photo by: Manuela Davies
by Pete Bodo
It's about 4 pm, and the nor'easter is spending itself outside; it's strange, but fewer than 24 hours ago I was basking in the warm Florida sunshine at the IMG Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. Nick, Gabe Jarramillo (Nick's second in charge and the second-longest serving Bollettieri aide) and I were in the coaching tower, a tall structure made of pressure-treated lumber, standing between the academy's "stadium court" and the field of 14 courts on the other side. Ivo Karlovic was on the stadium court; the players on the other premium courts included: Kei Nishikori, Phillip Simmonds, Philip Bester, and a host of other up and coming players, including the recent Orange Bowl singles champ (India's Yuki Bhambri).
Bollettieri factoid: the courts are assigned daily on the basis of ranking; the better your ranking, the closer you are to the coaching tower. Right now, Karlovic and Nishikori have most favored status. But bear in mind that, as Gabe made clear, the assignments aren't based on the ATP tour rankings, they're determined by the informal academy rankings. "When you come here," Gabe said, "You leave your 'official' ranking at the door."
The anecdote is useful to understanding Nick Bollettieri and his eponymous academy, although that distinction is academic. For Nick is the academy, and vica-versa, which is probably the first and most important component in understanding how he has succeeded so wildly, for so long: his fingerprints are all over 11 current or former no. 1 players, of either gender, although not all of them (Boris Becker is but one example) came through the academy's system. His most recent no. 1, as I wrote in my ESPN post earlier today, is Jelena Jankovic - a Bollettieri protege through and through.
So the academy is an organic entity, and it has always operated by its own laws and logic - a sure proof that it's the product of an individual, not a business plan, or a specific, empirical theory of player development. It's not that those bloodless and theory-driven approaches aren't valid, or that large-scale or even nationally supported developmental programs can't be productive (just look at France) - it's just that nobody -not even the French - has even come close to approaching the sucess of the NBTA, and some have failed miserably in trying to do so (does anyone remember the vaguely Orwellian, Australian plan hatched by the Australian Institute of Sport?). The NBTA, unlike the French Federation's program is an out-and-out autocracy, a self-sustaining, autonomous state on the international map of tennis, ruled and shaped by one man - Nick Bollettieri.
On Wednesday, I spent the entire day with Nick, for a day-in-the-life piece that will be published in the April issue of Tennis. I won't go too deeply into the specifics of that day here, except to say that it began with Nick and I meeting at the gym on the NBTA "campus" at 5:15 (Nick rises punctually every day at 4:20 am) and ended after 6 pm (which is on the short side for a typical Nick day). That evening, I had dinner with Nick and his wife, Cindi, and some of her kin. Nick and I then watched Blackhawk Down, which I'd never seen, to test out the new **Surround Sound system that Cindi had installed at the house as a Christmas present, to go with Nick's giant and extremely sharp flat-screen TV.
In the course of our day, I watched Nick evaluate a somewhat desperate junior girl whose secret hope was to earn a non-existent scholarship, and saw him work with a succession of players including an 11-year old girl, a pair of boys in their early teens (just two of the kids who are at the academy, full-time, but not in the "Elite" pro program), a Venezuelan girl who might be good enough one day to, say, represent her nation in Fed Cup, and two promising women pros - Michaela Krajicek and Sabine Lisicki (memo to WTA: both of these girls serve huge and, purely as physical specimens, made me think they might be to the WTA what Terrel Owens is to NFL receivers).
But instead of pulling one of those experiences and describing the training session, I'm going to dig a little deeper into the nature of the academy. Let's start with Nick.
Bollettieri is a uniquely American individual. He has no aspiration but to be judged by his degree of success in his chosen occupation (in America, what you do trumps who you are, or where your family came from). His personal style rubs many people the wrong way, and some of his quirks and habits are legendary and, to some, somewhere between mortifying and off-putting (the reflector he uses to work on his tan is never far away, nor is a good brag about something he's recently accomplished). Nick almost begs to be underestimated; he's easily mistaken for a snake-oil salesmen, especially Europeans and intellectuals of every stripe. But those "American" traits - the overt enthusiasm, the extroversion, the lack of polish and general ignorance of (although "indifference to" might be a better phrase) cultural things, they're just the superficial manifestations of deeper, more useful and powerful attributes.
