In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Mary Pierce [FRA]Born: 15 January 1975
Career: 1990-2006
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1995)
Peak Elo rating: 2,230 (4th place, 1995)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 18
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Mary Pierce had a word to describe the fans at Roland Garros. “They’re fickle about me,” she said.
She both was and was not a hometown hero. Born in Canada to a French mother and an American father and raised in Florida, she could just as easily have ended up playing for the USA. The French Federation landed her allegiance instead, and she spent her career representing the tricolore.
Pierce entered the French Open for the first time as a wild card in 1990. She was only 15 years old, yet she already had more than a year of pro experience. Her first two Roland Garros campaigns ended early at the hands of veteran stars Mary Joe Fernández and Gabriela Sabatini. In 1992, she reached her first second week in Paris, falling to an even younger rival, Jennifer Capriati. Capriati stopped her at the same stage the following year as well.
No one doubted that Mary had the tools to go further. Her groundstrokes were as powerful as any on tour. At five-feet-eleven-inches, she was one of the “big babes” who defined the era for commentator Mary Carillo. One fellow player said of her baseline weapons, “When Mary Pierce hits the ball, it stays hit.”
The breakthrough finally came in front of the “home” fans in 1994. There was nothing in her record–except that tantalizing potential–to suggest it was coming. She bulldozed the French Open field, dropping only six games in five matches. She double-bageled Lori McNeil and dropped a 6-1, 6-1 defeat on Amanda Coetzer.
Pierce with Arantxa Sánchez Vicario
ahead of the 1994 Roland Garros final
She was even better against top seed Steffi Graf in the semi-final. Pierce simply blasted the German off the court. She won 6-2, 6-2, handing Graf her worst defeat at a major in three years. After the match, Steffi spoke for plenty of frustrated women on tour: “What tactic can you have when she puts away every point?”
The pressure finally caught up with the 19-year-old before the final. Arantxa Sánchez Vicario had the patience to withstand Pierce’s barrage, and she held off the challenge, 6-4, 6-4.
Mary won over the French crowd, but only temporarily. While she became a grand slam champion in Australia the following year, she won only ten matches in her next five appearances at Roland Garros. The Parisian crowds booed as often as they cheered.
No matter. Mary Pierce had faced worse. Even after a decade on tour, she had plenty of room to develop, physically, tactically, and mentally. In time, she would win over the French gallery for good.
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The USTA had plenty of chances to regret letting Pierce out of their grasp. The French flag showed next to her name as she reached six major finals and ascended to third place in the WTA rankings. Even though she spoke French like a Floridian, she helped her mother’s country to Fed Cup titles in 1997 and 2003, defeating the Americans in the final of the latter campaign.
But this was no failure of talent evaluation. In the late 1980s, USTA scouts recognized the raw talent that would take Mary to the top of the game, even as they threw unprecedented financial and organizational support behind Capriati. Coaches such as Ron Woods and Stan Smith were wowed by what she had accomplished by her early teens, and they wanted to help her improve her match-play skills.
What the USTA couldn’t do was deal with Jim Pierce. Jim was “the original tennis dad from hell,” according to a 2000 profile in the Guardian. He was far from the first–Andrea Jaeger could tell you stories about her father Roland–but he brought the type to its apotheosis.
Mary recently told the New York Times, “From age 10 to 18, my life was basically hell on earth.” As soon as Jim saw the spark of her talent, he took full control of her development. Coaches and hitting partners would come and go, but he never let them get too close. They often chose to stay at arm’s length because Jim was outspoken at his best, physically threatening at his worst.
Jim Pierce, showing restraint
By the time Mary was 12, her father had crossed so many lines that the Florida Tennis Association banned him from tournaments for six months. He hit a fellow parent, and he berated Mary’s opponents in profanity-laced outbursts. Rumors swirled that he was physically abusive of his daughter. He described himself as a former beach bum, but in reality, he was a convicted felon who had served prison time in two states.
His behavior didn’t improve. The rest of the family–Mary, her mother Yannick, and younger brother David–split from him. He followed her on tour anyway. She filed restraining orders and hired a new bodyguard at each tour stop. The Women’s Tennis Council passed a rule in late 1992 making it possible to ban parents and coaches from tournaments. It was no secret why. The “Jim Pierce rule” was invoked against its namesake in a matter of months.
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Woods, the USTA coach, delivered the understatement of the year to Sports Illustrated in 1993: “It’s surprising that she could play with that kind of baggage.” When she turned 18 that January, she was ranked 12th in the world, with four tour-level titles to her name.
With Jim out of the way, Mary returned to Nick Bollettieri’s academy, where she had briefly trained before Jim alienated yet another group of peers. Bollettieri set her two goals. She would need to get in better shape (he wrote to her, “you are fat!”), and she would have to learn to fend for herself on court, rather than relying so much on support from courtside.
Results came quickly. Pierce claimed her first top-ten scalps, beating both Sabatini and Martina Navratilova at the 1993 year-end championships. She reached the Roland Garros final the following year. After a particularly hard off-season training regimen with her full-time coach, Sven Groeneveld, she won the 1995 Australian Open. She never lost more than four games in a set, and she finished the tournament with wins over the top two seeds, Sánchez Vicario and Conchita Martínez.
