Through the tunnels of Arthur Ashe Stadium at the US Open in New York, one can spot Omar Abdo rushing back and forth between the men’s locker room, the players’ lounge, the main interview room and various TV sets, working hard to make sure the players fulfil their media commitments.
Three months ago, the 24-year-old Saudi Arabian was hired as a PR manager by the Association of Tennis Professionals, the first Arab to take on that role on the men’s tour.
At the Grand Slam tournaments, where there can be 300 or so men competing across the different draws, Abdo’s job is mostly centered around helping the players with the press, while also finding opportunities for them to expand their reach.
At ATP events, his role extends beyond that. With the main goal of promoting tennis through working with the players, their teams and their agents, as well as collaborating with tournaments and sponsors, Abdo’s day-to-day job is a perpetual balancing act between many different stakeholders.
Being part of the PR team on the ATP tour also means you’re on the road for most of the year, with the tennis season lasting from January until November, right across the globe. The days are incredibly long and the daily list of requests from the media and commitments to a tournament is an extensive one, but you will never catch Abdo complaining about any of it as he admits he’s loving every minute of his “dream” profession.
Omar Abdo at Wimbledon as part of his duties as the ATP’s PR manager for the players. (ATP)
“I’m really driven by making history, doing something that’s not been done before, and that’s why I really take so much pride in being an Arab in this industry,” he told Arab News from New York on the weekend.
“There aren’t that many Arabs at all on [the tennis] tour, and that’s a thing I’d love to try and change now. Hopefully I can open doors for a couple of people and show that it’s possible.”
Abdo’s journey in tennis started from a young age when he picked up racquet as a kid in Saudi Arabia and went on to be part of his country’s national team.
With his heart set on becoming a pro tennis player, he moved to Spain to train there for two years as a teenager, but his hopes were derailed by health issues.
His time in Barcelona was not in vain however as he says it provided a great opportunity for personal growth and he went on to play Division I college tennis for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, where he majored in communications with a special focus on public relations.
“When I went to college, during my first year I had a notebook and I wrote down what I wanted to do in internships in the sports industry, all different departments, all different things. I just wanted to get better in every aspect; I wanted to know everything,” he said.
“I did some stuff on the agent side, the operations side, the marketing side, PR side, and I wanted to expand my knowledge more, just because I knew after college I would not have this opportunity again.”
Abdo applied for an internship at the ATP in the summer of 2017 and was sent to three tournaments in Montreal, Cincinnati and Winston Salem to serve as an extra hand for the PR team.
“I was trying to observe as much as I could. Just being in that tour life, I was like a kid in a park. I was thinking, ‘How the hell am I here?’ I was pinching myself the whole time,” he said.
“I was hanging around, trying to learn as much as possible, meet as many people as I could; that was a key thing I learned – I was always a very shy kid and I knew getting into sports in general, entertainment, you have to go and meet people, say hi, introduce yourself, get out of that comfort zone. I cannot be in my bubble; I had to expand on that.”
Abdo spent every single break he had from university working at events, learning the ropes and proving he was a valuable asset. Besides interning for the ATP’s PR team at tournaments, he was part of the operations team at Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala World Tennis Championship, he helped run the media center at the US Open and worked at the Anthony Joshua-Andy Ruiz Jr. fight during Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah season in 2019.
All this led him to land a full-time job at the ATP and he is concurrently doing his Masters in events management at NYU.
“A lot of people ask me, ‘Oh you’re so lucky, how did you get into this?’ I just worked my butt off, basically. I promise you, I did not have one single break from university that I did not go and work at an event. Even when I wasn’t on break, I managed to work on some stuff,” Abdo said.
“I knew that’s what I wanted and the job for me was honestly a dream job. It was definitely a dream come true and now it makes me more motivated because I really want to make an impact on the Arab region and try to push tennis and promote it as much as we can.”
The first time I met Abdo was at the ATP Masters 1000 event in Cincinnati back in 2018. In his capacity as an intern helping out the tour’s PR team, Abdo was accompanying Malek Jaziri to a small interview room where I was waiting to have a chat with the Tunisian tennis player.
I overheard Abdo speaking to Jaziri in Arabic and soon found out he was from Saudi Arabia. The moment took us all by surprise when we realized that all three of us – a player, a journalist and a PR handler – were Arabs, a rare occurrence on the traveling circus that is the world tennis tour.
“I remember that very clearly, that was pretty surreal, really cool,” says Abdo. “We don’t have many Arabs on tour, so to have three of us in the same place. We were all just doing our job, and I got pretty emotional at that time. I felt, ‘Wow, this is special’. And it made me sad too because I wanted more Arabs in the industry. But that was pretty cool.
“And now seeing Ons (Jabeur, the Tunisian WTA world no.18) all the time on tour it’s pretty crazy. Everyone loves her and she’s really great to me That’s always cool seeing another Arab on tour now, and hopefully many more will join.”
Abdo managed to carve a path for himself in tennis by working hard and grabbing every opportunity that came his way. He believes anyone who shows a great deal of passion and willingness to work and learn will be able to open doors for themselves, but he also paid tribute to several mentors he’s been lucky to have within the ATP organization, including senior vice president for PR and marketing, Nicola Arzani.
Asked about the most challenging part of his job, Abdo said: “There are two things: just trying to make everyone happy, when you really can’t make everyone happy, so you’re trying to please everyone the whole time; it involves a lot of negotiation skills.
“Also getting players to do certain things, especially after matches, that can be tough. It’s a lot of people skills really, you need to be very personable, so people can like you and enjoy spending time with you.”
The ATP already has a good presence in the Arab region with events in the UAE, Qatar and Morocco. Abdo is keen to explore more opportunities for the sport, in the Arab world and beyond, and is confident he can help the ATP expand its reach.
“I know the impact hopefully I can make to reach more people. I don’t want to take that for granted, I want to really embrace that,” he said.
