00:00Matt, this is a big summer for sports. We've had the Knicks and their historic win in the NBA
00:03finals. The World Cup is happening. I want to focus on another big tournament, and that is
00:09Wimbledon. So big picture here when it comes to sports and money, what sets Wimbledon, what sets
00:14tennis apart from other professional sports? Tennis is the ultimate oddball sport. It is so
00:22fractured. It just has not gone through the consolidation that all the other sports have
00:28done. It's essentially, it's basically the United Nations, you know, hundreds of tournaments
00:35operating independently, no real authority or actually seven or eight different authorities
00:42and governing bodies. They all kind of hate each other. They're constantly fighting with each
00:47other and then occasionally trying to make peace and sort some order out. And so tennis is sort of
00:55the last frontier in terms of change and modernization. And it is, I want to say decades
01:04behind where other sports are. How did it get to be that way? I think of how FIFA has consolidated
01:09its control over all of soccer around the world. Why is tennis so different? I think it's because
01:15it never really sort of grew up from its days when it was primarily an amateur endeavor. And so everything
01:29finally changed for tennis in 1968 where everyone sort of admitted that, you know, hey, we're all
01:37professionals here. Everybody wants to make money in this. And it sort of began to modernize. But at the
01:43same time, the Grand Slam tournaments, which were functioning independently, they didn't want to give up
01:50their independence. Eventually, you had these two things created called the ATP tour and the WTA tour,
01:57which were the men's tour and the women's tour. And then on top of all that, you have the International
02:04Tennis Federation, which is the world governing body, which is the sort of FIFA of tennis. And so you have
02:12this seven headed beast, all of these people who are running these things with different agendas,
02:21fancy jobs, big salaries. And while it would make a lot of sense for them to come together, I've really
02:28never known a sports executive who negotiated himself or herself out of a fancy job and a big salary. And
02:36that's always what ultimately happens. No one can decide how to divide up the power or the money
02:44because someone's going to lose more than one person is going to lose and nobody wants to lose in
02:50that game of musical chairs.
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