Jim Courier interview: I don’t mind admitting I was an a--hole

Simon BriggsFri, September 11, 2026 at 6:15 AM UTC

0

Jim Courier, a fierce competitor who won four majors during his playing career, has mellowed with age - Kazuhiro Nogi/Getty Images

“It’s an exercise in terror, doing live interviews,” Jim Courier, tennis’s leading exponent of the post-match chat, says. “I mean, I was petrified.”

Courier is talking about his debut on Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, in January 2005. His second debut, really. He had already played more than 20 matches on that court, including two successful finals against Stefan Edberg. But they had involved wielding a racket – a tool he was comfortable with. Now he was carrying a microphone, which he placed gingerly in front of Russian maverick Marat Safin.

“I had never interviewed anybody. I didn’t know anything about it, and I wasn’t exactly on great terms with the media. So, I’m sure it was awful, but I got through it.

“After my first night of work, I got called to the office of the guy who ran Channel Seven Sports, and I thought I was in trouble. But he was ecstatic. I’d been a last-minute call-up to replace John McEnroe, who was doing a talk show that year back in the USA. If it went wrong, it would be ‘These are the guys who didn’t bring McEnroe back – what a catastrophe!’ So they were relieved to be off the hook, and I’m sure I didn’t cost as much as Mac either. So that was like a double benefit for them.”

More than two decades on from that opening night, Courier no longer vibrates with anxiety before he walks on court. Having been No 1 in the world with a racket, he is now widely recognised as No 1 with a microphone. This knowledgeable and articulate broadcaster has, in his own words, “developed an empathetic gene over time”.

Courier is one of the best in the business at on-court interviews - Getty Images/Quinn Rooney

That potential for empathy was clear from that original 2005 Australian Open. Interviewing Safin again 10 days later, after an epic semi-final win over Roger Federer, Courier found him lost for words, and instinctively responded by asking, “Do you need a hug or what?”

But if the Channel Seven hierarchy were delighted, many of those who had followed Courier’s playing career were simply baffled. Where had this smooth-talking charmer come from?

For the majority of his 13 years on the tour, Courier had been about as cuddly as a rattlesnake. The first tennis player to wear a baseball cap, he played a rugged game, built around a ferocious right hook of a forehand. And then, when he came off the court, he was often surly and grudging in the interview room. His relationship with the media, as he now acknowledges, was one of mutual suspicion or even contempt.

During his glory days in the early 1990s, Courier came across like a tennis thug. Especially if you read influential American columnists such as Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick, who commemorated Courier’s maiden major title at the 1991 French Open by writing that he was “110 days younger than [his defeated opponent] Agassi, and … nearly as crass, sassy and sartorially dyslexic”.

Knowing Courier now, as an easy-going and apparently even-tempered 56-year-old, it seems remarkable that he wore such a heavy suit of armour around his softer inner self for so long. But then he had graduated from a rough school: the Bollettieri Academy in Florida, which his roommate Andre Agassi once memorably described as “Lord of the Flies with forehands”.

Indeed, in a passage from the beginning of Agassi’s award-winning autobiography Open, the book introduces Courier in a manner that makes him sound like a character from Apocalypse Now. “The jungle feeling, the constant threat of violence and ambush, is reinforced, just before lights out, by the sound of drums in the distance. I ask one of the boys: What the hell is that? Oh, that’s just Courier. He likes to pound a drum set his parents sent him.”

Courier laughs when I put this quote to him. “I still can’t believe that Nick [Bollettieri, the legendary coach who founded the academy] allowed me to do that. Drums are loud, especially cymbals are loud, and I would play for like a full hour at a time to vent my frustrations.

Courier enjoyed letting off steam behind the drums - Getty Images/Clive Brunskill

“But being at Bollettieri’s was a great way to get tough, because you had losses and wins every day, Nick was an amazing motivator, and when you got on his court, the energy that he brought, the aura that he had, everyone was just on red alert. It was like playing in a final of a tournament. First, though, you had to work your way up there. When I arrived [aged 14], I wasn’t on that court really at all.”

Courier had come to the academy with an intriguing package of strengths and weaknesses. He inherited a strong right arm from his father – a college baseball pitcher who was close to professional standard – and his forehand was a generational weapon, especially when speared diagonally across the court in the “inside-out” pattern favoured by the modern game. But his backhand was bizarre: a baseball swing, apparently designed to generate a home run.

Never a great one for tinkering with technique, Bollettieri preferred to focus on attitude and work-rate: two areas where Courier had few peers. His second appearance in Open comes when he beats Agassi in the third round of the 1989 French Open and then – in Agassi’s words – “makes sure everyone sees him lacing up his running shoes and going for a jog. Message: beating Andre just doesn’t provide enough cardio.”

When I put this second quote to Courier, he says: “That is a really interesting look into perspective. My strength and conditioning coach, Pat Etcheberry, wanted me to go for a 10-minute cooldown run after every match. We didn’t have these magnificent facilities with bikes and treadmills and weights rooms. So Andre took it as an insult but I did that after almost every single match.”

