American tennis great Pam Shriver and her coach Don Candy were involved in an ‘inappropriate’ relationship

Pam Shriver met her former tennis coach as a nine-year-old at her local club in Baltimore. Later on, Shriver went on to win a record 22 Grand Slam titles in doubles and established herself as one of the greatest ever tennis players. She recently revealed that during her playing career, she was involved in an ‘inappropriate and damaging’ relationship with her Australian coach, Don Candy.

Shriver said that the pair’s relationship started when she was 17 and Candy was 50. The relationship ended five years later in 1984. “Don never abused me sexually but I would say there was emotional abuse”, said the former World No.1. Don Candy passed away in 2020, aged 91.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Shriver won 133 titles, including 21 women’s singles titles, 111 women’s doubles titles, and one mixed doubles title. In Grand Slam tournaments, Shriver won 22 titles, 21 in doubles, and one mixed doubles title. She also won a women’s doubles gold medal at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul with Zina Garrison as her partner. Shriver and regular doubles partner Martina Navratilova are the only women’s doubles pair to have completed the Grand Slam in a calendar year, winning all four major titles in 1984.

“The short version of this story is that I had an inappropriate and damaging relationship with my much older coach, which began when I was 17 and lasted a little over five years,” she revealed. Shriver further added, “If Don had been better informed, he might have been cannier about the potential complications that come with coaching an adolescent girl. Clearly, he wasn’t a predator.”

Shriver explains that even though she loved Don Candy, her coach should have been more responsible and behaved like a guardian. “I still have conflicted feelings about Don. Yes, he and I became involved in a long and inappropriate affair. Yes, he was cheating on his wife. But there was a lot about him that was honest and authentic. And I loved him. Even so, he was the grown-up here. He should have been the trustworthy adult.”Only after therapy did I start to feel a little less responsible. Now, at last, I’ve come to realise that what happened is on him“, Shriver added.

Shriver says she is motivated to tell her story now because she believes present-day players are in similar situations.

Pam Shriver advised young female athletes to maintain a strict boundary between personal and professional relationships

Pam Shriver warned young female athletes to be very careful about their professional and personal boundaries. She doesn’t want youngsters to commit the same mistake that she did.

“I believe abusive coaching relationships are alarmingly common in sport as a whole,” she said. “My particular expertise, though, is in tennis, where I have witnessed dozens of instances in my four and a bit decades as a player and commentator. Every time I hear about a player who is dating their coach, or I see a male physio working on a female body in the gym, it sets my alarm bells ringing”, she added.

Pam Shriver clarified her stance for the readers. She said, “For any player or athlete who might be reading this, I want to emphasise the downsides of blurring personal and professional boundaries. The point has to be made very clearly: these kinds of relationships are not appropriate, and there will be consequences for those who cross the line.”

Pam Shriver presently works as a tennis broadcaster for ESPN and a pundit for BBC tennis coverage.

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