Crimes of the father

DADS ARE undervalued. Dads can ruin their children's lives. When they are good, they are very, very good. When they're bad, they're awful.

Most children survive an over ambitious father. Some have not. Take a walk around the playing fields of Ireland. Who's the well dressed gent on the sideline at the school's senior cup match screaming, "he's offside, Malachy. Take no prisoners. Shoe him out of it for God's sake?" Who's the strawberry-faced man screaming abuse at "the blind bloody referee" when a penalty is awarded against young Dermot? Who's the man who removes young Carol from her life long coach and friends because she's not improving her times quickly enough? Dad.

In ways, Steffi Graf is lucky. She appears to have kept herself together just. She seems to have survived her dad.

Having suffered her father Peter's admission to being an alcoholic, drug abusing tax dodger, who in 1988 and 1989 also had a highly publicised dalliance with a 20 year old nude model, her focus on tennis until this year's Australian Open in Melbourne has remained remarkably sharp.

Peter Graf and the fathers of other famous tennis players Jennifer Capriati, Mary Pierce and Andrea Jaeger, may be colourful characters, but they also add up to a real scary bunch.

Add `Big Roy' to the club and you have a natural president. `Big Roy' is the father of world supper middleweight IBF champion Roy Jones Junior, the guy Steve Collins really wants to fight. `Big Roy', like Graf, Jim Pierce, Stefano Capriati and Roland Jaeger, is not to be trifled with.

Picture the scene. `Little Roy' at 15 years of age down under the Interstate bridge that runs through his home in Pensacola, Florida. `Big Roy' nipping at his son's heels with a length of PVC pipe and stinging the backs of his thighs with it when ever he slows down.

"Wanna be a participant or a kingpin," screams Big Roy.

"Kingpin," answers `Little Roy'.

"Then what's wrong with you?" demands the father.

It's a cold world they inhabit. Basking in the reflected glory of their offspring and foisting their dreams on to shoulders ill equipped to bear the weight without something giving way, it has become, in tennis at least, a disturbing trend.

Recently three reporters from the German magazine Der Spiegel published a book called Reiclie Steffi, Arrnes Kind (Rich Steffi, Poor Child) depicting her life as a tennis prodigy under Peter's Svengali like control. The tabloid Bild also published excerpts from a confidential psychiatric profile of Peter, written for the courts by a Heidelberg psychiatrist.

It said that Peter's problems stem from a deep love for his father Alfons, which turned to loathing when he discovered that Alfons had taken a lover while his wife Rosemarie, Peter's mother, lay in hospital. Rosemarie committed suicide several months later after ingesting hydrochloric acid.

Peter, an insecure high school dropout, became addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs as the stresses of his daughter's career mounted. He gradually spun out of control, becoming erratic, overbearing and abusive, arguing with fans and insulting journalists who criticised her play. It is also reported that he covertly collected appearance money - a practice outlawed by the tennis authorities - from tournament promoters. His refusal to return a $300,000 appearance fee to promoter Ion Tiriac, after Steffi had pulled out of an 1992 tournament due to injury, put Germany's tax officials on his case. That and the fact that he hadn't filed tax returns for five years.

Compared to Mary Pierce's father Jim, Papa Graf is an angel. The WTA, who control women's tennis, were forced to introduce what is now called the `Pierce Rule' which bans Jim from entering any official WTA tournaments. They even distributed photographs of Pierce so that attendants would recognise him if he tried to gain entry to the public stands.

His tyrannical reign over his daughter was at its worst for the four years following her professional debut at 14. He had already served five years in prison for a series of crimes including grand larceny and had spent time in a New York psychiatric hospital having been diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

Jim once screamed "Kill the bitch", during a match, shouted abuse at opponents, and brawled with the bodyguard his daughter Mary had hired to protect herself from him.

Jim once hit her so hard that she was forced to withdraw from the Italian Open. She also alleges that he threatened to kill her. He was frog marched out of the French Open several years ago after another series of vulgar outbursts and when Mary was 18 she obtained a restraining order preventing him from harassing her. She even toured the circuit under a pseudonym to prevent him from tracking her down.

