The return of Jim Pierce | Sport

Seven years ago Mary Pierce cut off all ties with her father, whose brutal training methods and foul-mouthed courtside behaviour made him the original dad from hell. Now there's been a reconciliation. Well, sort of

The driver is a hulking bronzed beefcake of a man, his great barrel chest straining the buttons of a green and salmon-pink striped T-shirt, his thick grey hair bouffant and slicked back Seventies-style, like an ageing Engelbert Humperdinck's. From the old tabloid snatch-photos, and his description of himself, delivered in deceptively gentle Deep Southern tones during several transatlantic phone calls, clearly this is Jim Pierce, the original tennis dad from hell. So who is his blonde front seat passenger? Sensing a scoop my pulse quickens. Not his long-estranged daughter, Mary, surely? One has heard the rumours filtering from the ladies' locker-rooms, of course. Seven years after she ostracised her father, even hiring a personal bodyguard to escape his brutal, drill-sergeant training methods and foul-mouthed courtside outbursts ('Mary, kill the bitch' was one of his milder exhortations) the world's fourth-ranked women's player is whispered to have instigated a highly unlikely rapprochement.

Disillusioned with life in the ever-lengthening shadow of the game's genuine stars, such as Hingis and Davenport, and fearful that she might never repeat her solitary Grand Slam triumph, the 1995 Australian Open, Mary, it is said, has in desperation turned back to the man who threatened, bullied and, on at least one occasion, physically beat her into tournament-winning shape: her crazy ol' papa Jim.

The phone call Jim Pierce had been praying for since the fateful summer of 1993 - when the Women's Tennis Association banned him from attending all tour matches and he received serious stab wounds in a knife fight with Mary's minder - came early in February. Mary was languishing, alone and depressed, in a hotel room in Tokyo, where she had just been dumped out of the Toray Pan Pacific Open by Lilia Osterloh, then ranked 87 and the sort of opponent her father dismisses as a 'Timbuktu Nobody'.

'Dad, I'm not playing well, I think I need to work with you again,' are the precise words with which she re-opened the most tempestuous filial relationship sport has known. Or at least, those are the words that Jim recalls when he confirms their reunion, then talks about it for the first time over lunch at his favourite restaurant, The Cracker Barrell, where the portions of pinto beans and garlic mash match up to his gargantuan appetite.

Alas, they cannot be confirmed by Mary herself because Mary isn't here with us. Three days earlier, when he packed his racket and a bucket of tennis balls into the car boot and drove to Bradenton from his home in Delray Beach, a four-hour cross-state trek, Jim had been expecting to spend this week working his daughter 'like a dog' in preparation for her next event, the Bausch and Lomb Championships at Amelia Island, in northern Florida.

Under the terms of their new relationship, however, it is Mary who calls all the shots: a stark contrast to the old days, when her father paraded her around like a prized show pony. And so, having agreed by phone to train with him, she has pulled out at the eleventh hour, jetting off to Canada for the day on what Jim calls some 'meaningless, jumped-up sponsorship thing', and leaving him to hang around in the hope that she might call to fix a session when she returns.

For a proud man who has grown accustomed to getting his own way this is clearly an almost unbearable indignity. But since his first-choice obsession has stood him up, what else to do but concentrate on his second, namely womanising? The blonde in the Cadillac turns out to be his latest little dalliance, a giggling fortysomething Czech woman whom he introduces simply as Sveta.

As Jim's Colombian second wife Amanda is waiting for him back in Delray Beach, it may seem churlish to mention that he is cheating on her while she thinks he's coaching tennis. One does so only because his serial philandering seems to say so much about Jim Pierce's character. His apparently insatiable thirst for power, particularly over women, is coupled with a rather tragic compulsion to show the world that, even at 64, he's still a macho guy.

Why else would he arrive for an interview with a mistress in tow? A mistress, moreover, whose only memorable contribution to our three-hour conversation was to nuzzle against her lover's linebacker-sized shoulder and leer seedily in my direction: 'For me and Jim, sex and fish! But first always, sex!'

