INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — It was late in the afternoon of an early round at the BNP Paribas Open in the California desert, and Pam Shriver was having a day.
There had been practice and strategy sessions with Donna Vekic, the talented 26-year-old Croat she has been helping coach since October. She had been going back and forth with Lindsay Brandon, the WTA Tour’s new director of safeguarding, the cause that has become Shriver’s focus over the past year.
She was also spending time with a woman named Karen Denison Clark, who had reached out to Shriver in February as a fellow survivor of sexual abuse. Still ahead was a night match to call as a commentator for the Tennis Channel.
This is how it is for Shriver these days. She was long known to fans as a 21-time Grand Slam doubles champion and a leading television analyst, but Shriver’s life changed last year when she spoke openly for the first time about the man who had coached her when she was a teenager. Don Candy, who died in 2020, was 50 years old and Shriver was 17 when the relationship moved beyond coaching. Shriver now understands that the relationship, which lasted five years, was sexually and emotionally abusive.
Since she told her story, Shriver’s existence has become a test of juggling often conflicting missions. She…
