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.