Why else would he bring, to our second meeting the following day, a pocketful of photographs of 'The Other One', a third woman with whom he claims to be having an affair when Sveta - and Amanda - aren't around?

His desire to prove his virility is surpassed only by his need to shock. 'It's not true I carry two guns,' he says, loudly and unprompted, as the waitress comes to take our order. 'Nope. Only carry the one these days.'

Later he breaks off abruptly from talking about Mary to boast of his sexual encounters with the mothers of players on the tennis circuit. 'Never touched the girls. They were always outta bounds. But the moms, oh I've had dozens of 'em!'

He adopts a stage whisper: 'The mother of one very big name player came and asked me right out if I could do something for her. I ain't gonna tell ya her name: not for fifty thousand dollars. See, I love women. Love to taste 'em, smell 'em, touch 'em. Never smoked or drank much - women always were my drug.'

Pierce doesn't say so - maybe he's in denial, or, more probably, he simply lacks the insight - but for him the most dangerously addictive female was always Mary. It has been that way since she first picked up a tennis racket, when she was 10 years old and her father, who couldn't play the game and then took little interest in watching, somehow knew he was in possession of an embryonic champion.

The story of Jim and Mary's early years has been told so often it might almost be a ballad. Or rather, perhaps, a lament to lost childhood and the depths to which a parent will sink in the quest for wealth and vicarious sporting glory. His own version, however, brings unexpected verses, and as he reminisces one can at least begin to understand why he treated his daughter so harshly, and careered into the abyss.

The second of four siblings, Jim Pierce was born and raised in Greenboro, North Carolina. Superficially, his family was contented and relatively prosperous. 'I guess we were lower middle-class,' he says unsentimentally.

'My parents ran a grocery store, so we ate and slept well, owned a car. But my dad was a violent man, a fighter from Irish stock who'd been heavyweight champion for his battalion in the military. He was always whipping us. Whipped me every day for nothing, just horsing around like kids do. One day my brother and I tied my sister to a table leg and he beat us sore for that. That's why I never beat my kids. Swore I'd never do it.'

I shoot him a quizzical glance. 'Well, okay, maybe once, and under extreme provocation,' he concedes. 'At one tourna- ment in Italy when she was maybe 15 years old she spat at me from the court and yelled "Fuck you" because she didn't like the way I was encouraging her.'

He spreads his huge sausage fingers and paws the air. 'I tried to slap her like this, and halfway caught her on the face. People saw that, and that's how the reputation started. But if you said that to your father in England what would happen? He'd knock you out, right?'

Determined to escape his father's tyranny, Jim Pierce left school at 13 and started living rough on the streets. He drifted from job to job until, at 18, he joined the Marines, only to be court-martialled soon afterwards for going absent without leave. Sentenced to six months hard labour and dishonourably discharged, he emerged, broke, from the glasshouse and resorted to petty crime. For five years he survived on quick wits and even faster fistwork until, in 1959, he was jailed again, this time for 18 to 24 months, for forging a cheque.

He remained in prison for just 11 days before escaping and fleeing to New York where, he says, he squatted in a vacant loft and stole bread and milk to survive. In Manhattan he joined an altogether harder school of villains and had his first brush with death.

It came in 1960, when he was shot in the back by police while attempting to evade arrest for a knifepoint robbery. The bullet's exit wounds permanently scarred his stomach, but he was soon transferred from hospital to the notoriously tough Sing Sing prison, where his fellow inmates included mafioso and serial killers.

When we reach this period of his life, Pierce reacts with curious ambiguity. On the one hand he is reluctant to recall the precise reasons for his incarceration, particularly in front of Sveta. 'Let's just say I thought I was Jesse James.'

On the other he can't help but relate how tough he was back then. 'Remember the Gallo family? Joey Gallo. Killed about 500 people. No, don't write that, that's an exaggeration. Anyway, he was the Godfather in there, and I was his right-hand man. Nobody bothers you if you are with these people. But nobody bothered me anyway. I was in pretty good shape. I was ready to fight at the drop of a hat. I'd gladly take two shots if I could get one in myself.'

