How Marcus Daniell navigated the cut-throat world of pro tennis, one donation at a time

The thought that he might be taking food off his opponent's table did not sit well with Marcus Daniell when he was fighting for survival on the pro tennis tour.

So he started giving a portion of his winnings to people who were far worse off than the players he was facing across the net.

The 17-year-long professional career of one of New Zealand's most successful tennis stars is coming to an end very soon and when it does, Daniell will take his philanthropy to another level.

The 34-year-old played his last overseas tournament over the weekend at the Taube-Grossman Pro Tennis Tournament in California. His final event will be the ASB Classic in Auckland in January.

A knee injury in 2022 kept Daniell off the professional circuit for nearly two years but he decided to come back and make 2024 his final year on the ATP tennis tour.

The two-time Olympian and bronze medallist, Wimbledon and Australian Open quarterfinalist, and 5-time ATP titleholder is also donating 50 percent of his prize money this year to high impact charities.

Daniell, who grew up in Masterton, was good enough to make a New Zealand age-group football squad in his early teens and eventually had to decide between the two sports.

When he turned 17, he left New Zealand to start playing in professional events in 2007. The following year he started pursuing the tennis dream full time.

For several years he attempted to make his way in singles. In order to succeed he had to beat others, who were in a similar position to him.

"There were many years there where I was sleeping on floors and stretching money as far as it would possibly go to keep the dream alive," Daniell said.

"Most people see Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic earning millions but the reality is that's point zero zero one percent of all tennis players trying to be professional. It's such a tiny percentage make a living from it and then a tiny percentage of that tiny percentage make a really huge living off it."

He eventually focused on doubles in 2014 and started breaking even. When Daniell reached a point where he felt like he could make a living from tennis, he felt a strong urge to give back.

"It's just a reality that sport is a very selfish endeavour and necessarily so. You have to be really focussed on yourself and on what you're doing to get ahead but that never sat perfectly with the person I wanted to be outside of sport."

Daniell wanted to make sure his donation would actually make a difference so he started going down the rabbit hole of looking into what were good charities and what were bad charities.

Then from around 2015 he started donating 1 percent of his earnings.

"That was a very meaningful turning point for me in my career. It sounds a bit soppy but as soon as I made that pledge it made the whole tennis career more meaningful for me. It meant that every success that I had out on court, there was some good done in the world."

The most un-Kiwi thing

By around 2020 he had increased his yearly pledge to 8 percent of his income. During lockdown that year he had plenty of time to reflect.

"I had a realisation that I had never actually publicly spoken about giving and why I was giving. It's totally because of tall poppy syndrome and not wanting to put myself out there but the painful part of the realisation was that if I had spoken about it other people might have taken action, then suffering would have been averted in the world."

He then decided to use his position as a professional athlete to create an organization that focuses on spreading the message of effective giving in the sporting world.

High Impact Athletes (HIA) connects elite athletes to 12 of the most impactful charities in the world. One such charity works to prevent the spread of malaria by distributing long-lasting, insecticide-treated mosquito nets to susceptible populations in developing countries.

Each charity goes through a rigourous evaluation by the world's most stringent charity research organisations. Daniell found there were many athletes who wanted to give but they didn't have the time to investigate charities themselves.

In August, Daniell was one of four athletes elected to the International Olympic Committee Athletes' Commission by over 6,000 Paris 2024 Olympians.

Winning a bronze medal in the men's doubles at the 2020 Tokyo Games was hands down the highlight of his career and Daniell only just missed out on qualifying for Paris.

But he headed there anyway and tried to drum up a few votes.

He stood outside the athletes' village dining area and would walk up to athletes to ask them if they had voted yet and would they consider voting for him.

"Oh man it was brutal. I committed to doing a week of it and by the third day I was feeling sick, I had cold sores, I was just so stressed out.

"It's one thing talking to people about giving to charity but I was quite literally saying 'hey I'm Marcus, do something for me' and that just felt like the most un-Kiwi thing I've ever done in my life and it was extremely uncomfortable.

"I was very sure that it wasn't going to work out but in the end putting myself out there and talking to people worked out."

The cut-throat world of professional tennis

Despite all his years on the world tour Daniell said there were very few players he felt he had a genuine close friendship with, outside of his doubles partners.

