boot camp” that trains out­standing players from across the globe.
As an author, he somehow found time to write Things They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, a best seller in 1984 published in 82 countries.
Mark’s second marriage was to a standout American tennis player, Betsy Nagelsen in 1986, eight years after she was the final­ist at the Australian Open. A 2008 inductee to the International Tennis Hall of Fame, he died May 16, 2003, in New York

Filed Under: Archives, Lead Story Tagged With: Arnold Palmer, Betsy Nagelsen, Bjorn Borg, Bud Collins, Chris Evert, Gary Player, Gene Scott, IMG, Jack Nicklaus, Jim Courier, Mark McCormack, Martina Navratilova, Michael Chang, Nick Bollettieri, Pete Sampras, Rod Laver, Wimbledon, Yale Law School

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