In prison he was reportedly diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic (an interlude that is definitely unmentionable) and packed off to a secure psychiatric ward, where he was forever trying to buck the system, in the manner of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Discharged, he spent a further decade as a hobo and vagrant - 'I knew every bum in New York and Los Angeles' - before being arrested yet again, for possessing stolen property.

It was at this point, in 1973, that he jumped bail and fled to Montreal, Canada, where he fell for Yannick Adjani, an attractive French student. She quickly became pregnant, and their first child, Mary, was born on 15 January, 1975. Her brother, David, arrived the following year. Between the births they married and so, at 37, Jim endeavoured to settle down for the first time. He began making and selling jewellery, a craft he had learned from a Native American friend, and was intent on being the affectionate, devoted father he never had.

Quite clearly he was over-protective, though he still won't admit it. 'Love 'em too much? Are you kidding? Nah, I just wanted to take care of 'em, make sure they had the things I didn't have. We were always laughing, always happy. Most men are with their children after they finish work, but I was working in the house, and we were together 24 hours. We didn't go anywhere if we couldn't take our kids. They maybe had a babysitter three times in their lives, and that was their grandma. I was afraid to leave them with someone because I thought they might steal 'em.'

He discovered Mary's talent quite by chance, after their itinerant lifestyle took them south to Treasure Island, Florida. Belatedly drawn towards middle American respectability, there he joined a country club and took up golf. The snobbery and pomposity sickened him, and he soon left. 'They were the most selfish, stuck-up set of people I've ever met, and I met them all again later on the professional tennis circuit,' he says.

However, it was at the club's junior tennis clinic that Mary hit her first ball. Already a tall, athletic girl, her strokes were so powerful and well-timed that by her second visit Jim was visualising trophies.

Whether or not he also saw his daughter as a meal-ticket for life is open to debate. In the eyes of some tennis watchers, all of the pushiest dads from hell are motivated by greed, from Jennifer Capriati's hot-tempered Italian father Stefano through to the latest incarnation, Damir Dokic, father of the 17-year-old Yugoslav-Australian prodigy Jelena. Others, such as seasoned Florida tennis writer Darryl Fry, take a more benevolent view. 'I think not enough credit is given to guys like Jim, and Richard Williams [father of Venus and Serena]. They are not professional coaches, just ordinary dads, but they have taken these girls and developed them into world-class champions. I think they do it primarily out of love for their daughters. That's pretty amazing.'

Both the Pierces, adds Fry, made extraordinary personal sacrifices to help Mary reach the top. 'They owned a very nice home and they sold that and moved into an apartment so they had money for Mary to travel to tournaments and buy equipment. They also sold a couple of cars and bought this old white Cadillac [Jim's preferred make] for $200. They would drive from here to South Carolina for her to play a tournament, with the whole family staying in one room of some cheap motel. After the games Jim would take Mary to the nearest K-Mart store and have her hit up against the car park wall till very late. You see it all the time in American sport: the devoted father giving everything for his kid. Jim just went over the mark a little bit, that's all.'

Fry may be right, but had Pierce been coaching Mary on a public court in England it would have been a case for Childline. 'When she was 10 or 11 years old I would stand on her side of the net and smash maybe 700 balls as hard as I could for her to try and return,' he says without remorse. 'I'd hit them straight at her, too. I didn't deliberately hit her, I did it to build her reflexes.' The next day, when Jim drove us to a Bradenton court to have his photograph taken, I asked him to hammer balls at me from point-blank range so that I might understand how his daughter had felt. Even for an adult accustomed to facing fast bowling as a wicketkeeper it was an unnerving experience.

Yet as Mary's success grew, so Pierce's intensity increased and his grip tightened. By 1989, when she became the youngest American to turn professional, aged 14 years and two months, he had started berating her opponents and shouting the cringe-making words of 'encouragement' that would eventually make her freeze, mid-match. He had also taken her out of the school system, asking Yannick to teach her, and effectively banned her from having boyfriends. 'What did she need 'em for? Once they get hooked on a guy their tennis is finished. It was my job to keep 'em away.'

