Rest in Peace, Nick Bollettieri—a friend you couldn't resist

Unstrung: Jon Wertheim remembers the late Nick Bollettieri

I disliked Nick Bollettieri the first moment I laid eyes on him. Now, close to fifty years since that day in Delray Beach, Fla., I mourn his passing. When Nick died on Sunday, I lost a friend, and tennis lost a central figure in the explosive growth of the sport during the Open Era.

Journalists and their subjects and sources are not supposed to develop bonds of friendship. But Nick was one of those people who thrive on connecting with others, including wives (he had eight of them, not all as wonderful as his widow, Cindi). He had an inborn friend detector, and it was always on. If you happened to trigger it, you couldn’t engage Nick on any other plane.

But back to that first meeting.

I was walking over to the courts at Laver’s International Tennis Resort, where the first edition of the tournament that would become the Miami Open was about to begin. Out in front of a townhouse condominium, a shirtless dude with leathery brown skin wearing mirrored shades was busy rinsing soap suds off a dazzling red Ferrari. I recognized him immediately as Nick Bollettieri, the former paratrooper, lifeguard, and alleged flim-flam man. The largely straight-laced elements in tennis perceived him as the greatest threat to the sport since the relaxation of the “all-white” clothing rules (this, you understand, was before pickleball).

The optics, to me, were a little unsavory. On the other hand, I had to admire this guy—who was he coaching, this kid Andre Agassi?—because he clearly couldn’t care less what the country-club crowd that still dominated tennis thought of him. And the Europeans were even worse: Long after the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy began spitting out Grand Slam champions like some institutional Pez dispenser, friends in the continental press fumed at his success, routinely dismissing or mocking Nick as a charlatan.

Long story short, Nick and I developed a relationship that I came to value greatly over the ensuing years. They included numerous visits to the academy and lunches at Nick’s go-to restaurant nearby in Bradenton, Fla. The fact that Nick lived to the age of 91 despite all the meals he consumed at South Philly Cheesesteaks (the “blue cheese fries” are to die for—or from) tells you something germane about Nick. He never betrayed his suburban, middle-class roots (he was the son of a pharmacist from Pelham, N.Y.), nor let them stand in his way as he crashed a sporting party long dominated by bluebloods.

In fact, Nick was so much the egalitarian, democratically-minded individual that it was useless to try to engage him in any discussion of class or even of race. He wasn’t interested in sociology, but he knew that in developing elite tennis players he would be giving them tools for success in all aspects of life. His academy was an empire and it has spawned imitators all over the world.

He had an inborn friend detector, and it was always on. If you happened to trigger it, you couldn’t engage Nick on any other plane.

Nick was one of those exceptional individuals who was undaunted by any claim on his time or energy. He pursued what he wanted with vigor and accomplished things that might have taken three or four lifetimes for anyone else, including 12 children and grandchildren. His academy, built from the ground up, has produced a grand total of 11 players who earned the No. 1 ranking, most notably Agassi, Jim Courier, Maria Sharapova, Boris Becker and Monica Seles. Scores of others, including name players like Jelena Jankovic, Anna Kournikova, Jimmy Arias, Ivo Karlovic, Sabine Lisicki and Aaron Krickstein, lived at the academy or made it their home base.

Yet any attempt to link the success of Bollettieri’s proteges with a training system, or to assume that the structure and methodology of the academy was the key to their success, is mistaken. The secret sauce at the academy has always been Nick Bollettieri, and the force of his personality and vision.

As Nick’s players flooded the pro game, even his most snooty critics eventually had to acknowledge his positive impact. Many still characterized him as less coach than Svengali (a more highly evolved relative of “charlatan”), as if motivating players, or creating an environment conducive to maximizing their talent, were really just an athletic parlor trick. The International Tennis Hall of Fame was complicit in this informal blacklisting, snubbing Bollettieri for many years until it finally, grudgingly, admitted him in the “Contributor” category in 2014.

Apart from his serial disappointment over being ignored by the ITHOF, I never heard Nick grouse about how he was perceived. His relentless optimism—so often mistaken by so many for hucksterism—surely played a role in how long and fully he lived. Nick loved life as he loved people. But Nick was a disciplinarian when it came to his players. Although excuses and rationalizations didn’t cut it with him, Nick always kept negativity at arm’s length. He was face-forward, focused on the positive.

Nick was remarkable in too many ways to count. Deep into his 70s he still had perfect vision, not even reading glasses. He was awakened each morning at 4:20 a.m. by a device that emits a faint blue pulse instead of an alarm. Then Nick would work out—standard military stuff like push-ups and sit-ups—before making his way to the academy to start work (at 5:15 a.m., the last time I visited). He rarely left the academy before 6 p.m. and often stayed much longer.

Ed McGrogan, my editor at TENNIS.com, and I worked with Nick on some brief daily video reports from the US Open in 2013 and 2014. Nick knew everything about his players, and a lot about their rivals. But he did not know a lot about vowels and consonants.

To Nick, the preeminent tournament in tennis is and has always been “Wimbleton.” In Nick’s mouth, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga became “Zonga” and Caroline Wozniacki morphed into “Carolina Wozinaki.” It was futile to try to set him straight on pronunciation. To Nick, language was not an exact science. Thank God he was out of the broadcast game before Peter Gojowczyk popped up on the scene.

Nick habitually addressed anyone under 80 years with fewer than four stars on his epaulets as “boy.” Women like his long-time friend Mary Carillo got the “[Mary, Jane, Laura] dear” treatment. The salutations were always delivered in Nick’s gravelly whisper, often while he clutched your upper arm, enhancing the sense that he was happy to see you. It made you feel good when Nick addressed you that way.

To this day, Ed and I address each other as “boy” and I expect we will continue to do so. It just feels right, and it’s a near daily reminder of Nick and the kind of person he was. Nick knew people and what made them happy, it was one of the underlying reasons for his success. As he told tennis journalist Greg Garber some years ago. “I believe the gift I have is the ability to relate to people in a very simple way.”

Referring to the USTA, he added: “They have all kinds of coaches, and they talk about kinetic change and biomechanics, and all that stuff. To tell you the truth, I don’t know s---. I don’t really know all those expressions, but what I do know is [how] to be able to relate to people in a manner that fits into who they are. That’s the biggest thing I have.”