Year 2002
For years women's tennis seemed like the greatest sports show on earth, with
all the oncourt fireworks, dazzling iconography, and backstage drama that
P.T. Barnum himself would insist upon. We had the brilliance of Hingis, the
power of Davenport, the rapid ascendence of Venus and Serena, the blondeness
of Kournikova and a stew of manic, self-embarassing fathers, catifghts,
rivalries, short skirts—an international soap opera dancing around one of
the greatest periods in the history of women's tennis.
In the late 90s the women's tour surged past the men's in popularity and
drama, strong-arming the Association of Tennis Professionals into
considering a new alliance with the Women's Tennis Association and forcing
the US Open to put the women's final on prime-time television.
Now, those days seem long ago. In 2002 the Sisters clogged the finals of the
French, Wimbledon, and the US Open, and suddenly it seemed that beyond their
breaktaking play the tour was veering toward boring. "The dominance of the
Williams sisters is not a problem for women's tennis, not yet," says S. L.
Price, who covers tennis for Sports Illustrated. "But this year it will
begin to be. There's no doubt that tennis, men's and women's, is most
interesting when there's at least three intriguing stars capable of winning
at a time. People have gotten tired of the Williams story. It's not hot
anymore. Selling the tour this year will be a problem for the first time in
a long time. People will take a fresh look at the tour and see that it's
full of holes."
The world's number three player, Jennifer Capriati, has lost
to the Williams ten consecutive times making her an alarmingly distant
number three. As little as two years ago no one outside the Capriati family
thought she could break the top twenty. But now she's the only player in the
world with strength and speed equal to them, the only player who seems
unintimidated by them, and the only player most close observers believe can
shove at least one of them off of the top of the hill. "Jennifer has what it
takes if she doesn't grow discouraged by the losses," says Mary Carillo,
commentator and former player. "She's like Agassi trying to beat Pete.
Sampras, like the sisters, has all the natural God-kissed talent and great
desire. Players like Andre and Jennifer, very talented in their own ways,
have to be incredibly fit mentally, physically and emotionally to take on
that big a challenge."
Thus, in 2003, the player the game most needs
to succeed, is Jennifer Capriati. "The pro game will move on in positive
ways without any one or two of these characters," says Pam Shriver, the
great player who's now a Hall of Famer. "But, is it a more balanced, fun
tour if Capriati's playing well and beating the Williams sisters every once
in a while? Sure." For Capriati to fail to break up another year of
all-Sisters finals could mean the entire women's tour would suffer.
"Capriati is under tremendous pressure," Says Bud Collins, the legendary
tennis writer. "She appears to be the only one able to counter Venus and
Serena, but they're rising and she's not."
Capriati hears the critics saying the game is losing steam and feels the
direct reflection on her. "I don't want people saying the game is boring!"
she says defiantly. "I'm part of this game. You're talking about me! You
don't understand what we put in, how hard we work. Maybe there's that extra
pressure to win and not have them [the Williams] win everything because
otherwise everyone will think it's boring and women's tennis is going down…
That's a lot of pressure for one person to hold."
She stops a moment. "I'm happy that Lindsey's back [from knee surgery].
Martina. I want these girls to get their shit together just to make it more
exciting. I'm tired of hearing everyone saying it's boring." But who in
the world who can stop that talk but her?
Jennifer Capriati is the Drew Barrymore of tennis. A child
star who grew up in public, took a sabbatical while her generation was still
in high school, did drugs, got in trouble (not necessarily the same thing),
returned to tennis but struggled, but stuck with it, and eventually reached
prominence. In 1990, at 13 years and 11 months old, Capriati became a
professional tennis player, the latest in a long line of phenomenally good
and frighteningly young girls, expected to be the best of them ever. She
finished her first pro tournament in the finals and finished her first full
year on tour ranked eighth in the world. From the outside it seemed her spot
in the Hall of Fame was reserved. But the canker was already in the rose.