You don't have to be a Freudian psychologist to wonder whether Pierce unconsciously regarded himself as a substitute. 'I used to love walking behind Mary, say at the French Open,' he recalls moonily. 'I enjoyed watching people watching her because it makes you feel you've actually accomplished what you wanted in life. They started to call her The Body, and having her look good was all part of it. When she was still 13 I had a guy from Naf Naf [the clothing company] come up to me and offer $50,000 a year for three years to wear their stuff. At 15 she got a one million dollar contract from Ellesse. And when Phil Knight, the owner of Nike, saw her for the first time at the Australian Open he said, "I want that girl. I don't care what it costs."

'Someone told me Conchita Martinez couldn't get a contract at that time and she only wanted $100,000. Why? Because Mary was no truck driver, no greasy pork-chop. Mary was the golden girl and everybody wanted her. I was proud she looked so good and I used to tell her, "Walk on the court like you own it."

'She had beautiful rings, a Rolex on her arm, and a six-coral diamond bracelet, care of papa, that I wouldn't mind having back now. I wanted people to look at her and say she was successful and see that I was involved with her.

'About that time I read that Prince Rainier of Monaco's son wanted to be a sports agent, so I sent him a portfolio of Mary's pictures and offered him the chance to manage her. I said I thought she looked just like Grace Kelly. I got a nice letter back saying he knew who Mary was, but nothing came of it. She wore her hair long and it was really blond, and I was planning to have it braided right down her back, but I never got the chance ' His eyes grow suddenly distant, and he swallows hard, 'Cos then she upped and left.'

According to tennis folklore it was Mary who decided to banish her father seven years ago, but Jim Pierce tells a different story. While he concedes that his daughter was tiring of his explosive temper, he insists that Yannick cynically engineered the split because she wanted to exert control over Mary's affairs. 'I don't know if it was just for the money, but I'd thought our marriage was good. We had sex every day two or three times for 20 years, and she liked it as much as I did, believe me. But we had a power struggle over Mary.

'The Mother [Pierce never uses Yannick's name] was constantly trying to give her to some fancy new coach. She said Mary needed a Bolletieri or a Pecci, but we had gone from nowhere to No 12 in the world without any help. I wanted to go on as we were. I mean, when you have someone who hits the ball as hard as Mary you don't need all these clever tactics. What do you you tell Muhammad Ali? Knock the sucker out, right?'

Yannick, he claims, made her move at the French Open in 1993. 'Without my knowing they told the people at the [International Tennis] Federation that if I said anything at Mary's match they wanted me out of the court. So I wait till the crowd quietens, as always, and shout the usual stuff: "Come on Mary! Let's go! Fight! You're the boss!" And I was out of there, and right out of their lives.'

The authorities got rid of him once and for all by invoking a new anti-disruption regulation, still known as The Jim Pierce Rule. Mary and her mother acted more pragmatically. 'We were living in the house in Delray and they just never came home,' says Jim, running a hand through his Engelbert quiff. 'The fox had stolen the chicken and they didn't care about the drippings hanging around the place.

'They bought a $600,000 three-storey house with an elevator overlooking the water here in Bradenton, and there wasn't a phone so I couldn't even call them. I would drive over and try to talk sense to Mary, but I never saw her. Then I sat by the phone, waiting, hoping, but for two or three years we didn't speak a word.'

Small wonder, perhaps, given his behaviour in Italy a few weeks after they parted. Reduced to checking into the tournament hotels where his daughter was staying, like some deranged stalker, he was spotted in the corridor just along from Mary's room by her bodyguard, a strapping shaven-headed Frenchman half his age. The result was a fist-fight that still has Jim salivating with pleasure.

