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.