Those qualities include an absolute belief in, and fidelity to, his mission; a sharp, canny, practical mind; an extraordinary degree of focus; enormous reserves of discipline, and an almost scary degree of energy (The man is 77 years old, and he still jackrabbits around the court). Put most simply, Nick is a man of action, not reflection; a doer, not a ponderer. His philosophical inclinations are almost non-existent, and he's eternally forward-looking (this is especially baffling to people who most value their history and traditions). The latter may help explain why Nick doesn't appear to age in any meaningful sense, and perhaps even why he married eight times. He speaks of Cindi (his present wife) as if she were his first, which I think tells you a lot beyond the fact that it isn't easy being married to Nick Bollettieri.
Many institutions reflect the personality of their founder, but few I know of it do it as comprehensively, or have so obviously benefitted from it, as the NBTA. For there is no magic formula to explain the success of the NBTA, except in the sense that there is a magic formula that went into the making of Bollettieri. The academy is the sum total of one man and his vision, although "vision" may be too abstract to apply here. When the NBTA was purchased by sports marketing giant IMG some years ago, what they really bought is Nick Bollettieri, not Nick's system or philosophy of player development, except in the most fundamental sense. I'm not sure how the academy will go on when Nick decides to call it quits, and true to the type of man he is - an empire builder, a man of the action, not theories - I'm not sure that Nick himself knows, or cares, except insofar as the academy will be his legacy. Hail, I'm not sure Nick can even imagine the day when he's no longer **prowling the grounds, barking instructions and dispensing compliments, warnings and advice.
Steve Tignor and I took this trip together (he was there to interview Jelena Jankovic for a profile). We were joined by the talented photographer, Manuela Davies. While we were sitting in the airport on our way home, Steve made an interesting observation: He said he detected a real "military" vibe about the academy. It was an astute observation and it represents a pretty radical departure from our present sporting gestalt. Nick was a paratrooper, and he has a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for the Armed Forces (I can't imagine him sitting through a move like, say, Love, Actually, yet he was utterly absorbed in, and moved by, Blackhawk Down). This is a man with a lifelong belief in discipline, sacrifice, self-denial and clean living; he brings those values along to the court.
At one point during our visit, Manuela said that she's unsure if, in the event the choice came up, she'd be comfortable having children of her own attend a place like the NBTA. Fair enough: not every youngster is cut out for the Marine Corps, either, and some are absolutely unsuited to it. Some people recoil at the idea of putting their kids into a program that's so regimented, competitive, and demanding. But there's a reason that Nick seems to have little trouble populating his program, and it isn't because all his campers have nut-jobs for parents, or have a one-dimensional ambition (to win a Grand Slam). Many people believe in and respond to Bollettieri's views, but they are less likely to get loud about it than his critics, simply because they're like-minded - meaning, more interested in action, work, and attaining goals, rather than pondering, experimenting, and, to use the seductive trope or our time, "finding themselves."
Many of the youngsters at the NBTA have their sights set considerably lower (college-level tennis) than his "star" proteges, and they appear to enjoy the vigorously physical and performance-oriented nature of the academy. One thing is for certain: Although some of Bollettieri's proteges have struggled, dropped out, complained (Andre Agassi did so, rather famously), very few of them repudiated Bollettieri in the long term (including Agassi), and a good number of them look upon their time at the academy as formative, in a positive way. The academy, like certain branches of the service, consists of self-selecting elitists who have something like their own code and don't much care what the outside world thinks of it. It would be impossible for a kid who's not cut out for life at the academy to survive there for long, no matter how ambition-crazed his or her parents may be.
