After a younger Andre Agassi received an vital match whereas carrying denims, make-up and earrings, his coach Nick Bollettieri summoned him to look in entrance of his 200 tennis academy classmates. As punishment for having “defiled” the centre of excellence, Agassi was sentenced to wash all of the bogs on website. On the subsequent event, his coach threatened him, he must play carrying a skirt.
Few individuals can declare to have produced extra champions than the self-styled “Michelangelo of tennis”. Agassi, Jim Courier, Monica Seles, Maria Sharapova and each the Williams sisters all skilled beneath the watchful eye of Bollettieri, the groundbreaking teacher, who has died aged 91.
Within the late Seventies, Bollettieri pioneered the live-in academy for younger athletes seeking to obtain greatness. However his strategies have been as infamous as they have been progressive. He would stand bare-chested on the courtroom, berating his younger protégés over each stray shot or wrongly angled grip, as they repeated the identical actions hundreds of instances over.
The imaginative and prescient was to assemble collectively the perfect younger gamers in a single place the place they’d “play, break rackets, gamble, battle, punch”. College students have been banned from watching TV, listening to the radio, consuming junk meals or calling residence throughout the week. Punishment for misdemeanours on the courtroom concerned compelled runs with out water. However on the finish of each coaching session, the youngsters would file previous their mentor uttering the mantra, “Thanks, Nick.”
In his memoirs, Agassi described the academy as a “glorified jail camp. And never all that glorified.” But these aiming for the highest continued to flock there. And regardless of Bollettieri’s abrasive and obsessive status — he woke each morning at 4:30am to stretch and elevate weights — a lot of these he taught converse of him affectionately as an alternative mum or dad. They grew to become winners too. Of the tens of hundreds of gamers who skilled beneath him, ten would attain the rank of world primary.
“I used to be residing my dream”, Sharapova, who joined the academy aged eight, informed the FT in 2015. “I noticed all these nice champions come by way of and practise. And I awakened each morning and couldn’t await my alarm to ring at 6.30am and go and have my lesson.”
Nicholas James Bollettieri was born in 1931 within the city of Pelham, New York. His mother and father have been Italian immigrants. He was a quarterback on the highschool soccer workforce, earlier than his uncle satisfied him to attempt the “sissy sport” of tennis.
After finding out philosophy in school in Alabama, Bollettieri joined the military, turning into a paratrooper and reaching the rank of lieutenant. His time within the navy could be central to his teaching ethos later in life. “I started to be taught quite a bit being a paratrooper — self-discipline, the sensation you’re the perfect on the planet, that you are able to do something,” he mentioned.
After leaving the armed forces in 1957, he enrolled to review regulation on the College of Miami. To assist make ends meet, he started providing tennis classes for $1.50 an hour, regardless of having no expertise as a coach and never way more as a participant. After lower than a yr, he dropped his research to commit himself to tennis.
“Lots of coaches know way more tennis than I do”, he mentioned. “What I do know is tips on how to work with you as an individual.”
In 1961, he noticed Brian Gottfried, then 9 years outdated, on the courtroom and took him beneath his wing. Gottfried would later develop into Bollettieri’s first profitable product, reaching quantity 3 on the planet in 1977.
That very same yr, after a spell educating wealthy lodge purchasers to play tennis, he landed on the Colony Seaside and Tennis Resort close to Sarasota, Florida. A yr later, he would set up the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy.
He went on to borrow $1mn to show 40 acres of tomato crops in Bradenton, Florida right into a sprawling tennis boot camp, which opened in 1981. Agassi referred to his time there as “Lord of the Flies with forehands”, however attended without cost. His father solely had the cash to pay for 3 months tuition, however Bollettieri known as him to say he was “tearing up the cheque” after seeing how good he was. The pair had an emotional break up in 1993, quickly after Agassi received the primary of his eight Grand Slam titles.
Bollettieri was identified for his bother managing cash. And with monetary issues looming, he bought the academy to IMG in 1987. However he stayed on to run it.
Right now the positioning covers round 600 acres, and teaches a variety of sports activities to 1,200 full-time boarders and hundreds extra youngsters and adults who attend sports activities camps there. In 2014, Bollettieri was inducted into the Tennis Corridor of Fame, one among solely 4 coaches to obtain the accolade.
Josh Noble