Pam Shriver’s Tennis Juggling Act

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — It was late afternoon of an early round at the BNP Paribas Open in the California desert, and Pam Shriver was having a day.

There were practice and strategy sessions with Donna Vekic, the talented 26-year-old Croatian whom she has been helping to coach since October. She went back and forth with Lindsay Brandon, the WTA Tour’s new security director, the case that has become Shriver’s focus for the past year.

She also spent time with a woman named Karen Denison Clark, who had reached out to Shriver in February as a fellow sexual assault survivor. Still ahead was a night game to call as a commentator for the Tennis Channel.

That’s how it is with Shriver these days. Long known to fans as a 21-time Grand Slam doubles champion and leading television analyst, Shriver’s life changed last year when she first spoke openly about the man who coached her when she was a teenager. Don Candy, who passed away in 2020, was 50 years old and Shriver was 17 when the relationship moved beyond coaching. Shriver now understands that the relationship, which lasted five years, was sexually and emotionally abusive.

Since telling her story, Shriver’s existence has become a test of juggling often conflicting missions. She is a leading face and voice for tennis. She is also the tip of the spear in the fight to expose abuse. She’s one of the game’s few female coaches, as well as an ally for survivors of the kind of harassment she says is all too common.

“I don’t mind hurting women’s tennis if it means helping women tennis players,” said 60-year-old Shriver last week, sitting at a picnic table as fans flocked to the grounds of the BNP Paribas Open, the so-called fifth slam. with Clark beside her. “This is a tour that has looked the other way for decades and decades.”

She told her story, she said, because she wanted to change the culture of her sport, and the effects have already been significant.

Shortly after Shriver went public, WTA Tour CEO Steve Simon announced that the organization would overhaul its security policies and hire its first security director. Brandon, a lawyer, began a mandate late last year to make the sport safer by overseeing investigations into abuse complaints and reviewing the rules and standards of the WTA Tour.

At the BNP Paribas Open, her first tournament, she met Shriver and dozens of players, and said she spent most of her first three months at work investigating ongoing investigations. Her first major move was to require anyone seeking qualification for the women’s tour, including players and members of their support staff, to complete a new online safety education program before the French Open.

After Shriver spoke with International Tennis Federation president Dave Haggerty, the organization demanded that a wider range of people adhere to its guidelines and tightened its rules about prohibited behavior.

Her advocacy also led to her coaching stint with Vekic, a member of the WTA Tour players’ council, when a discussion about protection at a tournament in San Diego turned into a conversation about Vekic’s game. Within weeks, Vekic had added Shriver to her coaching staff, making her one of the few female coaches in professional tennis.

Her biggest impact, however, may be in her silent conversations with current and former players about their experiences with coaches whose behavior has ranged from inappropriate to abusive to potentially illegal, conversations like the one that began with an email from Clark on Feb. 7.

Like Shriver, Clark, now 65, was a top youth player in the Washington, DC, area in the 1960s and 1970s. Shriver remembered that Clark was older and better than she was, but didn’t know why her fledgling tennis career had largely failed before it began. Clark kept the reason to herself for over 30 years before telling her husband in 2006.

“I thought, ‘If I put it away, lock the closet and throw away the key, it will never bother me,'” Clark said. “But then my kids got older and they moved out, and it just had more space.”

In the summer of 1973, when she was 15, a coach with a burgeoning reputation saw Clark playing at a tennis camp and visited her parents to work with their daughter. Clark had already competed in some of the most competitive age group tournaments. Working with an emerging coach felt like an opportunity.

The New York Times has not been able to speak to Clark’s former coach, despite calling his cell phone and sending several messages to an email address, to his most recent workplace and through social media.

That fall, Clark said, the coach asked her to accompany him to an adult clinic he held at a resort in Charlottesville, Virginia, where her sister was in college. The first night, Clark said, the coach took her to the hotel bar under the guise of meeting other clinic participants, but they weren’t there.

Clark remembers giving her a glass of “something brown.” She remembers stumbling down a hallway and entering the carriage room. The next thing she remembers is getting on the bed. She lay on her back with her tennis skirt around her knees and he wiped her stomach with tissues. The coach then drove Clark to her sister’s mansion.

“I woke up the next day thinking I could never tell anyone about this,” she said.

She continued training with the coach for several more months until she could barely hold her racket without shaking and her game fell apart.

Last April, when Shriver told her story about “The tennis podcastClark listened. In December, after a successful battle with breast cancer, she began drafting an email, a draft of which remained on her computer for two months before sending it to Shriver, who replied 90 minutes later. They exchanged emails and had a video call a week later, during which Clark filled in the details. She did not file a complaint at the time and said she does not intend to now. She wanted to tell her story in hopes it would encourage other women to tell theirs.

“It made me feel like I was going crazy,” Clark said last week as she sat next to Shriver.

Shriver said she had felt the same way during the five years Candy coached her. Her lessons from that experience are at the heart of what she has tried to convey to the likes of Simon and Haggerty, offering ideas for better certification of coaches and requiring players to change coaches if they become involved with a current coach.

She urged Haggerty to make abuse monitoring the third pillar of the federation’s independent enforcement arm, the International Tennis Integrity Agency, alongside doping and corruption, including match fixing.

An ITF spokesperson said on Friday that the organization and its protection team, including an investigator, were committed to “working with all survivors – including Pam – to ensure their voices and opinions are included.”

Shriver hoped the tour would move faster than it has been, with the current promise of a new clear code of conduct in 2024.

“That’s a whole year later than I was told,” Shriver said, donning the agitator hat.

However, she has found her first encounters with Brandon encouraging. As Shriver sees it, tennis players have led among female athletes, having long since received equal pay in the biggest tournaments, as well as a notoriety far beyond what women have received in other sports.

The Tour’s Code of Ethics for Coaches already discourages intimate relationships between coaches and players and prohibits them for players under the age of 18. Brandon wants to establish a basic code of minimum standards and rules, as well as “an environment where people feel safe to speak up” and don’t fear retaliation.

The WTA declined to say how many cases are currently on its record.

At times, Shriver’s conflicting roles can be at odds. During the Australian Open, she condemned Elena Rybakina’s coach Stefano Vukov on Twitter for his aggressive and public criticism of Rybakina from the coaching box at the court. Her messages drew a rebuke from Rybakina, who defended Vukov. She was rumored to have violated an unwritten code – that coaches should not publicly criticize rival coaches.

Still, she said the juggling act had paid off so far, sometimes for unexpected reasons.

At a Friday morning cafe, Bradley Polito, the father of a 7-year-old daughter named Madeleine who is addicted to the sport, came over to introduce himself and thanked Shriver for everything she had said.

Polito explained that he had no background in sports. Shriver’s story, he said, opened his eyes and drove him to make sure his daughter had a female coach.

“It’s almost like a North Star to us,” he said.