Pam Shriver was 16 the first time she got to the US Open Women's Tennis final.
Ii the '80s and '90s, she won 133 titles and dominated women's doubles as Martina Navratilova's partner.
During her long career as a player, and now as an ESPN tennis commentator, she kept secret what she calls an inappropriate and damaging relationship with a much older coach that started when she was just 17.
Pam Shriver Photo: AFP / FILE
She's speaking out now. She says sports has far too many abusive coaching relationships and things need to change.
She hopes by sharing her story it will spark change in tennis, she told Jesse Mulligan.
“I recognise now it's abusive, because a coach is like a teacher, a person of trust and influence and power over a developing athlete. When it happened to me, it was over 40 years ago, and things have changed, but too much has not changed.
“So, I'm hoping by sharing my story that it'll spark, and I have already seen some sparks, and some things start to maybe shift in a better way and make it a safer workplace for the young athletes.”
A number of things came together to encourage her to tell her story, she says.
“I did some work during the pandemic, when I say work, I took some time to reflect and I had some therapy on like my patterns in life.
“And then I opened up to my therapist and mentioned the first relationship I had, and the therapist was like, ‘whoa, whoa, wait a second, wait, let's talk about this and let's put it into some perspective’, you know, basically, that first relationship was abuse.”
She was also at the right time in her life to talk about the relationship, she says.
“I think, when young people have abusive relationships they don't want to talk about it at the time. It probably took about five or six things to fall into place [before] I was ready to deal with it.
“My kids are also of the age now that I was when the relationship started. And I would never, ever wish that on my kids or any other teenager to have their first relationship be what mine was.
“And also my mom died and it's tough, it's Mother's Day as we're speaking right now in the US. And so it's kind of an emotional day for me the first Mother's Day without my mom. To be honest, she never ever knew and I would have had a hard time telling my story with my mom still alive.”
There was a culture of looking away in tennis back in the 1970s and 1980s, she says.
“It was just sort of accepted that a lot of coach-player relationships would develop, but I think over the decades, we now know that it shouldn't happen.
"It's not healthy for anybody. And there needs to be … here's my goal is for there to be workplace protocols like the way you would in really sophisticated corporations, companies where you can't have a boss cross over and have a relationship with somebody that reports to them.”
Her story started in the early 1970s when she first met her coach.
“I got a gift certificate for a lesson from Don when I was nine years of age from my mom, it was in my Christmas stocking.
“And then at 13 I started taking lessons for some time regularly and he was gonna go back down to Australia for many months and I can just remember the first time ever being really, really sad and crying over the fact he was leaving. And it was at that moment, I didn't realise it, but it was at that moment starting puberty that I was starting to have feelings for my coach.
“Now I didn't have any training that that might happen. And then it took another four years for me to share that I was falling in love with him. And that was where if either one of us had had the training that should be going on today, I never would have said that to him. And then he never would have taken actions that he took after that.”
That first relationship affected her in subtle ways later on in her life, she says.
‘It did hurt me and how I developed my personal relationships going forward. There were certain patterns that started from the very first one that kept going throughout my life.
“It’s stopped now, but I've also kind of taken an eight, nine-year pause in dating.
“I've been a single mom of three kids and so a tonne of time just goes into that. And I just feel like this year I turned 60, and I think anytime you have a birthday that ends in a zero, you do some reflecting, and you try to have the next phase of your life the healthiest possible.”
Shriver has had a stellar tennis career, the partnership with Martina Navratilova was life changing, she says.
“She had the best volleys of a female I think ever. We both love to hit overheads, we communicated really well together. Lefty-righty combination whether it's Newcombe-Roche, McEnroe-Fleming, the Bryan twins, there's a lot of all-time great doubles teams that were lefty-righty, so we had that going for us.”
Whether it was singles or doubles, her tennis career thrived after she ended her relationship with her first coach.
“I'm lucky I had a lot of great memories on the court.”
You can hear more about this on the podcast, Pam Shriver's story, me, my coach and the dangers of crossing boundaries.