"Everything kinda turned out like a fairy tale for a while," says Denise
Capriati, her mother. "But it didn't take long before you realized that it
was gonna be grueling. It's cutthroat, the jealousy, the sharks. Nobody
really warns you about that part of it." Capriati will be 27 years old on
March 29th... She has won three Grand Slam titles and will almost certainly
end up in the Tennis Hall of Fame, but the 13 years since her debut have
unfolded like great Greek drama, or, to be culturally consistent, epic
Italian Opera.
Capriati lives in Tampa, Florida, on the Saddlebrook Resort, a lush
sprawling gated community and vacation resort with golf courses, tennis
courts, restaurants, a spa, and streets like Lady Bug Lane. She lives in a
modest-sized, one level ranch style home along with her father, Stefano, a
tanned, stout, former movie stuntman and pro soccer player who lived in
Italy until his 20s. Her mother, a former stewardess, lives in West Palm
Beach. They divorced in 1995. In front of Capriati's house is a green Range
Rover, a silver Mercedes sedan, a white golf cart, and a red Ferrari. "I
don't drive it," she says of the Ferrari, a gift from Fila. "I just
enjoy looking at it."
You would expect after years of celebrity, years in which Capriati often
bristled at her portrayal in the media, that she would become a private,
guarded person. Word around the tennis writer camp fire is that Capriati is
terrified of journalists. But when a journalist asked to see her home she
walked away to ask her father and he—famously protective and still hurt by
post-US Open stories saying she was finished—exploded in a rage, yelling at
her in his thick Italian accent that journalists are not to be trusted. She
held her ground and after a moment he relented.
Over the past decade and a half her life has been filled with the chaos of
corporate attention, the mountain peak highs of youthful success, and the
gutter lows of a child struggling to be a child while celebrity makes that
all but impossible. So, it's no surprise her bedroom is all about serenity.
There's a bright white bedspread, fresh white tulips in a vase in the
corner, and a large, flat-screen television on the wall across from the bed,
positioned perfectly for watching under the covers. In her plush but
minimalist room, the hi-tech flat television is less post-modern than
delicate. "It's one of my few splurges," she says. To the left of the
television is one of the fluffy kangaroo dolls that represent the Australian
Open. Directly above the television, alone on its own little shelf, is her
trophy for winning the 2001 Australian Open, her first Grand Slam title, the
day that announced her comeback was complete. "Of course, this one means
the most," she says. (The trophy is maybe a foot and a half tall, about
a quarter of the size of the trophy she smooched for the cameras. If you've
ever won any amateur tennis trophy your trophy is probably taller than the
take-home prize from a Grand Slam.)
Capriati says she won that Australian (and the one after it) because the
Australian is her favorite tournament of the year, not the other way around.
In this way, her tennis has always flowered or floundered based on her
emotions. "You gotta be feeling happy off the court to do well on the
court," she says. "It all ties in together. Some people say they can
totally separate what's going on personally from what's going on on the
court. I have a hard time doing that. Usually what's bothering me outside
the court I'll be taking out on the court. If I'm having boyfriend troubles,
whatever."
Later, in her Mercedes, as she cruised slowly through Saddlebrook, she
shuffled through the CDs in her system. She found Tupac, Outkast, Jay-Z
Unplugged, and then, from the speakers poured Enrique Inglesias and his song
"Hero." Capriati cringed.
"I like that song," she said, sheepishly. "He has a pretty good
voice." He also has a video for the song in which he canoodles with his
girlfriend, at press time, Anna Kournikova. According to all sources,
Kournikova resentment runs high in the WTA locker room.
"Some players like to think they're celebs," she said later. "They
like the limelight."
You mean Anna?
"I'm not sayin any names."
When you saw the Enrique video did you throw up?
"Yeah."
She had dinner at a sports bar sortof restaurant a mile from her home. She
was in a Fila jacket, loose blue jeans, and Fila flip flops, with her
reddish-brown hair hanging long and a touch of makeup on her face. She had a
filet mignon, a heaping salad, a club soda, and a big bowl of berries. (Dinner
for her is often some sort of meat with a vegetable. Breakfast is commonly
eggs and oatmeal with a cobb salad for lunch and a protein shake or energy
bar as a snack. She eats no processed foods, no sugar products, no sugars.
