August, 24th 2001
In the 1950s, teenagers were everywhere, and entrepreneurs their elders
drooled at the chance to sell to them. Rock n' roll, teen exploitation
flicks, comic books, and instant fashion statements sprung up to stoke the
fires of adolescent demand.
Meanwhile, investigations into the morality of youth flourished. Teenagers
were dissected in parenting manuals and deemed "deviant" in social science
literature. A special Senate committee was convened by Estes Kefauver to
investigate the "connections" between rampant juvenile delinquency and the
pounding backbeat and rebellious imagery of the new popular youth culture.
Today, with the children of those very baby boomers in their teens and 20s,
N-Sync and Brandy and Puff Daddy rule the charts, the horny post-adolescents
of "Dawson's Creek" and "Felicity" fill the airwaves, and in the wake of
Columbine, a Senate committee meets to discuss in dour tones how Goth
culture and video gaming have led directly to tragedy. The adult world is
economically addicted to youth, and yet adults recoil in horror at the dark
underside of the very images of popularity and sexy youthful rebellion that
they help to package and market.
Sport feeds on youth. This is a matter of nature, to be sure in some
respects our bodies begin their inexorable decline before we have left
college. But it is also a matter of culture, wherein Tupac = Iverson, brand
names both.
While young athletes are marketed everywhere, one venerable market sports
journalism stands out for its ability to construct daily narratives about
these mythic youngsters for an avid public. Sports writing is the literature
of the present, and its practitioners use the tools storytellers have used
throughout human history: compelling characters, plot twists, narrative
flair. And, as in most literature, these elements are generally deployed to
stake out some moral ground, to create exemplars of the good and cautionary
tales of life's moral pitfalls.
Dickens first published his novels in newspapers as serialized stories,
using characters to take the moral temperature of his time and place. Sports
writers do the same thing, only their characters are real-life athletes and
their stories are ostensibly nonfiction.
One storyline has served writers especially well throughout the ages: the
decline of civilization, particularly as embodied by young people. And no
writers have relied on this storyline more steadfastly than sports writers.
"I was very young and I was experiencing my adolescence.... The path I did take
for a brief period of my life was not of reckless drug use, hurting others,
but it was a path of quiet rebellion, of a little experimentation of a
darker side of my confusion in a confusing world, lost in the midst of
finding my identity...." Jennifer Capriati on Labor Day, reading from
a prepared statement, shortly before ending her post-match press conference in tears.
"The Labor Day meltdown had nothing to do with losing to Seles.... It was
another creepy episode in a creepy professional career...." Marc Berman in
the New York Post the next day.
Most good, responsible adults circa 1999 spent some portion of their youth "experimenting
with a darker side" of life maybe staying out all night, smoking pot, or
dressing funny. Even those of us whose "experimentation" created rifts
within the family have lived to see most of the fault lines healed by now.
Most of our "creepy episodes" of youth have turned to anecdotes recounted
with a smirk over grown-up drinks, after responsible, adult 10-to-12-hour workdays.
If most of the above seems harmless, even normal, don't tell it to the writers covering
Jennifer Capriati's recent revival at the U.S. Open.
Capriati started competing in the high-stakes world of professional tennis
just shy of her 14th birthday when most people's idea of pressure is
making the transition from being a big-shot in junior high to a beat-up
freshman in high school. She was instantly labeled the great hope of
American women's tennis.
Then came Capriati's memorable semifinal duel with top-ranked Monica Seles
at the 1991 U.S. Open was the stuff both marketing departments and serious
fans dream of. These two kids hammered out bionic baseline volleys and threw
in enough canny approaches and timely drop shots to please the purists. A
mythic rivalry was being born, like the bygone wars between Chris Evert and
Martina Navratilova. The future looked green ahead, from the grass of
Wimbledon to the color of the millions waiting to be generated. Jennifer Capriati was 15.
A funny thing happened on the way to this fantasy world: real life. You know,
that messy place where violence and confusion mar the most perfect storyline.
