Nicolas Lamperin’s job description as director of the ASB Classic might well include “chief wrangler of egos”. He knows a thing or two about big egos. For much of his career he has been an agent to professional tennis players and worked in sports marketing.
He is a keen student of the psychology of winners. He says, and this is both startling and amusing, “I have no ego whatsoever.” Sacré bleu! He’s a Frenchman. The French, by the way, do not, unless they are a character in a British sitcom, get about saying sacré bleu. But to roll out some other stereotypes, he might be the most unlikely Frenchman you are ever likely to meet. He is not a foodie. He eats mostly vegan food. “I know. It goes against my nationality.” He doesn’t think France is the greatest country in the world. He doesn’t think Paris is the greatest city in the world.
He doesn’t much care for the French. “I hate that arrogant aspect that French people can have, which I don’t see here.”
Can he really no ego? Surely, everyone has one? He should know. He has spent his career dealing with egos. Before becoming director of the tournament in 2022, he was a tennis agent, which means dealing with players who mostly have very big egos. There is simply not room for two egos in the relationship, so it’s probably fair to say he has subsumed any ego he once had.
He agrees you have to have a big ego to be a top tennis player. “Yes, you need to have an ego and you need to be selfish also, to some degree, because so many people around you want a piece of you. And at the end of the day, you are on your own on the court and you’ve got to make the right decisions and you’ve got to make sure you’re in the best set-up to do so and, in most cases, that involves being selfish. I don’t know how many Christmases or New Years players would have spent away from their family, but they don’t have the choice if they want to be successful.”
Know your limits
The relationship between an agent and a top tennis player is, from the outside looking in, a strange one. The agent is part valet, part travel booker, a juggler of logistics and personalities and deal-making. Also, you are part psychologist and, possibly, psychic. You have to be good at anticipating what your player wants before they know they want it. And then there is the fine line between representing a player and being a friend. “When you’ve been working with a player for some time, there’s no real separation between the professional relationship and the personal relationship.” Which must sometimes be tricky. “It’s very intense. At some point I would spend more time with my players than I would with my family.”
There are limits. He was told early on in his career that going out on the town with players was really not a great idea. You don’t get drunk with players. “Exactly. You can go to the restaurant. Maybe you can enjoy your free drinks. Don’t go as far as getting drunk because all these stories are being shared. It’s a very small world.” He leaves before the shenanigans begin. “They can have their own fun but you don’t necessarily want to be a part of it.”
There is a famous story about Boris Becker having a few tipples and having it off in a broom cupboard with a waitress at a fancy restaurant. “Yes. I have many stories like this.” Oh, do tell. “No! I couldn’t mention names. But it’s not unusual. Not just tennis. I guess just professional sports.” Or any sort of star. “Yeah, well I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with pressure. There is so much pressure when they’re on the field and when they’re off the field, their ways of experiencing life goes to some different extremes.”
The agent is part valet, part travel booker, a juggler of logistics and personalities and deal-making.
He has represented Grand Slam winners Stan Wawrinka and Marion Bartoli and what I really want to know is: who’s the biggest diva he’s worked with? “I would say, in general, they’re not divas. They’re just very demanding, which I can understand because tennis being an individual sport, you don’t have a club looking after you.
“So you very much rely on your agent to make sure you’ve got everything you need, in terms of your hotel bookings or your racket or your shoes. I’ve never worked for [Russian former world No 1 Maria] Sharapova, for example. I did organise an event for her. She was fine on the day. She was extremely professional. She was on time. But I couldn’t comment on what it’s like managing her on a daily basis.”
Sharapova is known for being a diva. It’s telling that blokes get away with bad behaviour without them being called whatever is the male equivalent of a diva. “Choleric narcissist”, suggested some wit on the internet, which will do nicely.
Lamperin still represents one player, Gaël Monfils, who will be playing at this year’s classic. “I signed him when he was 18 and I’ve been working with him for 20 years and I’ll stay with him until the end of his career. There’s no chance I’m going to let him go unless he fires me, which could always happen.” He has an agreement with the tournament that if Monfils signs up for the classic he waives his commission. The two are more than agent and player. Monfils was best man at Lamperin’s wedding.
Entice and lasso
His job as tournament director is to entice and then lasso some names, which in turn, it is hoped, will entice people to go along.
Emma Raducanu is a name. Raducanu, who won the US Open in 2021, is represented by the super sports agency IMG. She has sponsorship deals with Nike, Dior, Tiffany & Co and Evian to name a few of her lucrative partnerships. In other words, she’s a big deal and Lamperin has to negotiate the deal. He has to be good at schmoozing. “Oh, yes. There’s a lot of diplomacy that goes into the job. Funnily enough, I’m often called ‘The Diplomat’. I’ve always had to be the person in the middle between the athlete and the tournament. We get all sorts of requests from players. We try to accommodate them when we can but it’s not always possible.”
