I read “Open” about 2 months ago and I really enjoyed it. However, I was stunned by the portrayal of Nick Bollettieri and his tennis camp for kids.
I mean, that camp produced Monica Seles, Andre, and Jim Courier. It must have been doing something right.
Andre describes it as a scam. He says that Bollettieri knew nothing about tennis and was just trying to open a school to make money. In fact, he said his Dad only heard about it by watching a 60 minutes expose about how corrupt and bad Bollettieri was.
However, I see that Bollettieri is still considered a reliable source of tennis information. He’s interviewed frequently by Tennis.com(tennis magazine) and has, it seems, become an expert. Did he become an expert over the last 30 years or did he know some before hand?
I don’t remember Agassi calling the camp a scam, although I’ll reread that part of the book now. I see that right off the bat he says it’s “a glorified prison camp” and “Karate Kid with racquets, Lord of the Flies with forehands” and “anarchy.” And he says some mean but 100% accurate things about Bollettieri’s tan. I’ll see what I think when I’m done reading. But it’s worth keeping in mind that Agassi didn’t want to go to the center, never wanted to be there, and was miserable the entire time.
Here is Agassi’s recollection of a sitdown with Bollettieri. This comes after weeks of not speaking to him at all.
He’s 14 at this point.
I can’t comment on what Bollettieri knows about tennis. Mahaloth is correct that he trained plenty of top players and many others who were successful pros. Wikipedia has a list of alumni. The academy’s baseline style changed the game. He’s been criticized for training robotic players who hit hard but didn’t have much ability to construct points or strategize and were boring to watch, but that’s probably not the same thing.
McEnroe has built an anti-Bollettieri tennis academy. He believes that kids shouldn’t be separated from their parents and families in order to train for a sport. It’s not just about results; it’s about the damage you inflict on kids by the loneliness and isolation combined with the constant pressure to win, win, win.
So, no, I don’t think Agassi was too hard on Bollettieri or Agassi’s father.
All of this is per Andre in interviews: He hasn’t read the book and he isn’t going to.Mike Agassi is 80 and says if he had to do it all over again, he’d have done it the same way except he might’ve trained Andre to play baseball or another sport where you can have a longer career - but he would have been the same kind of father. He’s turned the Dragon into a pitching machine for Andre’s son Jaden. I assume it only gets used occasionally.