Tennis: Laidback chief mops up and marches on

By MICHELE HEWITSON

"Nice day, Graham," I say.

He says, "Yeah, if you're a fish."

But not if you happen to be Graham Pearce, the man behind the the Heineken Tennis Open and not if it happens to be a sodden sort of Wednesday.

The sound from the Stanley St courts should be the thwack, thwack of balls on racket strings, the grunts and sighs of breath expelled in serious contest, the polite clapping from the stands, the cheering from the boxes.

But all that can be heard at Stanley St today is the blare of music from the loud-speakers thumping away merrily for the entertainment of a huddle of hopefuls scattered throughout otherwise empty stands.

And, even above this cheerful racket which merely serves to mock the lack of play, can be heard the constant sizzle of rain on summer-hot courts.

Trail Pearce through the rabbit warren that weaves beneath Stanley St to his cramped chief executive's office and you can still, just, hear the pitter patter.

He is remarkably cheerful despite the knowledge that above this office those stands are almost empty and that upstairs in the players' lounge are some very expensive athletes sitting around playing cards or checking their email.

Pearce is cut from a philosophical sort of cloth. Not much ruffles the cheerful long-term chief executive of Auckland Tennis.

He has, after all, been organising this tennis event for 15 years.

"The reality is that we run two weeks of tennis back to back each year and virtually never in Auckland do you get two weeks without some rain."

None of which stops him from keeping an ear cocked for water on roof and for the announcer's updates on the state of play.

You might imagine there would be little for Pearce to do but he only just manages to find an hour to talk. By four o'clock this afternoon he will be rescheduling matches. He will eventually decide to move the men's doubles to the indoor courts.

There are endless meetings. And Pearce is a hands-on sort of chief executive and tournament director. "You wouldn't find a tournament director anywhere else in the world who gets out on the courts with the squeegee," says the media manager.

"Oh yeah," says Pearce, shrugging, "We're all into that. I've done it twice today already. Well, it gives you something to do rather than ranting and raving at the rain."

When the doctor employed by Auckland Tennis to be courtside during the women's event retired this season, Pearce and his colleagues presented him with one of the squeezable sponge mops.

"Because there was no squeegeeing last week so he had withdrawal symptoms. He had good skills on the squeegee."

Pearce has very good skills, undoubtedly. Under his guidance the Stanley St tournament has become an event. An event which attracts stars on the court and characters in the corporate boxes.

What makes a successful tournament? "Ha, ha, ha. The weather."

One of Pearce's greatest skills is his ability to deflect the attention away from himself. He is, he says, in public relations. His job is selling the event, not himself.

But it is no doubt partly because of Pearce's deceptively laidback manner that the international tennis event has taken on a particularly New Zealand atmosphere.

When the courts are wet, it is not just the chief executive and the doctor who take to the courts with mop and towels. The referee and any spectator keen enough just jump over the fence to help.

"You probably wouldn't get the spectators at the US Open jumping the fence, they probably wouldn't let them. But we don't mind. The more the merrier."

Laidback on the surface, what runs through the 55-year-old Pearce's reign at Auckland Tennis is a military background.

His father, Major-General Les Pearce, who died on December 22, was the only soldier in the history of the New Zealand Army to rise through the ranks from private to Major-General.

Pearce spent his childhood travelling. He went to 13 schools, studied for his School C by correspondence, enrolled at Victoria University then was selected to go to Sandhurst, the elite of military academies.

When he reached 30, Pearce felt it was time to leave the forces.

He retired as a major and went to work in the Middle East and South America for an international trading company.

His father, of whom he is obviously very proud but not boastful, neither "encouraged me nor discouraged" him either to join the Army, or to leave the Army.

But his father did give him every encouragement "to make my own decisions".

What the military gave Pearce was "hopefully objectivity. Being able to look at situations and make sense of them and get them into a course of action which can be organised and undertaken.

"I guess also from military planning and logistics, an eye for detail. Tournaments like this take a lot of detailed planning."

They do. From mop duty to shopping for the next year's players at the US Open where Pearce travels every August, to dealing with agents. "And they can be a pain in the neck. They make their living by getting the best fee they can and our job, of course, is to pay as little as possible."

You can still hear the military man in him talking. He still talks about being in "Civvie Street".

He thinks it's very amusing to be asked whether he prefers dealing with temperamental tennis stars or with soldiers. Of course he maintains that the big stars are very rarely badly behaved.

"Some of them are better than others, of course, but ... if they're asked to do something they're not difficult."

The big advantage in the military is "that the whole structure's there. You don't have a democratic debate in the military. In Civvie Street these days it doesn't quite work like that. Everyone contributes in an environment like this; you're more like the conductor of an orchestra than a dictator."

He squelches up the steps on the stands, shrugs raindrops off his shoulders, and looks at the weather. He is the conductor who wishes he had a magic baton with which to conjure sunshine.