This Self-Portrait Not a Pretty Picture

Something’s different at the U.S. Open this year, something not having to do with construction or player boycotts. Nick Bollettieri, that tanned tennis fixture, will not be sighted grinning behind sunglasses in a players’ box on any of the show courts.

For the first time in a long time, Bollettieri is not coaching anyone good enough to pay attention to. He’s here, however, promoting his book, “My Aces, My Faults,” written with Dick Schaap.

The news that Bollettieri was writing a tell-all book was greeted with hardly disguised glee in the tennis world. Here was a man who knew the dark things lurking in the closets of top players. Alas, the book dishes less dirt about Monica Seles and Andre Agassi than Bollettieri himself.

He tells all, in detail, about his childhood as a self-described hustler and his five failed marriages. But beyond saying that Seles was at once his most demanding and most dedicated student, and revealing his financial agreement to coach Boris Becker--$180,000 a year plus 10% of Becker’s earnings, up to $1.25 million a year--Bollettieri fails to deliver on this “inside” account.

He said in a recent interview that he kept some secrets to spare the feelings of players who were quite young when they divulged them to Bollettieri. Another theory is that the International Management Group--which represents many of the players mentioned in the book and which owns the Bollettieri Tennis Academy--let Nick know that he’d best not embarrass their clients.

The biggest revelation is Bollettieri’s complex relationship with Agassi. Their longtime association has been severed, but the book’s obsession with Agassi indicates Bollettieri hasn’t completely let go.

Something about Agassi’s flamboyance intrigued Bollettieri from the start.

He writes: “Start with his appearance. He walked different, with his pigeon-toed gait, and he looked different, with his big eyes accented by makeup and, after he went through a crew-cut stage, his frosted, tinted hair running down his back. Sometimes he dyed his hair red, sometimes orange, sometimes both. He let his nails grow long, too, and painted them with polish, and he pierced his ears and wore earrings. He even wore lipstick once in a while.”

Bollettieri’s interest in Agassi included tolerating his erratic practice schedule and his indifferent academic record. But Bollettieri’s concern seemed not to extend to Agassi’s off-court behavior, such as his antics as a 15-year old:

“Andre built a pyramid in his room of miniature Jack Daniel’s bottles, all of them empty. How did they get empty? None of my coaches could figure it out. They never saw the bottles full, only empty. Maybe Andre bought empty bottles. It’s possible. I believe it.”

No one at the academy could figure out how the bottles became empty? It strains credulity that no one concluded that Agassi drank the liquor.

At least Bollettieri candidly admits he might not have acted if presented with evidence that Agassi broke academy rules.

“What would I have done? You put me on a lie detector test . . . I would have given him several chances. For Agassi, I would have.”

Which is more consideration than Bollettieri seems to have extended to any of his five wives.

Here’s his description of life with first wife, Phyllis: “She thought it would be nice if I at least spent some time with her and [their son] Jimmy Boy on Saturdays and Sundays. I preferred to go out with my buddies and drink and listen to jazz and party on the beach.”

Some time after that divorce, there was a complicated weekend when he proposed to one woman, then married another, a yarn he spins as a funny story. All of Bollettieri’s dicey escapades--he admits to stealing tennis equipment in the early days--are told in a breezy, it-was-all-so-madcap style that compresses marriage and divorce into a rollicking ride on a dysfunctional bus.

Each wife, it seems, at one point gave Bollettieri the same ultimatum: Choose between the latest tennis star/pupil or his family. He writes of one such moment with his last wife, “I didn’t hesitate. ‘I have to travel with Andre,’ I said.”

Bollettieri writes he packed up immediately, but notes, “I hated to leave my children, young Nicole and Alex, but I still think I made the right choice. Even though Andre and I also split two years later.”

A man not naturally given to introspection, Bollettieri’s saving grace is how candid he is about the impact of his choices. In an interview, he said he began to recognize and cringe at not just the brush-off treatment of his five wives, but particularly the lack of time spent with his five children when they were growing up.

“When the book was over, I said to myself, ‘I wonder how my kids will read this?’ ” Bollettieri said. “When all this was happening, I can’t say I really thought about all this.

“[My children] are insecure in a lot of ways. It was hard for them to understand that I would take a sport over them. I’m sure I gave them things, materialistically, to make up for not being there. When I was there, I was always thinking about doing more business. If I had to do it over again, I don’t think I’d be where I am today if I didn’t act as I did.”

Bollettieri is unrepentant . . . and unambiguous. His bottom line can be found on Page 64: “I really wanted to be the best, the most famous, the most important tennis coach in the world. I admit I also wanted to be rich.”

No kidding.