It pays to be young in tennis, but the cost is high

Bruce Emond The Jakarta Post Jakarta

By women's tennis standards, Indonesia's Angelique Wijaya was getting on in years when she won the junior girls title at the 2001 Wimbledon Tennis Championships.

She was 17, an age when many other young women tennis players were already veterans in competing in the big league of the women's circuit. In the last two decades, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Martina Hingis, the Williams sisters and Jennifer Capriati were all adult champions in their early teens.

Anna Kournikova, although yet to become a champion, was spotted as a potential top player when she was still in elementary school and moved to the U.S. at the age of nine to train at Nick Bollettieri's famous Florida tennis academy.

When one teen tennis star moves on to adulthood, there are always a crop of new young sensations inching to take her place.

It's not a new trend, but it is mostly found in the women's game, although there have been a few teen male prodigies, like Bjorn Borg in the early 1970s and Andy Roddick today. Because young girls tend to mature faster physically, they can compete with older women on the tennis court, particularly if they have a defensive baseline game.

For women with a more attacking style, like Martina Navratilova and even Indonesia's Yayuk Basuki (who attained her highest ranking when she was 26), it's a longer process to gain the strength for an all-court game.

"In my opinion, the WTA didn't have the right rules about the age when a player could turn pro in the past. Then, you could turn pro at 14, and you could do what you wanted," Yayuk, 31 and now retired, said from her Jakarta home.

"I think it was too early, like if you look at Tracy Austin, Andrea Jaeger and Capriati. But, now WTA has a good rule, that at 15, you can play in only so many tournaments. Only after 18 years, can they play a full 20 tournaments. I think that's fair."

The youngest women's champion at Wimbledon was a 15 year old, Lottie Dodd, who won championships five times in the 1880s. She was followed by other young women in the annals of sporting history: Suzanne Lenglen from France had been brought up by her domineering father to play tennis according to ballet footwork.

Maureen Connolly, who some consider the women's game's greatest player, was 16 when she won her first U.S. Open and 19 when she took the Grand Slam of four top titles in 1954 (she was forced into retirement by a horse-riding accident a year later).

In the 1970s, there was Chris Evert, who was just 17 when she reached the semifinals at the U.S. Open. Youngest of all was Tracy Austin who, at the age of 14, made her Wimbledon debut, losing to Evert 6-1, 6-1, in the first round. She went on to a successful career, including winning the U.S. Open twice, before injury cut her career short.

As money poured into the game, more young teen phenoms surfaced in the early 1980s, most prominently Andrea Jaeger, who was to become another early-retirement victim due to chronic injury. She told sports writer Frank Deford in 1995 that her notoriously aggressive father, "... wasn't my father (after the age of 13) but my coach ... but my father did it all out of love for me. He wanted me to have a better life than he'd had".

But it was the late 1980s which saw women's tennis starting to become dominated by girls barely in their teens.

Although the aging Navratilova remained a presence through to the mid-1990s, it was really a two-girl show, with Graf, who had spent most of her life on the tennis court, and Seles, the Yugoslavian-born, American-raised player who nearly gave her all for the game, with Gabriela Sabatini playing understudy

Capriati came up a little later, but tennis was thrown into disarray with the stabbing of Seles during a match in 1993 in Hamburg, Germany. Along the way, there was the growing realization that many of the young women tennis players enjoyed a very brief reign, before problems such as injury or burnout got the better of them.

Part of the problem is that tennis has become big business. Before 1968, tennis was for amateurs only, and the professional circuit was limited to just a few players. When "open" tennis debuted 34 years ago, big money suddenly came into the sport, and it continued with lucrative endorsement contracts and the rise of international sports management services, sending players to tournaments around the world.

Young, talented, attractive players can make lots of money -- both for themselves and their handlers -- by competing around the world. All those plane trips and playing on different court surfaces in changing environments take a great toll on the body, as is obvious from the cases of Austin, Jaeger, walking-wounded Gabriela Sabatini and now Hingis, who is having an operation to treat ankle woes.

There are also the emotional demands of trying to fulfill expectations of parents, agents and fans.

Capriati is perhaps the most famous case, accused of shoplifting and drug use after she became burned out from playing tennis day in and day out since she was a kid. Jaeger, who now runs a foundation helping children with terminal illnesses, was notorious for acting like a brat on court.

Graf, whose father had taught her tennis as a toddler by rewarding her with ice cream when she got the ball back, was painfully shy through much of her career, except when she was doing what she did best -- playing tennis -- and also suffered many injuries.

There was also the horrendous experiences of player Mary Pierce, whose father was famous for berating her or her opponents during matches, and the father of current top pro Jelena Dokic.

But the pressure of fame is not a modern development. The notoriously sensitive, temperamental Lenglen had a breakdown at the height of her career in the 1920s, and then gave up the game.

The Women's Tennis Association (WTA), especially after Capriati became the poster girl for all that was wrong with pushy parents and the pressure keg of the circuit, has taken several steps, such as the minimum age to turn pro rule.

Young women players are also given a mentor -- an older player who they can call on whenever they need advice.

Yayuk, who has been a mentor to both Wynne Prakusya and Angelique, said the WTA was trying to help out in other ways, including educating parents.

"They give talks to young players, parents and coaches about what the limits are, and when they (parents and coaches) should not be involved. They adopted a rule of keeping parents out of the locker room after the players complained about the lack of privacy," Yayuk said.

Yayuk did not play the full circuit until she was 20, but still managed to reach number 20 in the world, make more than US$1 million in prize money and become one of the top doubles players.

She said she still has some "what ifs" about her decision, but believes it was for the best.

"Maybe I would have made it to even higher, say to number 15, if I had turned pro earlier, but that's all in the past," Yayuk said. "On the other hand, I never really had a career-threatening injury (unlike players who turned pro at a younger age) except in 1995, and then I was able to recover by taking three months off."

So, perhaps Angelique and her parents have it right, by taking matters slowly but surely in her ambition to become a champion.