I was hoping that some of the requests would be mad ones, à la Mariah Carey, who is said to have asked for 20 white kittens for an appearance at, of all places, a shopping centre. No such luck. Most of the requests are around scheduling. “It’s hard because we’re trying to be objective but at the same time we also somehow have to look after the bigger games because they play such an important role for the tournament.”
But what is that indefinable quality that makes players bigger names and marketable? Having a personality, for one thing. Spectators don’t like robots, he says. He likes it when players have tantrums when, say, they miss a shot. It’s entertaining. He draws the line at abusing umpires or being horrible to the hapless ball kid.
Raducanu is hot stuff for a number of reasons. “She’s coming from the UK, which is a huge, huge market in tennis because they have the Wimbledon Championships. She’s very good looking. She’s smart, as well. She’s got that kind of double background with China.” Her mother is Chinese. She speaks Mandarin. All of which is to say that she has wide appeal. Did I mention that she is good looking? Well, she is. That always helps. Who wouldn’t want to watch a good-looking young woman leap about a court socking tennis balls? Is that sexist? Or lookism? Because isn’t there a double standard?
I’m often called ‘The Diplomat’. I’ve always had to be the person in the middle between the athlete and the tournament.
To come back to the broom closet rooter, Becker was never going to win a pretty face award. “I don’t think it’s just about how you look. It’s a lot more about where you come from. The Nikes and the adidases and all of these brands, they think in terms of markets. So, for them, you’re the big European market whether it’s France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy and then maybe the US, China, Australia. So they need ambassadors in those markets. Someone coming out of Ukraine or Armenia, some of these smaller markets, yeah, it’s a lot harder because there’s less appeal for these brands to invest in these markets.”
He believes women should get the same prize money as the blokes. “This should be the ultimate objective of the WTA [Women’s Tennis Association]. We are pushing for it because we believe this is the right direction. And especially New Zealand being the country that first gave women the vote, we do feel we have a responsibility to set the example.”
World beater
When he was a small boy in a small town in Brittany called Bréal-sous-Montfort and his parents asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, the answer was always the same. He wanted to be the No 1 tennis player in the world. “And they were kind of laughing at me because they knew I had no chance. But it was my ambition.” At the very least he wanted to be a professional tennis player. “I was a dreamer.” At 16, he came home from school and announced to his no doubt horrified parents that he was done with school. He was just going to play tennis. A compromise was reached: he would move to Rennes, the capital of Brittany, enrol in the tennis club, continue to go to school and play tennis after classes. He was good at training. He was good at tennis. But not good enough. He was still 16 when he was called into a meeting with the president of the club. “He said: ‘You can play with us. You can play as much as you want. But you need to be aware that you are never going to be a professional tennis player.’”
You feel for that teenage boy, the dreamer. He must have been crushed. But, “No. I think deep inside I knew it. But at least I could enjoy my passion every day.” He began thinking about becoming an agent. He went to business school. He learnt English. His English is lovely, elegant even. He got a graduate diploma in business in 2001, here at AUT University, which began his love affair with New Zealand. Even at 16, he was a pragmatist. An optimistic pragmatist. He is resilient. He bounces back like a tennis ball.
He doesn’t envy professional tennis players. It’s a lonely life. “They’re on the road 40 weeks a year. It’s not an easy life. All the ups and downs. If you’re not No 1 in the world you will end up losing every week. Every time they lose, it’s like a small death. You’re away from your loved ones. You think of being in a hotel and you go to all these amazing places and you don’t even enjoy them because you’ve got to rest and get ready for the next day. So I do admire people who have been doing this for 20 years and still have the passion.”
He spent 10 years working in sports management in Dubai before getting this job. He and his wife, Celine, and their three kids – Paul, 9, Arthur, 6, and 3-year-old Margaux – live in St Heliers near the water, which he loves. Celine has a vegan and vegetarian catering company, La Maison de Celine. They speak French at home. He is what I would call an exercise nut. “No. I like it. If I don’t exercise I kind of feel like I’m missing something.” He runs every morning. He still plays tennis, cycles and has taken up wind foiling. He and the boys are football fans. His club is Liverpool. He used to sing You’ll Never Walk Alone to his kids at bedtime. That’s called brainwashing. “I’ve been accused of this many times.” He says he’s something of a perfectionist, which may be something of an understatement.
You can see why he is good at his job. He has lovely manners. He has a quiet, unflashy charm. That French accent helps. He’s clever. He is really an observer. He prefers to stand on sidelines, just looking and analysing games and temperaments. He’s never going to upstage the stars. Of course he isn’t. He has no ego. Perhaps oddly, for a man with no ego, and therefore no interest in himself, he’s interesting.
The ASB Classic is at the ASB Tennis Arena from December 30, 2024-January 11, 2025.