Most importantly, from Bollettieri’s perspective, she did it without him. He had to leave Australia before the semi-final, but he saw on television that she turned to her coach’s box only when it was time to celebrate the victory.
Ironically, her new coach was a bit like her old one. When they split in 1996, Pierce compared the two:
My dad was very outspoken, like Nick is. My dad would talk to anyone about anything, kind of like Nick. And my dad would talk about everything openly and sometimes exaggerate it or blow it up, kind of like Nick.
Jim could be menacing and short-sighted, but as he would point out to anyone who would listen, he took his daughter to 14th in the world rankings by himself. While Mary distanced herself from her father, she–like Andrea Jaeger with Roland–gave him a great deal of credit for her success and insisted he acted with the best of intentions. Her teen years may have been “hell on earth,” but she believed she would never have become a champion otherwise.
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Pierce couldn’t sustain the level that took her to two grand slam finals in the space of eight months. 1996 was a particular struggle. After the break from Bollettieri, she reached only one final and lost to 82nd-ranked Barbara Rittner at Roland Garros. She dropped out of the WTA top 20 for the first time in nearly five years.
Steadily, she regained control of her health, her weight, and the family situation that all too often made sports columns sound like the gossip page. She reconciled with Jim and occasionally even trained with him, though in limited doses and only on her own terms. She made it back to the Australian Open final in 1997, won four titles in 1998, and returned to the top five by the end of 1999.
In early 2000, she hired a a familiar face as her new coach. Brother David was no Jim, but he did work her hard. Around the same time, a conversation with a fellow player, Linda Wild, persuaded her to become a born-again Christian. The shift in her mindset was significant enough that some of her peers assumed she was seeing a sports psychologist.
The new outlook–or perhaps the new coaching arrangement–showed up in her results immediately. At Hilton Head in April, she won the title with the loss only twelve games in five matches. After beating Monica Seles, 6-1, 6-1, she destroyed Sánchez Vicario in the final. Her 6-1, 6-0 victory required only 83 points, 27 of which were winners off the Pierce racket.
Despite the bludgeoning beatdowns she handed out in South Carolina, Mary’s game had become more well-rounded. Perhaps sharing a court with master tactician Martina Hingis helped: The two women paired up that year at the Australian Open, where they reached the final together. They would win the doubles title in Paris.
Pierce’s newfound courtcraft allowed her to clear the final hurdle at Roland Garros. She beat Seles in a quarter-final slugfest, then narrowly defeated Hingis in the semis after squandering match points and losing the second set. The final against Conchita Martínez was comparatively simple. Pierce hit 33 winners to her opponent’s 16, and she won 26 of 36 points at net. She seized her second grand slam title, 6-2, 7-5.
For a day, at least, the French had nothing to be fickle about.
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Mary had no opportunity to build on her triumph. Back and shoulder injuries limited her to only 10 events in the next 18 months, and she wouldn’t be fully healthy for longer yet. She helped the French to a Fed Cup championship in 2003, but she wouldn’t reach her another final on her own until the following year, when Kim Clijsters beat her at the Paris Indoors.
Having won majors at age 20 and age 25, Pierce couldn’t reasonably hope for the pattern to continue with another grand slam title after her 30th birthday. Yet she nearly pulled it off.
Back again with her brother, Mary rounded into form just in time for the French Open. Her ranking remained outside the top 20, so a difficult draw awaited her. Just to reach the semi-finals, she needed to beat three top-ten seeds: Vera Zvonareva, Patty Schnyder, and top-ranked Lindsay Davenport. After breezing past Elena Likhotseva in the semi-finals, she was finally stopped by Justine Henin, who beat her, 6-1, 6-1. It was her fifth major final, a full half-decade after her fourth.
She wouldn’t need to wait as long for number six. She reached the quarter-finals at Wimbledon, then won ten straight sets to take a title in San Diego. At the US Open, she got her revenge against Henin in the fourth round, then beat top-tenners Amelie Mauresmo and Elena Dementieva for a second major final of the season. This time it was Clijsters who left her as the runner-up.
Two months and one Moscow title later, Pierce was–again–back in the top five. She finished her campaign at the year-end championships with the best week of her career. She beat Davenport, Clijsters, Mauresmo, and Dementieva before losing a marathon three-setter to Mauresmo in the final. Measured by consistency, this comeback was even better than the one that had earned her a Roland Garros title five years earlier.
Alas, it didn’t last. A new set of injuries kept her out of action from February to July. Then at Linz in October, she tore a ligament in her left knee, collapsing on court only a few points from a second-round victory. Her career was over, even if it would take a few years before she made it official.
Pierce’s legacy–and her treatment by the French crowd–has become less complicated in the years since. Her biography is no longer dominated by her father’s misbehavior, no matter how much it explains her rocky rise to the top. Her bad losses are largely forgotten, no more than footnotes next to the triumphant wins. Her devastating groundstrokes–the hardest hit by any of the “big babes” of the 1990s and the core of her success on tour–are more than enough to ensure her a place in tennis history.