Just whole foods and natural proteins.) There were nine football games on
nine TVs throughout the room, but Capriati asked the waitress to change the
channel on a nearby set to the Emmys.
Have you ever watched the Emmys before?
"No," she says. "I never cared about it before. It's all about TV,
right?"
When Capriati was in the crib her father gave her a racket. At three she
began hitting balls. "[Her father] definitely had it in his mind that he
wanted to groom her to be a tennis player," said Denise Capriati. (Stefano
politely refused an interview request.) When she was five Stefano went to
Jimmy Evert, the legendary coach and father of Chris Evert, and asked him to
coach her. Evert snubbed the child, calling himself too busy. Then he hit a
few balls with her and suddenly found the time. She was just happy to be on
the court. "When I was in the juniors I was never aware of all those
things people were saying," she says. "You're gonna be the next Chris
Evert. I was just a happy go lucky kid."
Little Jen Capriati was a Girl Scout (she was in Brownies), played with
dolls, played soccer, loved school, and practiced her tennis every day. When
she was six she played her first tournament. "She was so tiny she didn't
know how to keep score," Denise Capriati recalled. "After the match she said
to the umpire who won? He said, you did. And she smiled and it was really
cute. And then she played the second match and it was a real long match, the
same day, to the number one seed, and when it was over and she said to the
umpire, who won? The other girl did. And she cried. It was very cute." Just
seven years later, in March of 1990, she played her first professional tournament.
"By the time she was 10 or 11 everyone had heard about this kid," Pam
Shriver said. "When she made her debut it was incredible. It was a regular
tour event and it had the media presence of a major. That began the start of
her feeling a great deal of pressure. Nobody was ever in Capriati's shoes.
The level of attention she got at 12, 13, 14 years of age was unique.
Sponsors, agents, media, tour—it was coming from all angles."
In 1991, at 14, she had a wonderful year, beating Seles, Gabriela Sabatini,
and, in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon, Martina Navratilova. She finished
the year ranked number six. She got millions for endorsing a truckload of
stuff including Rolex and Oil of Olay. No one would've believed that would
be her best ranking until 2001. "At first she enjoyed the whole thing—the
playing and the winning and the attention," said Mary Carillo. "By the
second year she was a professional prodigy, which changes everything. She
was a kid living as a grown-up. I don't think that's what she'd signed up
for, and it broke her down."
Denise Capriati often felt she and her family had gotten more than they'd
bargained for. "Once you're in it it's really hard to go back," she said.
"You want to slow down, but you have commitments and people coming at you
left and right and money in your face that's very hard to turn down and it's
very hard to maintain the balance of it all. I wanted her to stop because
maybe I felt in my heart, I noticed that she wasn't as happy as she used to
be. She wasn't enjoying it. She was changing. The desire wasn't there. The
spark was gone."
In 1993, at 16, in the midst of a rough year on the court, Capriati lost in
first round of the U.S. Open, and quit tennis. The years from 18 to 20 she
calls "That Bad Time." "She was just tryin to find out what she really
wanted in her own way," Denise Capriati says. "She was doing her own thing
and just struggling, trying to figure out life, and who she was, and what
she really wanted to do, and if she had a passion or a spark left to do it."
According to her mother, Capriati had lost part of her childhood. "[She]
wasn't able to live a normal life and lost whatever it is within, the spark,
the spirit of being a child. And no one should lose that. But it happened
and it's very hard to get that back." She moved away from her parents, got a
nose ring, took SAT prep classes, was arrested for stealing a cheap ring at
an outdoor mall and again a few months later for possessing a bag of
marijuana. She considered suicide. She did time in court-ordered drug rehab.
