Great Expectations 

By TAD BARTIMUS

Good on 'ya, Jennifer Capriati! It's great to see your name back in the headlines, great to see a smile on your face, great to see you waving the Australian Open tennis trophy in your powerful right hand. The world labeled you a has-been at 17, but you reached way down inside yourself to come back a winner. 

It was a lot harder the second time. Most things are. You were only 13 when you burst onto the international tennis scene in 1990 with a 1,000-watt smile and a killer backhand. Whoopee! Another Chris Evert! We're always looking for another somebody: another Michael Jordan, another John Elway, another Mia Hamm. Just give us a brilliantly talented youngster, and we'll make 'em an icon!
Your semifinal match against top-ranked Monica Seles at the 1991 U.S. Open offered tantalizing promise of a long-running duel of the divas. The next year you won a gold medal at the Barcelona Olympics. 

Then the relentless media spotlight, pushy parents, sponsorship sharks circling to feed off your fame, hormones and your own fledgling independence ran you right off the rails and onto a police blotter. You were accused of smoking pot and shoplifting, you got pimples, put on pounds, pierced a nostril. 

Hand-wringers in the media and on the tennis circuit moaned, "Why?" 

You were set up, Jennifer. You were a million-dollar baby with a brain that wasn't even fully developed yet. You were, in short, a teenager. 

And you were tired.

Two new studies, by the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, now claim that teenagers who work more than 20 hours a week may wind up getting lower grades, using more alcohol than their peers and spending less time with their parents. Earlier health and behavior studies reported teens are chronically sleep-deprived. 

Nearly 5 million American children under 18 hold jobs. Yours, Jennifer, was relentless. You were always "on." Everybody had a stake in your success: your sponsors, the adoring press, your mom and dad, the big business of women's professional tennis. 

Fans don't like to see their stars fall to earth. When you rebelled and failed to live up to others' expectations, you were cast aside like yesterday's ticket stub.

The world looked elsewhere for the next Chris Evert, leaving you to flail about like any other high school-age girl trying to find herself. Except for you, it was harder. Your mistakes turned into late-night talk show monologues and parental cautionary tales. You became a write-off, Jennifer - to everybody but yourself.

"I was very young and I was experiencing my adolescence," you told the world after you tried to make a comeback at the U.S. Open in 1999 but couldn't get past - who else? - Monica Seles.

"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," you said. 

"I made mistakes, and, yes, I am to blame ... But I've put a great deal behind me, moving forward in the right direction ... I feel like I've started a new chapter in my life."

Few believed you, Jennifer. Sportswriters have become inured to empty mea culpas from the likes of Darryl Strawberry and Mike Tyson. Why should your story be any different?

Because you had more faith in yourself than anybody else did. Because the people around you realized that Jennifer the person was more precious than Jennifer the endorsement, Jennifer the paycheck, Jennifer the statistic. Because - simple as it sounds - your maturing brain finally got hard-wired, you got help, you got sleep, and playing tennis became fun again.

This time, under a brilliant Australian sun, with adoring fans once again on your side, you volleyed past Seles, muscled aside defending champion Lindsay Davenport and toppled top-seeded Martina Hingis to win your first-ever Grand Slam tournament.

You showed us the hard way to become a grownup, Jennifer. May your victory - and all your victories to come - be sweeter for it.


© 2001 The Women Syndicate

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