'I approached him sideways on, right shoulder-first,' he drools, his testosterone levels almost visibly rising. 'That way they never suspect that you're a leftie and you're gonna sock 'em. Caught him right under the nose. If you catch 'em there they go down every time. He ran away then came back, so I put him down again and I kept on punching him. I tell ya, that guy must've liked being hit.

'He went away and came back with a knife and he cut me here,' he indicates a four-inch scar on his left forearm. 'Sliced through an artery and went right to the bone. Blood was pumping everywhere but I didn't care. I was high as a kite 'cos I'd kicked his ass. The police came and asked if I wanted to press charges but I didn't. It would have been like suing Mary, because she had hired him.'

Did he now regret his actions, I ask, realising at once the futility of inviting a man like Pierce to question his own behaviour.

'Nope, never regretted anything I did in life,' he replies. But then an unlikely thing happens. Jim Pierce, whose conversation so far has revolved exclusively around fighting, sex and power tennis betrays some fallibility. In the months after Mary left him, he confesses poignantly, he succumbed to hypochondria and depression.

'It destroyed me. I started having palpitations, and this and that. It's like for a while I thought everything was wrong with me. And then finally, one day, I ran across it in the medical book. It's called grieving, like when you've lost someone who's died.'

Had he sought professional help? 'No, no crutches or medication. It's just part of life and you have to live through it.' Abruptly, he switches from discussing his emotions to the altogether safer ground of the fortune he lost.

Mary has earned more than $5 million in prize money but Pierce says that is a fraction of her total earnings. Reliable sources inform him that commercial deals have brought her a further £20m, at least. And yet - the iniquity! - after devoting 18 years of his life to her, he has received 'next to nothing'.

'I've been screwed, blued and tattooed,' he says, claiming his exploitation has made him wise to every contractual wheeze, so that the fathers of other players now consult him for advice, among them Richard Williams and Greg Rusedski's father, Tom.

'When Mary opened her first account in Miami somebody had to be a signatory because she was a minor,' he explains with ill-concealed bitterness. 'My name never went on the account but The Mother's did. I never cared about money, only about my daughter and her future. You see, I thought the money would take care of itself. I never lost my focus. They lost theirs.'

He pauses, clenches both fists, then adds, 'Can you imagine if you had a wife and children and maybe $25m in the bank and one day you came home and you had nothing at all? And after you had given 18-and-a-half years of your life? For what? It's just an empty space, right?'

Four years ago, by now divorced and reduced to making jewellery again, he filed a lawsuit in Palm Beach County Court, demanding one quarter of Mary's earnings, present and future. The case, which was never reported in the press, was settled outside court, with Pierce receiving $500,000 plus the right to live in the smart, two-bedroomed Delray Beach condo for as long as he chooses. Hardly next to nothing, I put it to him.

'It is when you consider that half of it went to the attorneys and the taxman,' he retorts. 'Quarter of a million ain't gonna keep me for life. Not when I get sick and I don't have medical insurance. And Mary drives round in Porsches and has homes all over the place. If I had her money I'd say, "Dad, whaddya want?" Wouldn't you?'

Smiling at the irony, Pierce says it was the legal wrangle that caused Mary to start speaking to him again. 'I think she and The Mother felt they'd come off better if she started being nice to me,' he says sardonically. Until this year they continued to exchange small talk in sporadic and stilted long-distance calls. Then, in February, as Jim was contemplating another empty summer, Mary picked up the phone in Japan. He has since discovered that it was her fiancé, Roberto Alomar, second baseman for the Cleveland Indians baseball team and a far bigger name than Mary in American sport, who urged her to contact him.

'Roberto is a great guy, but I've known that for a long time. When they became engaged I drove over to the Indians' spring training camp in Ford Lauderdale without him knowing and checked him out,' Pierce says a touch eerily. 'I just wanted to watch him and see what kind of guy my daughter was gonna marry, and I wasn't disappointed.'

He and Mary agreed to train together during the last week of February, and Jim suggested that they should 'get back to grass roots'. So instead of working out in 'some fancy country club', they joined the fun players at the Bradenton Community College courts, right opposite the swanky Bolletieri Academy where Mary usually practises.