Some think the pressure of being the teenage family bread-winner overwhelmed
her. Many think, ultimately, she just wanted to be a child. "Jennifer may be
more normal than we give her credit for," Pam Shriver said. But most
teenagers aren't famous. Where Capriati had leveraged fame to sign
multimillion dollar endorsement deals before she turned pro, now, when she
tried to be a regular teenager and test limits, fame taxed her deeply,
putting her mug shot on the evening news nationwide. "People don't know
the real truth of why things happened," Capriati said. "Maybe some
day I will tell the story of my life or whatever, if it helps someone, if it
helps people in a good way. You know, about whatever happened that time… I
didn't love myself and I didn't feel loved by anyone else… How can you have
confidence if you aren't even comfortable in your own skin?"
During her three years away from the game she didn't consider herself
retired. "I never really saw myself as being out. I thought of it as
taking a break. It's not like I ever thought I'd never want to play tennis
again, that was it, career's over. I just wanted a break. It ended up being
kinda a long break, but I think deep down I knew I was gonna come back."
The thing that pushed her back was her reputation's nosedive. "I was just
a has-been. I hated that word has-been and I said oh my God, this is gonna
bother me for the rest of my life having to hear that. Burnout. What a waste.
That motivated me. I used all the negative comments to fuel me. They just
made me angry and maybe if they didn't say all that maybe I wouldn't be here
right now. Keep saying I can't do something, keep saying there's a gap,
because it's gonna motivate me and fuel me to go out and change that and
prove them wrong."
She rejoined the tour in 1997, but remained unhappy. "I was still a mess
inside," Capriati says. While the big five struggled for supremacy,
Capriati just struggled, ranked 66th in 1997 and 101st in 1998. "I didn't
like myself," Capriati said. "I thought everything was my fault and I
was such a bad person and that's why my life all went to shit and that's why
that all happened and I screwed up, I was a loser, blah, blah, blah. And for
a long time I couldn't look at myself. I was just constantly living in this
disappointment. Are you gonna be a disappointment? Are you not gonna be a
disappointment? You just can't take it personally. I'm a loser so, yeah, I'm
a loser. That's ridiculous. It's just a game, just as simple as that."
She began working with a trainer, sweating in the gym and in the pool and on
the track, losing weight and gaining muscle. Davenport famously said, "She
walked into the locker room and it was like, uh, Jennifer, is that you?" She
began dating Xavier Malisse, a hot-looking, low-ranked player from Belgium.
And she began to see herself with new eyes. "Slowly, I started to say it's
not just about me playing tennis. That's not why my family loves me. That
bad time when I wasn't playing, my family was still there, my friends were
still there. It doesn't matter to them if I play tennis or not. They love me
for who I am."
That realization, and her new body, and leaving Malisse in late 2000, freed
Capriati to play the best tennis of her life. She shocked the world winning
the Australian in January, 2001, and the French a few months later. That
year she was the only woman to reach the semi-finals of all four Grand Slams.
On October 15th she became number one in the world.
The Emmys roll on, handing out awards just for TV, and her bias toward one
actor becomes clear. "Matthew's always on, always funny," she blurts
out. "Not just like Chandler, but…" Once she gets started she brings
"Friends" star Matthew Perry up quite a bit. He was her guest at numerous
tournaments last year. If he's not her boyfriend, he's a good friend who's
on her mind quite a bit. "Matthew approves," she says of her Amex
commercial in which she stuffs an orange under her tennis dress like it's a
tennis ball. "He kept saying, gimme, I'll make it more funny. I was like,
um, maybe the next one."
The tennis grapevine says they're dating, her flushed cheeks while she talks
about him says they're dating, but she won't admit to being more than (sorry)
friends. "There really is nothing to say," she says. "I swear. Who
knows. Maybe someday, there could be, or potential, I don't know. Just,
right now, we're just friends more than anything. Just getting to know each
other on that level and things get complicated if you get romantically…" For now she's
taking it slow. "I wish I hadn't had all these bad relationships. That's
made me a little, like, put my guard up. You know, your self-esteem says,
what's wrong with you? Why am I having these really bad relationships? Why
can't I find a nice guy? If there are a million guys who'd like to go out
with me where are they?"
