A crazed German tennis dad who put the 'Graf' in "graft" by doing two years in the slammer for fudging his kid's tax returns, has died.
Peter Graf, who fathered tennis great Steffi Graf, then- hours after her delivery, announced she would become a tennis champ (and his meal ticket for life), was 75.
Just before Steffi turned four, Dad gave her a sawed down racket and put her to work returning serves int he family apartment. If she returned 25 in a row, she got ice cream.
"Most of the time," the doting father told an interviewer, "on the 25th ball I would hit it too hard or so she could not return it, because you cannot have ice cream all the time."
Not surprisingly, her father's antics- her carried her winnings around in paper bags and fathered a child by a Playboy model- eventually led Steffi to cut the old man off. In 199 he divorced Steffi's mom and married Steffi's former babysitter, who survives him.
NYT obituarist Douglas Martin gave the life of Peter Graf an apt ending:
Peter Graf, who fathered tennis great Steffi Graf, then- hours after her delivery, announced she would become a tennis champ (and his meal ticket for life), was 75.
Just before Steffi turned four, Dad gave her a sawed down racket and put her to work returning serves int he family apartment. If she returned 25 in a row, she got ice cream.
"Most of the time," the doting father told an interviewer, "on the 25th ball I would hit it too hard or so she could not return it, because you cannot have ice cream all the time."
Not surprisingly, her father's antics- her carried her winnings around in paper bags and fathered a child by a Playboy model- eventually led Steffi to cut the old man off. In 199 he divorced Steffi's mom and married Steffi's former babysitter, who survives him.
NYT obituarist Douglas Martin gave the life of Peter Graf an apt ending:
In 2001, Steffi Graf married the tennis star Andre Agassi, whose own father, Mike, had rigged up a machine to shoot tennis balls at him at 110 miles per hour when he was 7. When the two fathers met, what Agassi called 'the unavoidable moment' happened. The two men got into an argument about the machine: Graf took off his shirt, and both men raised fists. Agassi broke them apart.
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