College, the Army, Marriage,
Japan, Jimmy Boy
Nick Bollettieri
Even though I was a pretty darn good quarterback and might have played on a few small college teams, my dad had other ideas. At Fordham University, his professors were Jesuit priests who valued learning, and he wanted me to have a good Catholic education.
He became good friends with a priest there named Father Colkin who, among his other duties, was in charge of intramural sports. In one of their conversations, Father Colkin mentioned that he was being transferred to Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, a small school of 1,500 students.
He was going to be the athletic director there and promised my dad that if he sent me to Spring Hill, he would make sure I took part in the sports activities, although they only had intramural football.
I was surprised that Dad insisted on driving me himself from New York to Alabama--I figured he would just put me on a plane. I didn't know what to expect, but when we arrived and drove down the long entrance road lined with beautiful azalea bushes to the administration building, I noticed that the men there were all dressed in black with white collars.
They were priests and lay brothers, and they would be my teachers. Jesuits! I didn't say much, but as time passed I found out how to sway them, and most of the time, I got things my way.
I majored in Spanish. Mr. Cuen, my language teacher, wasn't a priest and had a large family whose health he worried about. By then, my dad was working for a pharmaceutical company, and so I had him send down some special vitamins to give to Mr. Cuen. When the time came for the final, I told him I wasn't prepared for it.
I asked if I could just put down what I knew, and he could grade me on that? He agreed and I managed to squeak by. The philosophy teacher, Father O'Keefe, liked to tipple, and taking him out for a glass of wine from time to time did wonders for my grades.
It's not an exaggeration to say that by the time I was an upperclassman, I basically ran the whole college. Every important student activity went through me. I organized everyone's social lives, setting my friends up with dates, pulling off pranks and hazing freshmen who were too full of themselves.
As in high school, I made no big academic splash, managing to get by in my classes while concentrating on ROTC and sports. I participated in intramural football and, following my Uncle John's advice, went out for the tennis team and played both singles and doubles the next four years. Although I had fun, I knew I had no special talent for tennis and had no plans to do anything with it in the future. That would prove to be quite a turnabout.
Jimmy Boy
My college years would have been a happy-go-lucky, all American experience if it hadn't been for a tragic event that befell my family. You always hear about terrible accidents that happen to others, but you never think it will happen to you, and then one day, it hits with a vengeance.
In my case, it occurred when I was 19, the winter of my sophomore year. I was making one of my rare visits to the campus library--I considered it sort of out of bounds and preferred to spend my time with my "underbosses" planning social activities.
I can still remember looking up from my textbook to see Father O'Keefe walking towards me. He had such a serious expression I figured I must be in big trouble. But then he sat down next to me and told me that my younger brother was dead.
My mom would hang up clothes to dry in the basement of our house. Apparently, Jimmy Boy was on his way down to the basement and tripped, fell down the stairs and hung himself on the clothesline. He had just had breakfast, and as the line cut across his throat, he vomited and choked on his food.
I was stunned. I hardly heard Father O'Keefe assuring me that it was all part of God's divine wisdom and that God had big plans for my brother. On my flight from Mobile to New York, I was in a daze.
I went directly to the funeral home. When I saw my brother lying in the coffin with nothing but kindness written across his innocent face, a wave of hopeless sadness washed over me, and I sobbed uncontrollably. It still happens sometimes, even today, 65 years later.
It was by far the most traumatic event that I've ever experienced. So many people say that time will heal everything, but whenever I think of Jimmy Boy today, tears come to my eyes.
I think about what magnificent feats he might have accomplished. My parents never got over his loss either. Even now, I can't figure out why he was taken so soon. My only hope is that Jimmy Boy can look down, smile and say, "Big Brother Nick, I'm still proud of you!"
A Vow
I returned to Spring Hill with a heavy heart, vowing to make something of myself, to make my life matter. I decided to become a Navy fighter pilot. So in May of 1953, I traveled to New Orleans to take the exam for the Naval Air Corps.
I passed the physical part of the test, but didn't do so well on the written part. I was deeply disappointed. I haven't had many regrets in life, but for more than 40 years I couldn't look up at a plane flying overhead without wishing I was the pilot.
Upon my college graduation, I received a second lieutenant commission from the ROTC and was assigned to the Army's Transportation Corps at Fort Story near Norfolk, Virginia.
On weekends off, I would travel to Virginia Beach, Virginia for fun and relaxation and to have a few drinks. It was on the Fourth of July in 1953 that I met a girl named Phyllis Johnson. She and her sister Shirley were at a club on the boardwalk.