At 10 o'clock on Monday morning, as millions are reporting for work,
Capriati gets in her silver Mercedes, drives ten miles an hour for about
five minutes, pulls up to Court 10-L, does a light jog, and begins hitting
tennis balls. Most days, when she's in training mode, she hits for two hours
in the morning, eats, naps, hits for two hours in the afternoon, then does
60 to 90 minutes with her trainer. This morning she takes the court across
from two men at once. Jimmy Brown is one of her coaches. He was in the
world's top 100 for nine years and retired ten years ago. Ricardo Gonzalez
is a hungry, nationally ranked 18-and-under. They are among the best male
players in the world not currently on the tour. They are clay pigeons for Capriati.
Her shots fly like low-slung comets. She meets each ball waist high, sends
it over the net by a few inches, and, still, it lands deep every time. She
doesn't use a lot of topspin, so her shots don't make much of a parabola,
they're more like line drives. "Everyone that I hit with says man, your
balls are so hard to return. I'm like why? They say, your balls, they don't
come up. They just, like, skid near the ground. They get really low. They
don't sit up at all. And it's like oh, okay. I wish I could hit against
myself to see."
She finds her ability a little miraculous. "You just hit it and it just
goes where you want it to go," she says. "Sometimes it doesn't, but
most of the time it does. And you know it's gonna go there. Sometimes I don't
know how I do it. Like, okay, thanks God." Brown has a more scientific
explanation. "She has perfect timing. The body and racket work together
seamlessly so she can get her hips into her shots. And she's strong. But
small guys can get power from great timing. Thing is, she's always attacking
the ball. You can tell a player to do that, but if they don't have great
hand-eye coordination, can't do it. With Jen there's no wasted motion."
"She's one of the greatest ball strikers ever," says Pam Shriver. "She's
just got an incredible gift to pound the ball with control. I love watching
her play."
At noon, finished toying with Brown and Gonzalez, she lets me get on the court.
Her shots are indeed low, hovering somewhere around your knees, making you
feel you need not a racket but a shovel to dig them out of the ground. Her
on court rhythm is incredibly fast: she's so quick and efficient to the ball
that no matter where you hit it, a second after you follow through it's
coming back at you, as if she were a ball machine gone wacky. There's no
time to think about where you might hit it. You just react as you would in a
fistfight. After you make contact with a few of her shots, and it feels like
someone's pushing against the face of your racket as you swing through, then
you realize your right forearm is sore and swelling. The whole incident
takes on the feel of intense aerobics mixed with a back alley mugging and
you're just deflecting and defending and, eventually, after eight or nine
minutes, your arm starts to throb and your lungs start to shriek and each
new shot racing at you is like a punch to the chest and you feel her inner bully.
In 2003 the tennis world will be watching to see if that bully comes out. We
want to know: is there a moat separating the Williams from the world or
separating the Williams and Capriati from the world? Capriati's supporters
are quick to point out that all of Capriati's six recent losses to Serena
have been extremely close matches and many times she led late in the third
set. After a tough loss in L.A. at the end of the 2002 season Denise
Capriati said, "Jen had her. She did everything but win. But Serena's balls
kept falling over, and she came up with a couple big serves, and…"
Brown thinks that the consistently close losses means the only difference
between them is mental. "She had Serena the last three times they played,"
he said. "I don't think she has to do anything different. She just has to
believe it and one win can do that."
Capriati thinks she does need to make changes to surmount the Sisters, may
need a new coach. She recently hired a new trainer and, in November, had
lazer surgery on her eyes to improve her vision. "Next year she'll be seeing
a lot better," Denise Capriati said. "For sure it'll make a difference on
the court." Capriati admits the Sisters are a challenge, but she refuses to
submit, or even to admit that they are currently dominating the tour.
"Steffi dominated," she said. "Martina Navratiloa dominated. I don't think
they've quite established that they're dominating yet. And, besides," she
said defiantly, "nobody dominates me. I'm not gonna be dominated by anybody."
Many are watching for signs of Capriati becoming discouraged. Her mother
says her resolve is only deepening. "She's determined to make that streak
change," Denise Capriati said. "[After she lost in L.A.] she said this is
the last time I'm losing to her. She just made up her mind and said I'm not
losin to her anymore."
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