Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1989,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this Wimbledon week is a marketing man but that simple title belies the extent of

his influence and the breadth of his interests. Having made millionaires out of the

golfer's Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, his attention turned to tennis.

He it was who transformed the Wimbledon tournament from a polite English pastime into

a multi-million pound business.

Since then he's moved on even further.

These days he has interests in many other sports and in film, television and opera too.

All of which means he runs the professional lives of people as diverse as Jackie Stewart and Jerry Hall, Michael Parkinson and Curia to Carna.

He is Mark McCormack.

But it is, they say, Mark, the marketing of Wimbledon, which you regard as your single greatest achievement. Is that right?

Well, I think in many ways it is. I think I'm awfully proud of the job we did with Arnold Palmer and are still doing for him and for many

of the other athletes that we have represented and continue to represent for several decades.

But I think that some of the accomplishments at Wimbledon

have been very challenging and extremely gratifying for me over the last 20 years.

But you transformed its profits from a mere 40,000 pounds a year, I understand, to

seven and a half million. Now how much was that brilliance on your part or how much was

it totally unexploited potential?

Well, I think you say I transformed the profits, I certainly would like to feel I was a part of that,

but there were an awful lot of factors involved in that transformation.

...