They had come east for greater opportunities than a small, sleepy town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains offered. Phyllis worked as a lab technician for an orthodontist and loved to dance.
That night, we danced for more than two hours. It got late and as they were leaving, I asked where they normally went to go swimming. Phyllis said at the beach by the Coast Guard building. From then on, whenever I had time off and on weekends, Phyllis and I would go surfing there.
I was not happy in the Transportation Corps, so I volunteered to become a paratrooper and began my jump training in Fort Benning, Georgia. Some of my friends kidded me that I only did it for the dough--we got an extra $150 per jump, a lot of money at the time.
But there was more to it. Many of my buddies dropped out when they weren't able to keep up with the mental and physical demands to succeed in an elite unit. Each member of the team had to be exceptional. Excuses were not tolerated.
I can still remember when our drill sergeant said "give me 10," meaning 10 pushups. We had to take a two-second pause between each rep. This made it increasingly difficult to perform the exercise and ridiculously difficult to handle the next 10 pushups that we knew were coming demanding.
To make it worse the sergeant had us do the pushups in the mud. He knew that most of us would end up face down. His mission was to find out who would quit. Yes, the training was insanely difficult. But sometime during the six-week training program, I realized that we were being pushed to accomplish what others felt couldn't be done.
This was a life lesson. Only a few, determined individuals possess the resolve and focus to become the best at anything. I wanted to be one of them. I made it through the six weeks of training and would later employ similar tactics at my tennis academy.
I graduated jump school and earned my paratrooper wings. I was now Second Lieutenant Nicholas J. Bollettieri 04003116 in the 187th Airborne at Fort Campbell in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.
Besides our military duties, we also played football. It was highly competitive with teams from other bases. It was a lot of fun, especially when the pretty girls came to watch us play.
Unfortunately, things were about to change. One afternoon, I was late returning from off base for a football practice. I had a beautiful, souped up, yellow and green Ford convertible that my dad had given me when I graduated from college.
100mph
In my rush to get back on time, I was stopped by a state trooper who clocked me doing over 100 mph. I guess I wanted to be a fighter pilot so badly that was as close as I could get to flying.
The incident was turned over to the military police and because I was an officer, referred to the commanding general, General Smith. He reamed me out for being so reckless--as if jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet was a rational act--and said that I was guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer. For punishment, he gave me an Article 15 citing, ordering me to be reassigned to Japan.
One of my innate gifts is to extract the positive out of difficult circumstances. So I actually looked forward to spending the remainder of my military career in Japan. The Korean War was over. How bad could it be?
So I drove that same car to my parents' home. We had never told Mom that I had been jumping out of airplanes for the past several months. We knew her nerves would have gone haywire at the thought.
We also spared her the news that I had been reassigned as a punishment. We led her to believe that the government was providing me with the opportunity to travel and see exotic parts of the world.
Phyllis
As I traveled to the west coast to get ready for my departure to Japan, I began thinking about Phyllis. I called her up and we talked for a few minutes. I asked if she would visit with me before I left for Asia. She laughed and said, "Nicky, you're crazy." Not being a guy who takes no for an answer, I asked again a few more times and got the same response. So finally I gave up.
On the day before my departure, an announcement came over the speaker system at the base in San Francisco: “Nicholas Bollettieri please report to the orderly room." I thought for sure that I had managed to get into trouble again and spent the time on my way to the orderly room trying to figure out what rule I might have violated.
When I finally got there, imagine my surprise to find Phyllis waiting for me. She had apparently changed her mind. I proposed to her on the spot, and we were married in the base chapel a few hours before I left for Asia on September 15, 1954. Phyllis had thought to pack a wedding gown in her suitcase and we went before a newly appointed judge who waived the typical three-day waiting period.
Phyllis returned to Roanoke and I shipped out to Japan, where I was stationed on the island of Kyushu. With Mount Tsurumi and the Pacific Ocean as backdrops and warm weather, it was a tropical paradise, but a lonely place for a newlywed. Fortunately, Mom and Dad decided to send Phyllis over to live with me as a honeymoon and Christmas present.
It was a wonderful time. We lived in a cottage off base, in a three house compound owned by a Japanese family. We even had a maid who would shine my boots to the point where I could see myself in them.
Phyllis and I took in the hot springs--steam rising from incredible cobalt blue water. We went to Tokyo on weekends. We'd go shopping and to nightclubs where we put on dance shows to American big band jazz music, which was all the rage.
During that time, my son Jimmy Boy was conceived. The rest of my tour was uneventful, and we left Japan to return to the United States in the summer of the following year. We ended up at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina where my son Jimmy Boy, named after my brother, was born in June of 1955.