Monica Seles was stabbed by a deranged fan. And Jennifer Capriati started
acting "confused" like a normal red-blooded American teenager.
She gained weight, lost her will to practice. She hung out with people her
own age who were not celebrities or highly-paid athletes. She listened to
the popular music of her time grunge, alternative, punk rock. She did some
teenage things like smoke pot and shoplift. The tour seemed less and less
real to her. In 1994, after some run-ins with the law, she stopped playing
professional tennis altogether. She was 17.
Labor Day weekend at the 1995 U.S. Open proved that in the upside-down world
of professional sports, it is much easier to return gloriously from the
bizarre than the mundane. For if Seles's tumble from tennis was the more
dramatic and chilling, her comeback to pro-tour normalcy has been complete.
Capriati's story, by comparison teenage girl pierces nose, smokes pot, and
hangs out with other teens is so commonplace that it shouldn't even be a story.
Yet the New York sports media focused myopically on Capriati's "troubled"
past. Seles's victimhood cast her as an innocent, while Capriati could only
be cast as someone failing to honor her potential as both an athlete and a
person. Neither storyline is based on any real knowledge or insight into the
protagonists as people. What these stories do reveal are the particular
notions of responsibility the authors hold dear notions that hold in
little esteem the reality of being a teenager in a pressure-cooker public arena.
Forget about sports, and instead imagine a kid who has always been good with
chemistry sets and gotten straight A's in science. Somewhere during high
school, the kid smokes a little pot, the grades slip. The kid has to see the
guidance counselor a few times. The folks are concerned. The kid is more
interested in listening to punk rock records than studying physics; goes to
some shows, maybe steals a few times on a dare from friends, maybe gets caught once.
The kid manages to make it through high school, maybe goes to community
college for a year or takes a year off to travel and work in a convenience
store. The kid starts reading Scientific American again, and maybe takes a
class. Then after a year or so, the kid decides to apply to college, take a
lot of science. Maybe the kid winds up a researcher, maybe a med student.
Apply the same story to a kid who has a way with words. Maybe after taking a
few acid trips and taking a car on a joyride one night, some day this kid
goes to j-school and becomes a sportswriter. In America, where lives take
circuitous routes to success and to the grave, there are two words for this
kid: totally normal.
So here was Capriati, having decided over the years to get back in shape and
practice the trade at which she is most skilled. She returned to the tour in
'96, and was, unsurprisingly, rusty. A couple years later, she hired a new
coach and started getting her game back together.
Fast forward to the 1999 U.S. Open in New York. Through the first week of
the Open, the 23-year-old Capriati looked like a seasoned pro ready to make
a big-time comeback. Her ground strokes were strong, and she was placing her
shots well. The fans got behind her as she dismissed Iva Majoli 6-0, 6-3,
and then struggled back from a nailbiting 5-7 opening set loss against Seda
Noorlander to win her next match. Momentum and popular sentiment seemed to
be swinging her way.
At each post-match press conference, however, Capriati was greeted with
questions about her past. "Did the victory today mean more because of all
the personal agony you went through?" was a typical serve, and the
backhanded volley of questions degenerated from there.
Maybe the writers were trying to build the "wayward-kid-makes good"
storyline to add further luster to her comeback-in-the-making. But still, as
she had done by "screwing up" in the first place, Capriati confounded their
wish to control her narrative. This is a consistency on her part, a kind of
integrity, that the media may never recognize.
Capriati tried to set a statute of limitations on the obsessive discussion
of how she lived her life six years before.
Some beat writers took offense at Jennifers unwillingness to serve as
protagonist in a morality play they believed served as the most appropriate
splashy backdrop to her on-court revival. "Capriati self-destructed and now
pretends to be the victim," Selena Roberts intoned in her New York Times
piece Monday morning, referring to the events of years past. "Capriati
gained nothing from her experience."