The elitism of the academy may be best reflected in the men - fittingly enough, all his pros seem to be men, and Hispanic ones to boot - with whom Bollettieri surrounds himself. There's an air almost of a secret society about them. During a lesson, there may be three or four Bollettieri aides on court - video-taping, feeding balls, standing on the sideline, chin in hand. When there's a break in practice, they confer, heads together, their voices indiscernible. They aren't merely developing a player - they're planning a campaign.
Bollettieri inspires great loyalty in his assistants. Julio Moros, who's been with Nick the longest (close to 30 years, albeit with a break here and there), Gabe Jarramillo, Carlos Gomez. . . each of them puts in long hours without complaint, and I sensed that, like the best of leaders, Bollettieri doesn't ask his men to do anything he isn't willing or able to do himself.
The academy itself evolved in a curious, idosyncratic way, both as an organic representation of Bollettieri's personality and as an elitist enclave. From the outside, the entrance, with its guardhouse, spotlights and whitewashed walls, is evocative of any of Florida's numerous "gated" communities. But once you're inside, some of the differences are notable. The typical gated community in Florida offers plenty of the kind of "privacy" that to many (including me) smacks of isolation, and even a kind of anti-social loneliness. But on the NBTA campus, the facilities are crowded together, and there's usually enough activity - much of it the ordinary comings and goings or resident students and staff - to create a general sense of community. This makes the academy something of a society; it's a self-contained, self-sufficient, self-regulating place, like some walled Medieval village in Europe.
If that's an exaggeration, it's not by much. The training facilities, housing, offices, and courts are clustered together in a confusing complex riven by small lanes and walkways. You can get turned around and momentarily lost quite easily. This feeling of concentration could be put down to the demands of growth, but I think it goes deeper than that . Once Bollettieri became a success, he could have found any number of backers to transform or even tear down the place and start over on a larger playing field. But perhaps instinctively, and with a distinctly un-American reverence for what has rather than what can be created, he chose to keep his place tight - to expand within rather than beyond the boundaries he established. He thereby fostered the one thing that can soften the blows that are delivered to so many, so routinely, in a competitive environment - a genuine, inherent sense of community. This provides a hedge against the feelings of isolation an alienation that can so easily take root where a sense of shared hardship and sacrifice is lacking.
At the same time, the academy is de-centralized, and atomic. There is no central gathering point. Nick rarely sets foot in his tiny office, except when he wants to show off the pictures of former players and friends that cover its walls. The academy is not the office, the clubhouse, the pool or the Starbucks coffee bar - it's wherever Nick happens to be, at any given moment. And as Nick is never in one place for all that long, the practical effect is that the academy is everywhere, in way that has nothing to do with bricks and mortar. This is something that no army of MBAs, bank officers, or developers could ever hope to re-create. The academy has some of the same, eccentric properties and additions you would find in a grand Victorian home occupied by one family for a long period; it's easy to see how an investment banker or developer might want to blow the whole place up and start over, oblivious to the fact that in so doing, he would kill the genius and spirit of the place.
Take that coaching tower - if you were designing an academy today, you would probably incorporate a balcony or viewing area into a grand clubhouse, overlooking the stadium court. But at Nick's, there is no grand clubhouse. More significantly, I haven't heard of any schemes to create one. Although the facility has all the obligatory, high-tech bells and whistles (a state-of-the-art gym, an elaborate video network), and Nick has kept apace and even ahead of the curve when it comes to training and teaching technique, the real heart of the academy is the coaching tower - a stark, unpainted, wooden structure that screams "Texas football", not mint juleps on the veranda at six. This targeted, Spartan approach undoubtedly struck many of the old guard as ghastly when the game began to navigate the shoals of the Open era, but it has won the day. And much to Nick's credit, he never did abandon or significantly alter his vision once he had successfully elbowed his way into the territory of the "haves" in tennis. This is a man who has remained true to his vision and never lost sight of his goals.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure how that kind of genius can be bottled, or passed on to successive generations. There will never be another Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy for the simple reason that there will never be another Nick Bollettieri.