Bollettieri reveals substance behind the showmanship

Former American paratrooper who created modern game is still hungry for success at next week's Australian Open

The image of Nick Bollettieri, in Britain at least, is simply of a coach who guided Andre Agassi from child prodigy to the 1992 Wimbledon title and has somehow produced a succession of world-class players. But the man behind the sunglasses is much more than a master motivator.

Bollettieri founded the world's first boarding tennis academy in Bradenton, Florida, in 1978 and at one time had three future world No 1s – Jim Courier, Andre Agassi and Monica Seles – on the books. Today the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy (NBTA), which was sold to the sports management company IMG in 1987, is part of a 190-acre complex known as IMG Academies, which includes two football pitches (where the United States Under-17 team is permanently based), two baseball diamonds, a David Leadbetter Golf Academy, facilities for basketball and ice hockey training, an indoor climate-controlled dome, mental training department and sports injuries clinic.

The facilities at NBTA, which has 72 courts, have a quality that seem straight out of science fiction and the results remain impressive. Last year's Wimbledon semi-finalist Xavier Malisse is a former Bollettieri student as is the 2002 US Open quarter-finalist, Max Mirnyi, and the much improved German Tommy Haas. The women's world Nos 1 and 2, Serena and Venus Williams, have trained extensively at the Academy and listened carefully to Bollettieri's advice on how to develop their game. The next great women's talent is likely to be the 15-year-old Russian Maria Sharapova, who has the looks to rival another former Bollettieri student, Anna Kournikova, and seems to have the game to match.

At the Australian Open, which starts in Melbourne next week, Bollettieri will be watching Mirnyi and Serena Williams, who tuned up for the event by spending a week at the Academy, with great interest. Serena will be attempting to win her first Australian Open and fourth consecutive Grand Slam title.

Bollettieri, who is now 71 and was married for the sixth time in December 2001, prepared for his career as a coach in unlikely fashion. He majored in Spanish and Philosophy at a Jesuit college in Alabama then went into the 187th Airborne Division as a Second Lieutenant. When his Army service ended he attended law school at the University of Miami. Yet he says he has never read a book in his life.

Bollettieri preferred to study synopses. He says: "I couldn't care less about history. I couldn't care less about the grammar of a language. I didn't give a damn. But philosophy I enjoyed and was the only subject I did well in. You know why I did well? Because there was no definite answer. When you get into if it's either A or B and you have to memorise and do research I'm a disaster."

Bollettieri, who once said he would "rather have been Fred Perry than Perry Mason", believes he would have been "one of the most famous trial lawyers in the world" even though he dropped out of law school to become a tennis coach, which, at the time, was akin to being "a bum, a zero – it was not a profession".

While attending the University of Miami he managed to get a job as a coach on a public court in North Miami Beach. Although he was not without qualifications, having coached and played for the Army team, he was unsure about the technicalities of the game and sent his first wife, Phyllis, to watch other coaches and take notes on what they were teaching so that he could he gain a better understanding of what he was supposed to be doing. At the time he says he did not even know what an Eastern forehand grip was.

Bollettieri resigned from his job in North Miami Beach when he left law school at the end of the first year. The city of Springfield, Ohio, then hired him and he spent three summers there. During the winters he returned to North Miami Beach to teach on two run-down courts that were in desperate need of new net-posts, nets, lines and Har-Tru, an American clay surface. Bollettieri lacked the necessary funds for any refurbishment so he and his cousin took the quickest option and removed the necessary items: several 100lb bags of Har-Tru "found their way" on to their pick-up truck on a late-night sortie to the nearby Hollywood Beach Hotel. The next day the nets, net-posts and lines were similarly acquired from the 125th Street Tennis Center.

Bollettieri's big break came via the parents of the former US Davis Cup player, Charlie Passarell, who lived in Puerto Rico. Passarell's parents were on the board of directors for the Rockefeller hotels and employed Bollettieri as the pro at the Dorado Beach Hotel. During the summer he returned to the US from Puerto Rico and became the tennis pro for the Rockefeller family in Tarrytown, New York. He also started summer tennis camps using the facilities of colleges and prep schools, which brought his name to the attention of the public.

Bollettieri left the Dorado Beach Hotel in 1975 and had his first academy at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort located in Longboat Key, Florida. In 1978, with the help of Mike DePalmer Snr, a former basketball coach who was the tennis pro at the Bradenton Country Club, Bollettieri then started his boarding tennis academy. To begin with he had children living in his own home with his third wife, Jeri, but soon acquired a decrepit motel in which to house his aspiring athletes.

With the help of Colonel Bill Baxter, a former Special Forces veteran who had fought in Korea and Vietnam, he was bringing an Army-style discipline to the children in his care. Of this period he said: "We had to put fear in these kids because we were scared of having this many kids away from their homes... If we didn't the whole place would have blown up."

Soon came the day that changed the face of modern tennis. That happened when a 12-year-old boy, Jimmy Arias, turned up at the Academy. Arias already had a booming forehand, the product of a semi-Western grip, exaggerated follow-through and superb timing.

Bollettieri recalls that at that time he was still "teaching by the book". Forehands were hit with an Eastern or Continental grip with no real follow-through, legs glued to the ground like mechanical sculptures: "Arias's father got out of a little old Volkswagen, broken down – it was a piece of shit. And out got this skinny little kid who started beating some big college players and I said: 'Holy shit! This is the new forehand. I called in all my staff and said: 'This is our forehand, baby!' Pow! Wrap around that neck! That started it!"

