When you watch Sharapova, the multimillion-dollar finished product, it all seems so easy. But knowing that a child is a future Sharapova or Agassi is something else entirely. Nick Bollettieri, the famed founder of the Bollettieri Tennis Academy and former coach of Agassi, Seles, and Sharapova, among others, says he can surmise a lot from watching a 4-year-old. The way children hold the racquet and react to balls gives Bollettieri a sense of “what God gave them,” he says. But he’s given up on predicting whether those talents will produce a professional. When I asked Bollettieri why, at last year’s U.S. Open, he stepped closer, paused a few beats, and began slowly jabbing his index fi nger into my chest.
“You’ve got the whole world now, buddy,” Bollettieri said, emphasizing “whole” as if the planet had recently doubled in size. “Look at the NBA, look at baseball.” What he meant was, look at Russia. Look at Serbia. Look at Eastern Europe. Look—off in the distance—at China. More kids are playing tennis, and they’re playing it well at earlier ages.
“When I used to have an Agassi or a Seles, I could say, ‘I’ve got another one,’” Bollettieri says. “I can’t say that anymore.”
As the tennis world expands, coaches say, top-level instruction at an early age becomes more important. This doesn’t surprise Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University who studies how people acquire expertise. After years of research on elite athletes and musicians, Ericsson has found that over time, experts generally need more practice and better training. Take chess, which Ericsson has examined with the help of computers that compare today’s best players to past champions.
“Chess champions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are pretty much like top players in competitive chess clubs today,” Ericsson says. “Bringing someone to that absolute level of performance is going to take more time and better training.”
Yet for children whose parents don’t have the means to pay for it, like the Silvas, such training is more difficult to come by. Bollettieri has given away hundreds of scholarships, but never to a child Jan’s age. The strength of the game today has made Bollettieri less likely, not more, to deviate from that principle, especially for a boy. Top coaches almost uniformly use the word “impossible” when asked if they can predict professional success for a boy, because of the athleticism and depth of competition in today’s men’s game. Predicting success for a girl is merely very difficult.