Advertisement

As we speak, at a table outside Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, Brad Stine, Courier’s early tour coach, happens to pass by. He joins in the story. “My favourite one was in Australia, when Jim beat the living snot out of this guy Jaime Oncins. We went out together afterwards for our usual 15 minutes. It wasn’t like we were going quickly; we would do a 10-minute mile pace, but then we got a little competitive for the last 100 yards, and we were going twice as fast when we came back past Oncins by the transport desk. He looked at us with these wide eyes, like ‘Holy cr--!’”

“It wasn’t our job to dissuade the myth,” Courier interjects. “We weren’t trying to dissuade people from the idea that ‘I’m working more than you, I’m tougher than you, I’m more prepared than you, and I am not going to fall down on that court until you knock me out.’

“As a tennis player,” he adds, “I became very much a pugilist. I had my armour up, and I think some of that came from some tough moments early in my career where I thought I was doing things right, and then I would read stories about myself” – he cites the Curry Kirkpatrick one as an example – “that impacted me, and made me very defensive and very determined to walk my own way. I stopped watching news, stopped reading newspapers when I was at a tournament, because I didn’t want to let any of the outside noise bleed into my psyche. I just tried to block out a lot of the world because I was sensitive to it, like any kid.

“I’m a TV guy now, and I know that when we work in the media, we have to make assumptions to do our job. But at that time, what I didn’t want was for people who didn’t know what I was going through to tell other people what I was going through, because it could affect me.

“There was one time when I’d agreed to do an interview before the Miami Open with a great writer who I’ve since reconciled with – Doug Smith, who wrote for USA Today. Doug called my agent on the same morning to postpone, because he was going to see Jennifer Capriati in Saddlebrook. I didn’t want to rearrange, because I was trying to defend my title. So we went back and forth, and the editor from USA Today said, ‘If Jim doesn’t agree to this then we’re going to have to run a negative piece on him,’ and they did, and they crucified me. And I was like, ‘You know what? F--- you and f--- all of you.’ That was when I started to understand the business side of the media, and I was like, ‘Well, if you guys aren’t going to play fair, then …’

“It’s a long answer to say, like, that’s why I was an a-----e to the media. But I had my reasons. They didn’t know my story and I didn’t really want them to.”

Andre Agassi was a room-mate, a team-mate and a rival of Courier’s during the early 1990s - Getty Images/Jean-Loup Gautreau

Courier’s glory days lasted for a little more than two years – a period in which he won four majors and stood on top of the world rankings for 58 weeks. Only 13 men in the Open Era have been No 1 for longer, including his Bollettieri roommate Agassi in ninth place.

The end of his reign coincided with the rise of Pete Sampras, who was a year younger and equipped with the best serve in the history of the men’s game. Sampras, more than anyone else, cracked the Courier code by repeatedly serving wide to his forehand. Nobody else was brave enough to do this, but the tactic opened up the court and allowed the next shot to be directed towards that vulnerable baseball backhand. Sampras won 16 of their 20 meetings on the tour, including the 1993 Wimbledon final.

“Pete really took over,” Courier says, “especially after he hired Tim Gullikson as his coach. He’s one of the all-time greats for a reason. And Andre got his stuff together for Act Two in this game. He started out as a gambler, pushing all his chips in and often losing the lot, and then [after combining with the great coaching strategist Brad Gilbert] he became the casino. He became the house.”

Pete Sampras wasted little time in becoming Courier’s arch nemesis - Getty Images/Jean-Loup Gautreau

Asked about his retirement from the tour in 2000, Courier replies: “I knew I was ready. My body was not doing great, and all the work that I wanted and needed to do became less fun. And I got a phone call before I’d even announced that I was finishing, asking me to do television at Wimbledon for TNT. It took about a decade before it became more of a full-time job, but it was interesting from the jump.

“When I first started [with the on-court interviews in Australia], I knew everybody. Marat, [Lleyton] Hewitt, all these guys. They knew I wasn’t a professional interviewer. I’m relatable because they know I’ve walked it, and I definitely am aware of where they’re coming from in those moments.”

The only time Courier’s regular post-match appearance has strayed into awkward territory came last year, when Novak Djokovic declined to take any questions but instead grabbed the microphone for a terse announcement – “Thank you very much for being here tonight, I appreciate your presence and the support, I’ll see you in the next round” – before stalking off the court.

The explanation for this mini-tantrum lay in a lame attempt at comedy by Tony “Chompers” Jones, a Channel Nine anchorman, which had appeared on TV a couple of days earlier and incensed Djokovic and his fans by referring to his Covid-era expulsion from Australia.

“I hadn’t even seen Novak because the fires in Los Angeles had delayed my arrival in Australia,” explains Courier, who was blindsided by the incident. “Normally I see everyone in the hallway, and Novak and I have always gotten along. So I just didn’t have the context fully that he was in a war with Channel Nine. But that was a weird moment for sure, and it took me a second to figure out what was going on. Fully understanding it now, I would think that they would have sent someone else who wasn’t visibly attached to Channel Nine out there.”

Otherwise, the only mystery is why Courier is not doing the post-match interviews at more events around the world, particularly his home slam in New York, where he is on-site in any case as part of ESPN’s coverage.

At the conclusion of our interview, I suggest that life behind the microphone seems to have soothed the intimidating tennis warrior who won 23 ATP titles.

“Good,” he replies. “I’m not in combat anymore. So I should be soothed.”

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Sports”