To Capriati's frustrated request that "we just stick to the now and stop
asking about the past," Roberts (who is often excellent) was oddly
incredulous. The writer could not believe that this tennis player just
wanted to talk tennis, "instead of embracing her role as a cautionary tale."
Capriati's refusal to play the part assigned to her sent Roberts into a
stream of alarmist prose that harkens back to Dick Young's waning years in
its mean-spiritedness and ignorance: "Once the bubble gum lost its flavor,
and the stuffed animals failed as good company, once popularity became a
real drag and her acne bcame a corporate concern, Capriati began relating to
the hopeless lyrics of bands like Nirvana."
Plowing ahead in this vein, Roberts wrote: "Then came the nose ring, the rag
doll's slouch and makeup from the Goth home kit.... This sullen look of a
rebel was a more comfortable fit than celebrity for Capriati as she dropped
the girlish giggle, picked up a joint and vanished from the tour like a
plume of smoke. By 1994 she was a case file for the police."
Maybe it didn't occur to Roberts, but the dolled-up, media-savvy pressure
cooker of women's sports is a whole lot less natural to teenage tennis pros
and Olympic hopeful gymnasts than the rock n' roll, fashion, and occasional
drug use that has been the status quo rite of passage for young people for
many decades. One can almost imagine Roberts freaking out over bobby-soxers
fainting at Frank Sinatra shows, sneaking cigarettes and gin fizzes in the
early 1940s. She echoed Senator Kefauver's high-pitched 50s rhetoric in her
overheated indictment of relatively innocuous adolescent behavior.
Finally, after Capriati lost a closer-than-it-sounds straight-setter to
Seles on Labor Day after Roberts's piece had run that morning, by the way
tennis fans were treated to the sorry sight of a horde of amateur
psychologists making a young woman cry. In a vain final attempt for now,
at least to get the media monkey off her back, Capriati read a statement
she had prepared before the tournament. She had been waiting for the right
time to read it, and now that her impressive run was over at the Open, she
was ready. Sitting at the podium with a smile on her face, unfazed by her
loss to Seles, Capriati unfolded
the paper and read aloud nervously.
She had a lot at stake in this moment. She was, in her way, trying to
explain to the world what it had all felt like to her what her bout with
teenage girl-dom had meant to her, not what it means to the kids watching at
home, or to the adults who wanted to package her story for consumption. She
was trying to explain that she was her own person, that she had her own
narrative and that her life had meaning, and a kind of logic. She was trying
to say, very politely, that it was her life.
Sadly, that wasn't what people heard. She finished reading. She looked up,
hopeful against hope that her words had done the trick. There was a moment's
silence waiting to be filled, a moment at which everyone stood at a
crossroads together. We could all be bigger people, or we could keep on down
the same well-trodden path. The moment slipped away.
A barrage of the same old questions came flying across the net, more
powerful than any Monica Seles ground stroke ever could be. Capriati tried
to swing at them but her weak lobs opened the door for one last well-placed
shot: "Why do you see the media as your adversaries?" The spin on that one
said, this isn't about you, this is about us and our insatiable desire to
frame your story our way. It was a shot Capriati could not return. And while
losing to Monica could not break her smile, losing this media match did.
Interestingly, the most critical voices belonged to women. Perhaps in a need
to counter male expectations that they will be too "sensitive" to cover the
macho world of sports, female reporters often out-macho their male
counterparts. Such excessive zeal was apparent in the beligerence of Serena
Roberts, and like Roberts before her, Ursula Reel of the New York Post
chided Capriati for "spiraling into a black hole of instability."
Men jumped on too. Harvey Araton, in a somewhat more balanced piece, still
moralistically argued that "Capriati's challenge is in the mirror."
That mirror faces two ways. We are passing through a season when more and
more great athletes are emerging younger and younger in sports, and when
many more markets exist to promote them. In such a moment, it will be
interesting to see if the scribes and the commentators can look, for a
change, at themselves.
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