| | Capriati's sad tale
continues
Posted: Wed September 2,
1998 
Sports Illustrated staff writer Jon Wertheim will
report frequently from Flushing Meadows during the U.S.
Open.
Attend the first-round matches at the U.S. Open and you
can't help but wonder why tennis is suffering from a crisis
of popularity. Under a cloudless sky, the sport's best and
brightest, from
Andre
Agassi to
Natasha
Zvereva, from 16-year-old
Mirjana
Lucic to 34-year-old
Lori
McNeil, are all out and on display for public viewing. Despite a
bevy of close matches, there are hardly any upsets, so
everyone invariably goes home happy.
One of the most enduring images of Tuesday's matches,
though, was shrouded in sadness. In, say, 1993, the
prospect of a
Jennifer
Capriati-Jana
Novotna match would have packed Stadium Court because you had two
Top 10 players on the cusp of stardom. Yesterday, though, a
capacity crowd of rubberneckers—self
included—jammed into Louis Armstrong Stadium to watch
the defending Wimbledon champ take on a
confused young woman whose ranking hovers in triple
digits.
The plight of Capriati, now an astonishing 22 years old,
is, of course, a hackneyed cautionary tale by now. But
there is still something ineffably dispiriting about
watching her make like tennis's
Roberto
Duran and trade on her past glory while proving a shadow of her
former self. Capriati's "comeback" is really no
comeback at all. Since returning to the Tour after a
burnout-induced hiatus, she has won zero tournaments. Over
the past two years, her match
record is 17-23. Ranked as high as No. 6 in the far-off days of
1991, Capriati is now No. 109, dependent on
compassionate/avaricious tournament directors and sponsors
who can sell some seats by including her in the draw with a
wild-card
invitation.
This was the case at the U.S. Open. Capriati has failed to
advance beyond the first round since 1992, when
George
Bush was president and
Martina
Hingis was 12. On Tuesday, the crowd, perhaps stung by
"we-helped-create-this-mess" guilt, cheered
wildly for Capriati, particularly after she belted a few
winners and fired up a little something from our memory
banks. As for the missed volleys that decent
junior players ought to make in their sleep? The forehands
that nearly hit the back wall on the fly? The fact she
still has no clue how to construct a point?
Well, she's still rusty. Needs some more match
play.
After a deceptively close 6-4, 6-3 defeat, Capriati, a
smile welded to her face, gave a wave to the crowd before
departing to the locker room. With a reception like that,
it's hard to imagine she won't be back next year. "I
was a little surprised," she
said, her diction still peppered by an obscene quotient of
"likes," "y'knows," and
"stuffs" that leave little doubt that her
formative years were spent doing little else but playing
the game that would ultimately betray her. "It makes
me feel good that
they're still like that. It's encouraging."
Afterward, she made her way through the bowels of the
stadium and passed a construction dumpster. How nice it
would have been if she had chucked her rackets inside and
decided, at long last, to commence the next chapter of her
life.
VOLLEYS: One of the more intriguing first-round matches pitted
ramrod-straight
Jan-Michael
Gambill, who still lives at home and is an unabashed
Star
Trek and
Reba
McIntire fan, against
Karsten
Braasch, a flaky German with a
Hideo
Nomo-esque service motion, who was the inspiration behind the
ATP Tour's decision to ban smoking during changeovers.
Gambill won in four sets. ... In his first-round match
against
Paul
Goldstein,
Andrew
Ilie experienced such severe cramping in his right hand that he
tried playing lefty before eventually retiring ... The
first set of
Lindsay
Davenport's match against
Catalina
Cristea lasted a whopping 16 minutes ... How bad did it get for
Elena
Wagner against
Venus
Williams? Down 1-6, 0-5 and facing triple match point, Wagner tried
an underhanded serve ... Poor
Cedric
Pioline. As the tour's 17th-ranked player, he was one slot out of
the seeding. Instead, he drew
Jonas
Bjorkman in the first round and surrendered after five tough sets
... Had
Patrick
Rafter not pulled out a five-setter against
Hicham
Arazi, he would have been the first defending champin U.S. Open
history to lose in the first
round.
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