"While there is a lot of camaraderie on tour and for the most part everyone gets along pretty well, to some extent it can't go too much deeper. Next week you could be drawn against them and you're doing everything you possibly can to win that match and take food off that person's family's table, it's pretty cut-throat.

"It is this weird paradox, you spend a huge amount of time with these people week in week out but there's always this sort of barrier that prevents you from having a deeper friendship."

He compares finding a doubles partner to being worse than online dating.

"Of the people who might make the shortlist of who you would want to play with, probably at least 80 percent of them are going to be paired up. You have to try to find a way to suss out whether there's any chance of them splitting up with their partner to play with you and that's a really awkward situation because you see these same people all the time."

Daniell felt that there was too much of a tendency for doubles partners to split as soon as things got a bit difficult.

"All of the best teams in the world, the history making teams went through periods where they were losing a lot of matches. It's how you deal with that and bounce back stronger, that I think makes you championship material."

He would like to see the pay structure change so more money can filter down to a larger number of players.

"It's one of the biggest sports in the world but on the men's side there are probably only 250 people in the world making a living from it. If you contrast it with rugby, in New Zealand alone you would probably have something like 250 people making a living from playing professional rugby. When you've got teams that have 20 to 30 people all on salary, you've got a large number of people making a decent living. In tennis it's just the very tip of the pyramid that makes a living."

Daniell said he will miss the competitive side of tennis.

"There's something that really focusses you more than anything else I've experienced in life. When there are high stakes and it means the world to you there's this intensity of focus that comes from that and I think I might miss that because you can't fake that."

Leveraging the athlete voice for good

High Impact Athletes now has 220+ athletes, from 34 countries, and 48 sports. There are close to four full-time equivalent employees now helping Daniell run HIA and he sees it growing exponentially.

When Daniell retires from tennis, running High Impact Athletes will become his full-time focus.

"I am very passionate about the potential HIA has to make a pretty massive impact in the world. Since I started making money I didn't give up on my scrimping ways, I don't really have much interest in material stuff so I've managed to build a decent enough nest egg that doing for-purpose stuff for the rest of my working life feels really good."

Daniell and his American wife, who are currently based in San Francisco, are expecting their first child in about six weeks. They plan to come back to New Zealand not long after that and base themselves in Raglan.

HIA has put more focus this year on athlete-led campaigns.

"We've done well building up the athlete community and educating people about their options around giving. For a lot of our athletes that's a percentage pledge, for some of them it's yearly donations and that's working really well but the big opportunity we think is in the fan bases."

Athletes who have joined the movement include New Zealand boxer Joseph Parker, golfer Ryan Fox, and Black Ferns sevens star Michaela Blyde.

International athletes include American football pro Patrick Laird, and Greek tennis star Stefanos Tsitsipas, who has been ranked as high as third in the world.

"Someone like Stefanos has millions of followers across his social media platforms. If he can champion a cause or charity and just one percent of his fanbase decide to pledge a small amount for each point he wins for example - those numbers very quickly get really really compelling.

"And given how cost effective the charities we support are that could literally mean tens of thousands of lives saved. We're in talks with some big athletes to try to be the faces of some campaigns next year."

The idea that people care what professional sportspeople think about issues outside of the sport that they play is a curious one for Daniell.

"I think it's strange in some ways, I think probably a smart way of going about things is to listen to experts on things they are expert in. But I think it's pretty clear that athletes as a collective have a huge amount of social influence around the world.

"It's a lever that can be used to sell a bunch of shoes and merchandise and tickets. But what if we use that lever to do as much good in the world as we can and I really think that's being under utilised."

When Ugandan Olympic marathon runner Rebecca Cheptegei died last month after being set on fire by her former boyfriend, there was a huge outcry within the HIA community to do something.

It led to the creation of One in Three, which refers to the World Health Organisation statistic that one in three women globally will experience physical or sexual abuse in their life.

"It's an umbrella organisation and we're pulling together as many different athlete groups as we can to try to stand up and speak out against gender based violence."

Daniell said prominent Ugandan athletes were going to be part of a mass media campaign speaking out against gender based violence.

"This is a use of athlete voice that if done well with push from enough people, could have a huge impact around the world, I just think this is an amazing use of athlete social influence."