Arias became a full-time student at the Academy and, at 15, became the youngest male player ever to gain a world ranking. In 1982 he reached the semi-finals of the US Open and finished the year at No 5. But injuries blighted his career and he never achieved the results his extraordinary talent warranted.

By 1987 Bollettieri had refined the classical forehand to become what he now calls the "killer forehand" and his advanced coaching techniques gained many adherents because of the successes of Courier, Seles and Agassi. By then Bollettieri and his coaches had developed the drive-volley, which has become one of the most destructive strokes in today's game.

Bollettieri said: "We started them swinging at their volleys. They thought it was goddam crazy. What the hell is this guy doing? This [the drive-volley] is a big shot today. We invented it. Just swing at it. Hit the damn thing."

Bollettieri's speech is at times strangely, but amusingly, sprinkled with interjections of "Pow!" and "Holy Mackerel!" as if he was being scripted by Batman comics. But although this larger-than-life character has a healthy dose of ego, he is largely unaffected by his own celebrity and seems remarkably unattached to money.

Indeed, his excessive generosity with scholarships brought financial problems which led him to sell his academy to IMG. Now NBTA has its own academic school on campus and also its own language school since students are drawn from all parts of the world.

Bollettieri says: "Education to me is not book sense totally. Education is learning something 24 hours a day from the books and from the street. The Academy is really an education for life that includes a little bit of everything. That's a city there when you come in those gates. It's not an academy, it's a frigging city. It's a city of people from 60, 70, 80 countries."

Bollettieri, who advocates the death penalty for drug pushers, operates a no drugs, no drink, no smoking policy on campus. "I can say without hesitation we're as good as any institution in the world today," he said. "Are we clean? Nobody's clean. No legal office, no doctors' office, no garbageman's office, no grocery store is. There's drugs and alcohol all over the place. But we've done as good as any institution in the world. And that's not easy to do. That's damn tough."

Bollettieri averages about three out of every four weeks a year at the Academy and is very much a hands-on presence. Invariably up at five in the morning, he is on court by six. Part of his secret in coaching children is very simple: he treats them as adults. And, despite his tough guy persona as a former paratrooper, he himself has a considerable sensitivity and an engagingly childlike quality. The extra ingredient is his ability to motivate students to aim for standards that even they might not have believed they were capable of reaching. After their break-up, in 1993, Agassi wrote to him, saying that he was "the only father I felt I ever had."

His gift for understanding children is combined with an ability to empathise with other races and peoples. Because of his upbringing as an Italian American – in an area of New York which included Italians, African Americans and Irish – he has always been strongly anti-racist. He says: "I wouldn't be where I am today if I didn't have an open heart to all races and I've proved that over the years."

One of his heroes was the 1975 Wimbledon champion, Arthur Ashe. Together they started the Ashe-Bollettieri Cities programme in 1988, which aimed to give underprivileged children the chance to develop their tennis. He says that Ashe, who died of Aids in 1993, was: "An inspiration. A marvel of a person."

Today, apart from running the Academy, giving clinics to coaches round the world and teaching via a remote learning system which includes e-mail and video, Bollettieri is the driving force behind a sophisticated teaching initiative called "Tennis in a Can" which is aimed at high school students and coaches in the US and is the first such programme to be endorsed by the United States Tennis Association in 120 years.

Bollettieri's achievements, however, have given an essentially simple yet driven man an insight into the darker side of human nature. He says: "I sincerely think the penalty of success is very high. No matter what you do, the more successful you become, the envy and jealousy – no matter what you give back – will increase because you are showing up other people. They know it, refuse to accept it, and will try to destroy you."

Despite criticism he has received because of his love of showmanship, Bollettieri says he still has "many goals to accomplish". One of his few regrets is that he did not have the chance to work with the Lawn Tennis Association in Britain. In 1994, after a humiliating Davis Cup defeat to Romania (in which Tim Henman made a winning debut partnering Jeremy Bates in the doubles), the idea was mooted in some quarters for Bollettieri to work with the LTA, but tabloid broadsides along the lines of "Bollettieri to save British tennis" killed any prospect of a partnership.

Yet Bollettieri still seems interested. "I'd present a plan and have a no-cut contract for five years. They can't fire me. No way."

He also revealed that he might have coached Henman. "We came close, very close five or six years ago. I said 'Jeez, I could help' and I've always liked Tim. I felt Tim needed me to give him that edge and that confidence. He had the game.

"I would make him forget Britain. I would make him forget anything else... I would have made him bolder and attack much earlier. I would have taught him a little more spin on his forehand. I would work on his forehand a lot. He's got a great backhand. If he had the Bollettieri killer forehand and he had the balls of Bollettieri...!"

Of Henman's present coach, Larry Stefanki, Bollettieri says: "Larry does a good job. But I don't think he could juice up Tim Henman like I could have juiced him."

Bollettieri and Henman would have been an interesting team to say the least: the bland Englishman and brash American. In an age of frauds and charlatans, it is one of the world's mysterious ironies that a man who looks like he has just walked off the set of The Godfather and once described himself as "a hustler and wheeler-dealer" should, in fact, be the genuine article.