Academician from the boarding school – Newspaper Kommersant No. 226 (7427) dated 12/06/2022

On Sunday, one of the most famous tennis coaches, American Nick Bollettieri, died at his home in Bradenton, Florida at the age of 91. His name is usually associated with the success of numerous students who rose to the top of the world rankings, including Andre Agassi and Jim Courier, Monica Seles and Boris Becker, Anna Kournikova and Maria Sharapova. In fact, Mr. Bollettieri was not so much a coach in the classical sense of the word as an outstanding organizer. And his main merit is the development and implementation of the concept of a tennis boarding school, which has changed professional tennis in many ways.

For those who have joined tennis relatively recently, the name of Nick Bollettieri, quite possibly, does not mean anything. However, thirty years ago, in this sport, perhaps, there was no more promoted coach, who became a real sports legend in his prime.

The biography of Bollettieri is unique in many ways. The son of Italian immigrants, he joined tennis while studying at one of the oldest Catholic colleges in the United States, after which he volunteered for two and a half years to serve in the paratroopers. This was followed by demobilization, admission to the Miami University School of Law, which had to be abandoned due to lack of funds to support the family, and full immersion in the coaching craft. About him, the author of the future memoirs “My Aces, My Mistakes” at that time had a superficial idea.

However, the ability to take a fresh look at the role of a tennis coach, combined with entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to sell himself, allowed Nick Bollettieri to become a leader in his profession.

In 1978, in Bradenton, near Tampa, Bollettieri purchased a tennis center, named it an academy after himself, established a brutal training regime there, and began to churn out champions. And in 1987 he sold the academy to IMG, retaining management functions. Success was evident, and soon such academies of various sizes, in one form or another, reproducing the Bollettieri sweatshop, began to appear around the world. The principle of their work, as a rule, was formulated simply: individual work is carried out with talents, and the strongest survive from among the rest.

The cornerstone of Bollettieri’s coaching credo was to play at the back line at maximum pace on the rising ball. This tactic, of which Andre Agassi and Monica Seles were the brightest adherents, was often criticized for being limited, but it is on its basis that tennis has been developing for more than thirty years.

Another factor in Bollettieri’s success was his phenomenal eye for future champions.

Although in this sense, he also had punctures, which are not customary to talk about. For example, Marat Safin, who at one time came to see the American guru, he attributed to the unpromising.

It is believed that Bollettieri’s wards were at least 12 players who rose to the top of the world rankings. Formally, this is so, but each such case should be considered individually.

For example, the role of Bollettieri in the formation of such stars of the late 20th century as Andre Agassi, Jim Courier and Monica Seles is really hard to overestimate.

For a couple of years he was the personal trainer of Boris Becker. However, much more often the head of the academy determined the general line of development of the tennis player and motivated him, and the assistants implemented this plan. Therefore, Bollettieri was never considered the personal trainer of Anna Kournikova, who, even at the peak of her career, regularly returned to Moscow to polish her technique with her children’s coach Larisa Preobrazhenskaya. The same applies to Maria Sharapova, and to the Williams sisters, and to the Chilean Marcelo Rios, and to other famous players who used the services of the famous academy and are grateful to its founder.

Probably, when in 1992 on Wimbledon grass Andre Agassi outplayed Croatian serve ace Goran Ivanisevic in the final from the back line, his coach really looked like a brilliant master of individual work with a gifted athlete with a difficult character. But now it is obvious that the main merit of Nick Bollettieri lies elsewhere. It consists in the development and implementation of the concept of a tennis boarding school, which should rightfully be named after its father and eventually became one of the foundations of professional tennis, saturating it with a large number of high-level masters and increasing the degree of competition.

Evgeny Fedyakov