September, 26th 1994
The desert sun is on the rise and already packing a punch only a lizard could
love, and it would be 99 degrees in the shade if there were any, so it's small
wonder that the hot acres of outdoor hard courts at the Mission Hills tennis
complex are deserted, all except for one.
On its simmering surface, a teen-ager with a rakish purple glaze in her
ponytail and a hard-working wad of green gum in her mouth is whacking tennis
balls across the net as fast as her male sparring partner can deliver them. The
tear in her graffiti-print shorts is self-inflicted -- tennis shorts as fashion
victim -- but the tears under her eyes are not tears of unhappiness from feeling
victimized by everyone within staring distance. This is just plain sweat after a
rigorous practice session.
"That's too good, champ," her adult opponent says as she burns a
double-barreled backhand beyond his ample reach. His casual compliment brings
the ghost of a smile to her face.
What's right with this picture?
The teen-ager happens to be that infamous tennis and 12th-grade dropout,
Jennifer Capriati, lately an alumnus of Florida's police blotter, the school of
hard knocks and two strange stints in rehabilitative facilities, where addiction
and psychosis were daily subjects on the blackboards.
Six weeks ago, she and her family relocated to this recreational mecca in the
California desert, prospecting for a new start after a bad time. Last week,
Capriati broke her yearlong vow of silence regarding the public's need to know
her private ups and downs.
From courtside at her morning practice; from the white leather driver's seat
of the 1991 Volkswagen Cabriolet she purchased in Palm Springs, Calif.; over
Thai-style pizza minus its "fattening" cheese and peanuts, and romping on the
sofa with the 5-month-old puppy who has turned out to be her surest antidote to
alienation, she waxed cautiously optimistic after a year of waning internally.
The torment, as she refers to it, is over. She hasn't solved her problems,
but she has elected to survive them.
It's little surprise that the book on Capriati's bedside table is Robert
Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land." She has been living her own
science-fiction saga ever since fame, fortune and fear of failure descended with
a boom at 13 and she discovered, too early, that all that glitters is not gold.
"I was always expected to be at the top, and if I didn't win, to me that
meant I was a loser," she said last week. "The way I felt about myself had to do
with how I played, and if I played terrible I'd say, yes, I can handle it, but
really I couldn't; I felt like no one liked me as a person. I felt like my
parents and everybody else thought that tennis was the way to make it in life,
they thought it was good, but I thought no one knew or wanted to know the person
who was behind my tennis life."
When Capriati couldn't make peace between the girl in the mirror and the
player who had been assigned a starring role as "the next Chris Evert," she
tried to rid herself of the latter identity. Being a teen-ager, it seemed only
logical to go to extremes to do it.
"I was depressed and sad and lonely and guilty," she said of her dismay at
being the player everybody knew but a person nobody understood.
"I felt I'd give up all the material things to be with someone who would love
me for me," said Capriati, who did give up her marketability and credibility in
the course of the six-month walk on the wild side that landed her here on the rebound.
Yes, the Betty Ford Clinic is just around the corner. But no, Capriati isn't
going there for therapy after a year of entropy that began with a destabilizing
loss at the 1993 United States Open and culminated in her arrest in May on a
marijuana charge following her own version of the lost weekend.
Instead, she's back on the tennis court, the not-so-innocuous launching pad
that made her a celebrity at 13, broke her at 17, but now seems an integral ally
as she picks up the pieces of a life that had, in her prematurely jaundiced
vision, turned pointless, friendless and hopeless. Over the Edge Of a Precipice.
"I was pretty close to being not in existence," said Capriati, speaking at
length, albeit uneasily, about the most difficult year of her life. After all,
everybody else, from the teen-aged acquaintances with whom she was arrested to
several players and former players with whom she'd traded little more than nods
has already passed judgment.
Pantera and Jane's Addiction may still be the bands of choice on her stereo
system, but regarding Jennifer's addiction, she has her own opinion to share.
"I'm not an addict to drugs, but you could say I'm an addict to my own pain.
Or I was," she said, fidgeting with the toe-ring that's replaced her nose and
navel rings. "I had this sarcasm about everything. My spirit was just, like, dark."
Capriati's opening-round loss to Leila Meskhi at last year's Open pushed her
over the edge of a precipice and into a self-destructive limbo. The self she
wanted to destroy? Jennifer Capriati, tennis phenom and international celebrity.
"I burned out -- I'll say it," Capriati announces with a grimace that shows
she's fully aware of the chorus of "I told you so's" the revelation will inspire
in the armchair psychologists and cynics who have waited for her to take a fall
ever since she turned pro, and multimillionaire, as a toothy, giggly 13-year-old.
In 1993, less than four years after the Women's Tennis Council bent its age
eligibility rules to allow this box office smash early entry to their
novelty-starved circuit, Capriati left it and purposely left no word when or if
she would be back.
She will be, but it will probably happen later rather than sooner.
Had a groin strain not intervened, Capriati would definitely be in Zurich
next week at the European Indoors. But to return to the circuit the same way she
left it, in pain, seems unwise: Capriati hopes to play every aspect of the game
more wisely her second time around.
"I don't regret anything that happened in my career, except that maybe 14 is
too young to handle everything emotionally," she said. "But I know I don't want
to leave tennis the way I did, crying and crawling away." Turning Her Back On
the Tennis World.
Capriati, who had residual nightmares after losing her 1991 Open semifinal to
Monica Seles, cried incessantly after losing her 1993 first-rounder.
