spiceboy
Jun 3rd, 2005, 05:45 PM
Frenchwoman puts family turmoil in the past.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/tennis/sfl-bricker02jun02,0,2371022.column?page=2&coll=sfla-sports-tennis
Published June 2, 2005
PARIS · Mary Pierce is in a good place now, an almost otherworldly place, far from the family upheavals, the booing of the French crowds and the controversies and anguish that once seemed to dominate her life.
To see her on and off the court now, stoic and at peace with herself, is to see a 30-year-old woman who has been quite transformed.
I have no doubt that if she loses her French Open semifinal today to Elena Likhovtseva, it won't diminish her happiness one iota. Nor, finally, will it affect her relationship with the largely fickle and demanding French fans.
If she has to walk off court a loser this afternoon, they will be chanting "Mah-ree, Mah-ree," just as they did as she swatted away Lindsay Davenport two days ago in the quarterfinals.
"It's true you change over the years. That's probably a good thing," Pierce said after winning her first-round match 10 days ago.
Throughout this tournament, I've never seen her so calm, almost blank with a lack of emotion at times. She smiled once during the Davenport match, after slashing a crosscourt backhand for a winner in the second set. She grinned for about 10 seconds, then went back to serve the next ball.
It's been 12 years since a half-dozen gendarmes in size-50 jackets escorted her father, Jim Pierce, off an outside court for "interruptive behavior." The French and the WTA Tour had had enough of his abusive patois and banned him from future events.
Not long afterward Mary and her French mother, Yannick, estranged themselves from her father. But he tracked them down to a hotel in Italy, where he got into a fight with their bodyguard.
"I walked toward him and he put his hand on me to stop me," Jim Pierce told me in an interview in September 1993. "I drilled him with a left. The guy's a sucker for a left. But as he got up he pulled a can out of his back pocket and Maced me."
Once inside Mary's room he got a towel, wiped his eyes and threw the towel at the bodyguard's feet. "When he looked down, it was hammer time. I must have hit him with four good shots," Pierce said. "When I hit him the fifth time, he pulled a knife and cut me across my arm. He cut me to the bone.
"The hell of it was, it was my own knife. I guess my wife had given it to him."
That's what her life used to be like, and that was just the beginning of years of ups and downs, mostly downs, both personally and professionally. She had a French mother, an American father and was born in Canada.
"I was a mutt," she said earlier this week. She wanted to be French and to be accepted as French, but she was not born here, nor did she live here. Nor did she speak with a classic French accent. She sounded more like an American who had learned French.
The turmoil in her family life contributed to other problems -- constant changes of coaches and poor performances. In 1996, when she was beaten badly by little regarded Barbara Rittner in the third round, she was booed off the French Open center court.
"It was a terrible feeling," Pierce said a few days ago. "They whistled. They started cheering for her. So I was like, `Am I still in France? Where am I? This isn't Germany?'"
She had a haughty attitude in those days, as if she was America's gift to French tennis, and she was very reclusive with the French media.
But gradually, as she matured, things improved, and when she won the 2000 French, the acceptance finally was there. By that time she had reconciled with her father, but her romance with baseball player Roberto Alomar was souring and she was, once again, into a period of weight gain.
It has been only in the last year that Pierce seems to have found inner peace, and it has come by moving to Paris and working with French coaches and trainers and getting a firmer grip on what she's all about.
She's 30 years old, and who can say that this isn't her final shot at a second French Open title and a third Grand Slam trophy (she won the 1995 Australian Open)?
"When I was younger, it was new and you don't know how to react. You don't understand why the public is reacting that way. You're trying to do your best. So I would take it personally as something that was directed at me," she said.
"Now, I understand people better, and I understand myself. That's why I've changed."
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/tennis/sfl-bricker02jun02,0,2371022.column?page=2&coll=sfla-sports-tennis
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/tennis/sfl-bricker02jun02,0,2371022.column?page=2&coll=sfla-sports-tennis
Published June 2, 2005
PARIS · Mary Pierce is in a good place now, an almost otherworldly place, far from the family upheavals, the booing of the French crowds and the controversies and anguish that once seemed to dominate her life.
To see her on and off the court now, stoic and at peace with herself, is to see a 30-year-old woman who has been quite transformed.
I have no doubt that if she loses her French Open semifinal today to Elena Likhovtseva, it won't diminish her happiness one iota. Nor, finally, will it affect her relationship with the largely fickle and demanding French fans.
If she has to walk off court a loser this afternoon, they will be chanting "Mah-ree, Mah-ree," just as they did as she swatted away Lindsay Davenport two days ago in the quarterfinals.
"It's true you change over the years. That's probably a good thing," Pierce said after winning her first-round match 10 days ago.
Throughout this tournament, I've never seen her so calm, almost blank with a lack of emotion at times. She smiled once during the Davenport match, after slashing a crosscourt backhand for a winner in the second set. She grinned for about 10 seconds, then went back to serve the next ball.
It's been 12 years since a half-dozen gendarmes in size-50 jackets escorted her father, Jim Pierce, off an outside court for "interruptive behavior." The French and the WTA Tour had had enough of his abusive patois and banned him from future events.
Not long afterward Mary and her French mother, Yannick, estranged themselves from her father. But he tracked them down to a hotel in Italy, where he got into a fight with their bodyguard.
"I walked toward him and he put his hand on me to stop me," Jim Pierce told me in an interview in September 1993. "I drilled him with a left. The guy's a sucker for a left. But as he got up he pulled a can out of his back pocket and Maced me."
Once inside Mary's room he got a towel, wiped his eyes and threw the towel at the bodyguard's feet. "When he looked down, it was hammer time. I must have hit him with four good shots," Pierce said. "When I hit him the fifth time, he pulled a knife and cut me across my arm. He cut me to the bone.
"The hell of it was, it was my own knife. I guess my wife had given it to him."
That's what her life used to be like, and that was just the beginning of years of ups and downs, mostly downs, both personally and professionally. She had a French mother, an American father and was born in Canada.
"I was a mutt," she said earlier this week. She wanted to be French and to be accepted as French, but she was not born here, nor did she live here. Nor did she speak with a classic French accent. She sounded more like an American who had learned French.
The turmoil in her family life contributed to other problems -- constant changes of coaches and poor performances. In 1996, when she was beaten badly by little regarded Barbara Rittner in the third round, she was booed off the French Open center court.
"It was a terrible feeling," Pierce said a few days ago. "They whistled. They started cheering for her. So I was like, `Am I still in France? Where am I? This isn't Germany?'"
She had a haughty attitude in those days, as if she was America's gift to French tennis, and she was very reclusive with the French media.
But gradually, as she matured, things improved, and when she won the 2000 French, the acceptance finally was there. By that time she had reconciled with her father, but her romance with baseball player Roberto Alomar was souring and she was, once again, into a period of weight gain.
It has been only in the last year that Pierce seems to have found inner peace, and it has come by moving to Paris and working with French coaches and trainers and getting a firmer grip on what she's all about.
She's 30 years old, and who can say that this isn't her final shot at a second French Open title and a third Grand Slam trophy (she won the 1995 Australian Open)?
"When I was younger, it was new and you don't know how to react. You don't understand why the public is reacting that way. You're trying to do your best. So I would take it personally as something that was directed at me," she said.
"Now, I understand people better, and I understand myself. That's why I've changed."
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/tennis/sfl-bricker02jun02,0,2371022.column?page=2&coll=sfla-sports-tennis