It pays to be young in tennis, but the cost is high<\/p>\n
Bruce Emond
\nThe Jakarta Post
\nJakarta<\/p>\n
By women's tennis standards, Indonesia's Angelique Wijaya was
\ngetting on in years when she won the junior girls title at the
\n2001 Wimbledon Tennis Championships.<\/p>\n
She was 17, an age when many other young women tennis players
\nwere already veterans in competing in the big league of the
\nwomen's circuit. In the last two decades, Steffi Graf, Monica
\nSeles, Martina Hingis, the Williams sisters and Jennifer Capriati
\nwere all adult champions in their early teens.<\/p>\n
Anna Kournikova, although yet to become a champion, was
\nspotted as a potential top player when she was still in
\nelementary school and moved to the U.S. at the age of nine to
\ntrain at Nick Bollettieri's famous Florida tennis academy.<\/p>\n
When one teen tennis star moves on to adulthood, there are
\nalways a crop of new young sensations inching to take her place.<\/p>\n
It's not a new trend, but it is mostly found in the women's
\ngame, although there have been a few teen male prodigies, like
\nBjorn Borg in the early 1970s and Andy Roddick today. Because
\nyoung girls tend to mature faster physically, they can compete
\nwith older women on the tennis court, particularly if they have a
\ndefensive baseline game.<\/p>\n
For women with a more attacking style, like Martina
\nNavratilova and even Indonesia's Yayuk Basuki (who attained her
\nhighest ranking when she was 26), it's a longer process to gain
\nthe strength for an all-court game.<\/p>\n
\"In my opinion, the WTA didn't have the right rules about the
\nage when a player could turn pro in the past. Then, you could
\nturn pro at 14, and you could do what you wanted,\" Yayuk, 31 and
\nnow retired, said from her Jakarta home.<\/p>\n
\"I think it was too early, like if you look at Tracy Austin,
\nAndrea Jaeger and Capriati. But, now WTA has a good rule, that at
\n15, you can play in only so many tournaments. Only after 18
\nyears, can they play a full 20 tournaments. I think that's fair.\"<\/p>\n
The youngest women's champion at Wimbledon was a 15 year old,
\nLottie Dodd, who won championships five times in the 1880s. She
\nwas followed by other young women in the annals of sporting
\nhistory: Suzanne Lenglen from France had been brought up by her
\ndomineering father to play tennis according to ballet footwork.<\/p>\n
Maureen Connolly, who some consider the women's game's
\ngreatest player, was 16 when she won her first U.S. Open and 19
\nwhen she took the Grand Slam of four top titles in 1954 (she was
\nforced into retirement by a horse-riding accident a year later).<\/p>\n
In the 1970s, there was Chris Evert, who was just 17 when she
\nreached the semifinals at the U.S. Open. Youngest of all was
\nTracy Austin who, at the age of 14, made her Wimbledon debut,
\nlosing to Evert 6-1, 6-1, in the first round. She went on to a
\nsuccessful career, including winning the U.S. Open twice, before
\ninjury cut her career short.<\/p>\n
As money poured into the game, more young teen phenoms
\nsurfaced in the early 1980s, most prominently Andrea Jaeger, who
\nwas to become another early-retirement victim due to chronic
\ninjury. She told sports writer Frank Deford in 1995 that her
\nnotoriously aggressive father, \"... wasn't my father (after the
\nage of 13) but my coach ... but my father did it all out of love
\nfor me. He wanted me to have a better life than he'd had\".<\/p>\n
But it was the late 1980s which saw women's tennis starting to
\nbecome dominated by girls barely in their teens.<\/p>\n
Although the aging Navratilova remained a presence through to
\nthe mid-1990s, it was really a two-girl show, with Graf, who had
\nspent most of her life on the tennis court, and Seles, the
\nYugoslavian-born, American-raised player who nearly gave her all
\nfor the game, with Gabriela Sabatini playing understudy<\/p>\n
Capriati came up a little later, but tennis was thrown into
\ndisarray with the stabbing of Seles during a match in 1993 in
\nHamburg, Germany. Along the way, there was the growing
\nrealization that many of the young women tennis players enjoyed a
\nvery brief reign, before problems such as injury or burnout got
\nthe better of them.<\/p>\n
Part of the problem is that tennis has become big business.
\nBefore 1968, tennis was for amateurs only, and the professional
\ncircuit was limited to just a few players. When \"open\" tennis
\ndebuted 34 years ago, big money suddenly came into the sport, and
\nit continued with lucrative endorsement contracts and the rise of
\ninternational sports management services, sending players to
\ntournaments around the world.<\/p>\n
Young, talented, attractive players can make lots of money --
\nboth for themselves and their handlers -- by competing around the
\nworld. All those plane trips and playing on different court
\nsurfaces in changing environments take a great toll on the body,
\nas is obvious from the cases of Austin, Jaeger, walking-wounded
\nGabriela Sabatini and now Hingis, who is having an operation to
\ntreat ankle woes.<\/p>\n
There are also the emotional demands of trying to fulfill
\nexpectations of parents, agents and fans.<\/p>\n
Capriati is perhaps the most famous case, accused of
\nshoplifting and drug use after she became burned out from playing
\ntennis day in and day out since she was a kid. Jaeger, who now
\nruns a foundation helping children with terminal illnesses, was
\nnotorious for acting like a brat on court.<\/p>\n
Graf, whose father had taught her tennis as a toddler by
\nrewarding her with ice cream when she got the ball back, was
\npainfully shy through much of her career, except when she was
\ndoing what she did best -- playing tennis -- and also suffered
\nmany injuries.<\/p>\n
There was also the horrendous experiences of player Mary
\nPierce, whose father was famous for berating her or her opponents
\nduring matches, and the father of current top pro Jelena Dokic.<\/p>\n
But the pressure of fame is not a modern development. The
\nnotoriously sensitive, temperamental Lenglen had a breakdown at
\nthe height of her career in the 1920s, and then gave up the game.<\/p>\n
The Women's Tennis Association (WTA), especially after
\nCapriati became the poster girl for all that was wrong with pushy
\nparents and the pressure keg of the circuit, has taken several
\nsteps, such as the minimum age to turn pro rule.<\/p>\n
Young women players are also given a mentor -- an older player
\nwho they can call on whenever they need advice.<\/p>\n
Yayuk, who has been a mentor to both Wynne Prakusya and
\nAngelique, said the WTA was trying to help out in other ways,
\nincluding educating parents.<\/p>\n
\"They give talks to young players, parents and coaches about
\nwhat the limits are, and when they (parents and coaches) should
\nnot be involved. They adopted a rule of keeping parents out of
\nthe locker room after the players complained about the lack of
\nprivacy,\" Yayuk said.<\/p>\n
Yayuk did not play the full circuit until she was 20, but
\nstill managed to reach number 20 in the world, make more than
\nUS$1 million in prize money and become one of the top doubles
\nplayers.<\/p>\n
She said she still has some \"what ifs\" about her decision, but
\nbelieves it was for the best.<\/p>\n
\"Maybe I would have made it to even higher, say to number 15,
\nif I had turned pro earlier, but that's all in the past,\" Yayuk
\nsaid. \"On the other hand, I never really had a career-threatening
\ninjury (unlike players who turned pro at a younger age) except in
\n1995, and then I was able to recover by taking three months off.\"<\/p>\n
So, perhaps Angelique and her parents have it right, by taking
\nmatters slowly but surely in her ambition to become a champion.<\/p>",
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