Youth is served in tennis, but at a risk

Youth is served in tennis, but at a risk

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.