'All the people from Bolletieri could see us, and there were holes in the nets and everything, but I couldn't care less,' he says. 'After working in a place like that, when you get to Wimbledon or the Roland Garros you think you've gone to heaven.

'We did seven or eight hours hard work, just like we used to, and afterwards Mary gave me a big hug and a kiss, and she thanked me. And some of the coaches from the academy came on over and said, "Mr Pierce, we just want to say we're so glad to see you back with your daughter again." That was nice.

'Remember, I have become an outcast in tennis. I can get into tournaments now if I'm working with one of the players [he has recently coached Florida's Vince Spadea with some success] but people who used to kiss my ass ignore me. Richard Williams, who's a close buddy, says I've been treated worse than a black man on the circuit.'

For Pierce, the pressing question now is whether his brief and touching reunion will lead to the permanent working relationship he clearly craves. Though he and Mary secretly trained together again before the Ericsson Open in Key Biscayne at the end of March, the portents are not good, for already their personalities, both forceful in their different ways, are clashing.

Mary, whose one-track childhood has left her shy and socially awkward, and who loathes the spotlight, insists their arrangements be kept private. Their reunion has been reported briefly in the US media but she steadfastly refuses to discuss it, and a spokeswoman for her agent, IMG, told me curtly: 'Mary's not giving any interviews at the moment, and she certainly wouldn't want to comment on this.'

Jim is so desperate to shout his return from the rooftops that he readily defied her to give this interview. Mary apparently wants to work with her father on an ad hoc basis, whenever she feels in need of a boost. Jim, who believes her fitness has dipped as a result of ill-supervised, half-hearted training sessions, wants them to toil all day, every day.

Jim is also itching to start attending his daughter's matches again, but she is said to be appalled at the prospect and has made no attempt to have the ban lifted. 'We have heard that they have worked together on an unofficial basis, but we haven't had any request from either her or him to attend any tournaments,' says a WTA spokeswoman. 'If there was such a request then we would take a look at it.'

Mary's last coach was Michael de Jongh, whose best efforts were predictably slandered by her father, just like those of his predecessors: 'I mean, who are these guys? One minute they're gasoline pump attendants, the next they're tennis experts.' Mary and de Jongh parted company during the winter and she is now officially coachless. 'The last couple of tournaments her brother has been hitting with her,' adds the WTA source. 'Her father is certainly not listed as her coach anywhere.'

In the past it would have been Jim's way or no way. Now 25, and soon to be married, Mary is no longer willing to do as daddy says. 'There has been what you might call a role reversal,' he shrugs. 'I have to take her on her terms or I don't have any. I haven't been round my daughter for six, seven years, so for now I guess I have to go with her wishes.'

Apparently forgetting that she won the Australian Open without him, he adds: 'But I want nothing less than full control. If she gives me that she can still become No 1 in the world and she can win all those Grand Slam titles she would have won if she'd stuck with me.'

The message delivered with maximum force, the tennis dad from hell drains his frosted tankard of iced tea and reaches into his tight white shorts for the Cadillac keys. When will he and Mary work together again, I ask as he rises from the table. He just shrugs and wraps his tree-trunk arm around Sveta.

'Sex and fish!' she giggles knowingly for the umpteenth time. 'Me and Jim, two times a day, every day!' Pierce grins wickedly and steers her towards the waiting limousine. She may not be the woman he really wants beside him at the wheel, but today Sveta from Prague is the only blonde on offer.

Post-script: On April 22, a fortnight after our interview with Jim Pierce, Mary gave her best performance for years, thrashing Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario 6-1, 6-0 to win the £100,000 first prize at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Having finally made contact with Mary, Jim had trained her intensely for three days immediately prior to the tournament. Surely no coincidence, though sadly he wasn't around to accept my congratulations when I phoned him last week.

'Jim's not here any more,' his wife said tearfully. 'A few days after he saw you he came back, packed his clothes, and took all our money - $225,000 - in cash from the bank. He just said he was leaving me for another woman and he walked out.'

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