"I started out O.K., but at the end of the match I couldn't wait to get off
the court. Totally, mentally, I just lost it," she recalls, "and obviously it
goes deeper than that one match. I really was not happy with myself, my tennis,
my life, my parents, my coaches, my friends... I spent a week in bed in
darkness after that, just hating everything. When I looked in my mirror, I
actually saw this distorted image: I was so ugly and so fat, I just wanted to
kill myself, really."
So she proceeded to kill her public self. She turned her back on tennis and
all it entailed. She withdrew from her family, first emotionally, then
physically, and moved into her own apartment last November.
"I thought the best thing for me was to be in total isolation; I didn't want
anyone to know anything about me," Capriati said.
Her anonymity was short-lived once she was cited for shoplifting on Dec. 10.
"I forgot I had the ring on, and by the time I remembered, it was too late,"
said Capriati, who routinely arrived for tennis matches without the right
clothes, racquets or contact lenses and just last week walked out of a
restaurant without her car keys.
Though a juvenile at the time, Capriati's celebrity status seemed to outweigh
her legal right to confidentiality; her case wound up being dismissed, but not
before a worldwide blitz from the news media, most of which presumed her guilty,
sent her even deeper into her shell.
"I thought, 'Am I that big that they have to make such a big deal out of
this?'" she said. "And I see now that once you're considered a celebrity, you
kind of have no rights to privacy. After that I kind of forgot about everything
and everyone except for my brother; all I cared about was having my music and
partying with friends."
For several months, she refused to touch a racquet, but last winter, even
after the party circuit had become her only circuit, she realized she was bored
and started hitting balls on the sly.
"It wasn't like I wanted to go back to it yet," said Capriati, who didn't
want her parents to get any ideas about a springtime comeback, "but when I
thought about the slams, I always thought, 'I'll be there again.'"
But then came another setback. Her parents, worried about her mental state,
plucked her from her apartment and signed her into the Manors, a private
psychiatric facility in Tarpon Springs, Fla., for a two-week evaluation in
February. Capriati emerged resentful, and when she turned 18 in March, she left
her family's Saddlebrook home for Boca Raton, a move across Florida that
initially received her parents' blessing.
"I was trying to get better, get happier, but I felt like people were
watching me at Saddlebrook," said Capriati, whose paranoia was not unfounded.
More than once she was ambushed by tabloid photographers hiding in the bushes
and stalking her high school in surburban Tampa, Fla. In Boca Raton, she moved
in with friends who attended the local university, and her father found her a
tutor for her schoolwork.
Again, she started playing tennis recreationally and remembered that she
"loved it, loved the game. But I was so out of shape I couldn't really hit for
more than an hour, so I wasn't ready yet to ask my dad to find me a hitting
partner." 'I'm Playing Because It's Inside Me'
Capriati's arrest occurred on May 16 inside a seedy Coral Gables motel room
where she was bankrolling a party attended by an assortment of teen-aged
revellers she later described as "acquaintances, not real friends."
What they had in common was a complete lack of interest in Capriati, the
tennis player; her generosity with her car and wallet were enough to award her a
high ranking in their pecking order.
What the police, who made two felony arrests and released two others without
charging them, found in Capriati's backpack was just enough marijuana to charge
her with misdemeanor possession and snap a mug shot that turned up on TV screens
around the globe. Her sponsors dumped her, she went into a 28-day treatment
program at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, and learned another lesson.
"To be involved with those people is not worth the consequences," said
Capriati, whose case was again disposed of without her being tried or incarcerated.
Despite reports that her name is now worth mud, the vestibule of the
Capriatis' town house is brimming with boxes of clothing and equipment from
companies like Nike, Head and Reebok, all of whom appear to have some interest
in outfitting her comeback. Wild cards are available at whatever event she deems
to enter. Her father, Stefano, is happily ensconced on the practice court.
Tennis seems ready to welcome Capriati back, and she seems ready to attempt a
return, albeit on slightly different terms.
"It's just a game to me now; I'm playing because it's inside me, I have this
desire to play and a talent to play, and I don't want to waste my talent," she
said. "I don't care about being No. 1, but I'm ready and willing to give a
battle, and that's what sports is all about. Who cares about endorsements and
all that stuff? Just give me a racquet. There's no ending to my story yet."
Jennifer Capriati's Long and Winding Road
March 1990: Turns pro at 13 years, 11 months and reaches final in her first
event. October 1990: Wins first title, the Puerto Rican Open. November 1990:
Becomes youngest on WTA Tour to have a top 10 ranking. August 1991: By 15 and
without winning a major event, she is 26th wealthiest athlete in world,
according to Forbes magazine. June 1992: Passes $1 million in career earnings at
Wimbledon July 1992: At 16, wins Olympic gold medal at Barcelona Games January
1993: Wins title in Sydney, Australia, sixth of her career and first outside
United States. Victory in her first event of the year would be her only 1993
title. August 1993: Loses in first round of U.S. Open and doesn't return to the
Tour for the rest of the year. December 10, 1993: Is cited for shoplifting a
ring from a vendor's kiosk at Tampa Bay Mall. Case is dismissed by family court
judge. January 1994: Announces she has no immediate plans to play in 1994. May
16, 1994: Is arrested at Coral Gables, Fla., motel and charged with possession
of marijuana, a misdemeanor. Undergoes court-approved rehabilitation, and case
is resolved without a conviction. Sept. 13, 1994: Announces plan to make a
comeback, unranked and unseeded, in October at events in Zurich and Filderstadt, Germany.
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