Nick Bollettieri
Legendary tennis coach who guided 10 world No1s, including Andre Agassi and the Williams sisters
NICK BOLLETTIERI, who has died aged 91, was among the most recognisable and successful tennis coaches of all time; the charismatic Italianamerican, renowned for his permatan and relentless positivity, drove a string of talented wannabes to stardom through his ebullient personality, despite being scarcely able to hit a forehand himself.
Among his most high-profile pupils were Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, the Williams sisters, Boris Becker and the child prodigy Jennifer Capriati, plus Jim Courier, and Monica Seles, who was the first of the 10 players he coached who topped the world rankings. He also introduced the idea of boarding tennis academies which, thanks to his military background, resembled boot camps, with formidable levels of discipline and a heavy emphasis on physical fitness.
Nicholas James Bollettieri was born on July 31 1931 at New Rochelle, New York, the son of hard-working Italian immigrants. His father James was a pharmacist, his mother Mary a housewife. A hyperactive, energetic child, he struggled with reading and processing information and possibly suffered from dyslexia.
At the nearby Pelham Memorial High School, he dabbled in sport, though he did not excel at any game, and he tried tennis for the first time in his senior year at Spring Hill College, a Jesuit foundation in Mobile, Alabama, because their side was one man short. He later admitted: “Before that I thought tennis was for sissies.”
After graduating with a Philosophy degree, Bollettieri hoped to become a fighter pilot but failed the written exam, so he served as a US Army paratrooper in Japan, becoming a first lieutenant and developing the passion for physical fitness that would characterise his coaching career.
He began a Law degree at the University of Miami, but dropped out, finding his studies dull and restrictive, then turned to teaching tennis, prospering as much through his personality as his coaching expertise. He ran his first formal tennis camps at Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, where the durable Brian Gottfried was among his pupils.
By the late 1960s he was tennis director of the Rockefeller family’s ritzy Doral Beach Hotel in Puerto Rico, then in 1978 he moved to Longboat Key in Florida to coach at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort.
For Penny Moor, a British international who played on the Virginia Slims circuit in the early days of the women’s tour, Bollettieri, who gave her free accommodation at the Colony in between tournaments, was an inspiration to everyone, not just the superstars: “Your ranking didn’t matter,” she recalled. “He just wanted to make you better, and he was tremendously generous and encouraging, with a ‘you can do it’ attitude.
“His coaching technique wasn’t classical to start with; he was more of a psychological mentor, instilling this incredible sense of self-belief. In the early days a lot of the stuffy old guard of the tennis establishment looked down on him as being a hustler from the wrong side of the tracks, but they really sat up and took notice when he started producing champions.”
In the early 1980s, Bollettieri moved to Bradenton on the west coast of Florida and opened his eponymous Tennis Academy, where he trained his growing numbers of pupils with an iron rod, insisting they follow his own regime of dawn starts, gym work-outs and long runs on the beach.
Aware that tennis was “a numbers game”, he had hundreds of youngsters on court for long hours, hitting endless balls to groove their strokes, and he also developed several signature shots, such as the drive-volley which proved a deadly weapon in Monica Seles’s armoury.
Andre Agassi joined the academy in 1984, and although he hated the uncompromising approach to training, Bollettieri immediately spotted his natural gifts, bullying and cajoling him to add fitness and mental strength to his extraordinary talent.
By 1986, 27 of the academy’s pupils were in the main draw of the US Open and the centre expanded rapidly with state-of-theart equipment. When in the early 1990s Monica Seles and then Jim Courier achieved the coveted No 1 rankings, Bollettieri was already the go-to coach for many hyperambitious families, convinced that his magic touch would transform journeyman juniors into champions.
Later in his career, some would pay an eye-watering $900 an hour for his services, even though he rarely hit balls to players himself, using athletic young coaches as hitting partners for his pupils while he stood on the sidelines, shouting instructions and encouragement.
“He was a much-loved and a much-hated figure,” admitted one prominent British coach. “He was larger than life and absolutely devoted to winning, encouraging his player in any way possible, including waving his hands to draw his pupil’s attention and suggest a tactic, which was really off-putting for the opponent.
“Yet he was big-hearted and enormously kind to anyone he thought had promise. Maria Sharapova’s family were very poor, but her father took her to America and threw her on his generosity: Bollettieri spotted her extraordinary work ethic and gave her a free scholarship and accommodation, which really turbocharged her career.”
Another rival coach recalled: “Many of his players were renowned for grunting or squealing during matches. It was really controversial as it was so distracting for the opponent – and as the racket struck the ball, the opponent couldn’t hear from the noise of the stroke whether it had been hit flat or with slice. Monica Seles and Maria Sharapova were particularly known for it – and strangely, neither of them would grunt or squeal in practice, only in matches, and the volume would get louder and louder the bigger the point.”
Bollettieri claimed that he never taught his players to grunt but considered it “part of their arsenal of weapons”.
When the Academy at Bradenton ran into financial problems in 1987, the International Management Group bought it – but, aware that the Bollettieri brand and charisma were potent draws to tennis enthusiasts, they retained him to oversee the coaching programmes.
Although deadly serious about his pupils’ success, his personal relationships were another matter. He was married eight times, though he joked that two of the alliances did not count as they had folded so quickly he could barely remember his ex-wives’ names. One recalled that when she forced him to choose between her and golden boy Andre Agassi, he chose the player.
Bollettieri always insisted that Agassi’s 1992 Wimbledon victory was the high point of his career, and “a fulfilment I can’t even describe”. After numerous volcanic clashes however, the pair went their separate ways the following year.
He followed a high-protein and vegetable diet, extolling the benefits of healthy eating long before it became fashionable, but he was known to sneak off and wolf Snickers bars out of sight of his pupils.
He was also renowned for consuming a cholesterol-laden full English breakfast without fail in the press room during the Wimbledon Championships, where he wrote a daily column for The Independent newspaper.
He was also a prolific author of coaching books, including the best-sellers Nick Bollettieri’s Junior Tennis (1984), Nick Bollettieri’s Tennis Handbook (2001) and his colourful autobiography My Aces, My Faults (1997).
His passion for tennis continued throughout his life, and despite his increasing frailty he was still courtside, coaching from a chair in Florida, a few months before his death.
James, his son by his first wife, was the only one of his offspring to follow in his tennis footsteps, becoming a coach and a gifted photographer. Bollettieri is survived by his seven children, including two sons from Ethiopia whom he adopted with his eighth wife, Cindi Eaton.