For some time Jimmy, who was dishonourably discharged from the marines at 19, followed his daughter's career on TV and sent her faxes asking for money. He then instigated a court case against her. "No one wants to sue his own daughter," he said, "but Mary is a prima donna bitch. She has no integrity, she does not care if I live or die."

Capriati and Jaeger were never subjected to the physical assaults Pierce had to endure, but their fathers' one dimensional approach to tennis was equally corrupting. Jaeger's father Roland, a former boxer, bricklayer and bartender, ensured she approached every match with a Spartan's mentality. Turning pro at 14 and rising to world number two by 16, Jaeger was the archetypal tennis prodigy.

After the 1982 French Open, she walked off court with her father talking incessantly into her ear every step of the way to the press conference. Andrea subsequently accused Martina Navratilova of beating her with illegal coaching. She claimed that Renee Richards and Nancy Lieberman, two of the winner's friends, had been in the stands sending Navratilova signals.

"Mentally wise I'm stronger than Martina," she said of the best woman player in the history of the game. "That's how you come back at her. But I can't keep concentration when it's three against one."

Navratilova replied: "If she's getting this stuff from her father, Mr Jaeger is a louse."

The consensus was that Andrea was getting it from her father and a lot of other louse stuff, too. When she lost late that summer in the US Open to Chris Evert, Roland hustled her into his van for the long drive back to Illinois. He refused to wait for her to shower.

A former coach, Owen Davidson, went on to say: "There are many problems there. I got out when I realised the father wasn't playing with a full deck."

Jaeger burnt out.

Capriati's burn out was more spectacular, more public. Her father Stefano had her doing sit ups in her cot. They paid off. No crime, but a burgled childhood.

Arriving at the French Open in 1990 and barely 14 she spoke of seeing the city in a couple of hours and was startled that Notre Dame was a cathedral.

"I thought it was a football team," she said. Napoleon's tomb she identified as the place "where that little dead dude is buried". That was Paris. Asked the following year what she'd seen this time, she answered, "I did Paris last year".

Stefano raised her for one thing to strike a tennis ball. At 16, she became uncommunicative and dressed in black.

"You see, when a teenage girl looks in the mirror and sees she is a little fat, she hates her mom and dad," reasoned Stefano. At 17, the millionairess had been arrested for theft. By 18, she was caught in the possession of drugs and had completely disappeared from tennis.

Bud Collins, the highly regarded American tennis commentator, had told Stefano before Jennifer's demise that he was over playing her and at times she was being entered into tournaments when she was clearly injured.

"When the apple is ripe, eat it. Jennifer is ripe. If she burns out, only God can know. Not you or me. But when that happens she'll have more money than I can ever give her," replied the man who threatened to sue if the WTA refused to lower its age limit from 14 to 13 to accommodate his daughter.

The age limit is now 16.

Who knows the safest route to the summit for a teenager? Is there a safe route?

`Big Roy' looks at `Little Roy's' dog lashed to the tree and lifts the shotgun. He squeezes the trigger three times and walks away. A few minutes later he returns with a Glock 9 mm pistol and puts two more bullets into the dog's head.

`Little Roy' returns. Sitting in the passenger seat of his jeep, a friend driving, they pull up in front of the tree and look at the dead dog. His father rolls up in his own car alongside the jeep.

"I killed your dog," he says, letting the words hang in the air matter of factly. Moments pass. "Let's go," says `Little Roy' to his friend.

"I was in pain all day," he says of his childhood. "I was so scared of my father. He'd pull up in his truck and start looking for something I'd done wrong. There was no escape, no excuse, no way out of nothing. Every day it was the same: school, homework, farm work, training. Getting hurt or dying might have been better than the life I was living. So I turned into a daredevil. I'd do anything. Didn't make much difference. Used to think about killing myself anyway."

Dads. Don't you just love them.