Gender Benders in Women’s Tennis

In Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols (2005), Stanley Teitelbaum’s interesting study of male sports heroes, their world, and their often tragic arc of plummeting from fame, the men share several features with women athletes, but there is also a different dynamic at work. Due to their special skills, both genders experience love as conditional, balanced by their potential and ability to live up to others’ expectations (p. 18). Among male tennis players, however, there is more camaraderie and post-match horseplay in the locker room, while women players socialize less and remember a fist

Page 1

pumped in their face or a painful defeat for long after (L. Jon Wertheim, Venus Envy, 2001, p. 52). “I don’t come to make friends,” Venus Williams says. “I come to win matches” (p. 51).

My sampling from women’s tennis, itself arguably exceptional among women’s sports, suggests early gender divergences. Boy athletes are viewed by Teitelbaum as “coddled since childhood,” emotionally stunted, self-centered, and insensitive to others’ needs. Such deficits can foster compensatory behaviors, such as gambling, substance and steroid abuse, or, after their heyday, clinical states of depression and despair. While the pitfalls of fame and celebrityhood seem to impact both genders, there is no single pattern for girls who become tennis players. Yet the most commonly repeated one is very young girls being driven and dominated by their fathers’ ambitions. Most prominent are Mary Pierce, Steffi Graf, Andrea Jaeger, Jennifer Capriati, Maria Sharapova, Mirjana Lucic, Sonya Jeyaseelan, Jelena Dokic, and the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus.

The tradition reaches back at least to the 1920s and France’s Suzanne Lenglen’s struggles to escape her “Svengali-like father” (Paul Fein, “Does Father Really Know Best?”, Tennis Confidential, 2002, p. 184). Not all of these fathers have been abusive, and the girls were often eager to get into the game, but many fathers’ doubling as coaches and managers put their girls in a painful bind. Covering the women’s tour in the 1990s, Michael Mewshaw heard “horror tales about girls being berated and beaten by fathers, brothers, or coaches” (Ladies of the Court, 1993, p. 26). Some “had seen Patti Hogan being whipped on the bare legs by her racquet-wielding father” and others named juniors “being slapped around and destined to become the next generation of battered women.” In a few instances, mothers play a similar role. Anna Kournikova suffered from the “mother from hell,” and Alexandra Stevenson’s mother’s micromanaging deflected attention from the real star. Mothers end up getting banned from locker rooms; fathers from the stadium. On the other hand, Monica Hingis’s game was carefully nourished by

Page 23

her tennis mom, Melanie Molitor. Without her supportive presence at courtside, Monica’s game foundered. Monica Seles and Lindsey Davenport are other rare exceptions of escaping parental interference.

Another gender difference is that female athletes peak earlier without necessarily maturing faster than males. A girl may start hitting balls right out of the nursery, turn pro at thirteen (Capriati), work out with older male players, and win her first grand slam at seventeen (Sharapova’s 2003 Wimbledon title). Lucky to own high-school diplomas, they have already earned millions. Their glowing, muscular bodies are lined up with products; their faces are on magazine covers. Surrounded by trainers and consultants, their lives are the quarry of paparazzi no less than those of movie stars. But although they own mansions and sports cars, what they often do not own is themselves.

Driven by parents’ agendas, many promising and a few top players burn out before their twenties. Stefano Capriati famously bragged about teaching Jennifer push-ups in the crib and pushing her to turn pro while still an eighth grader by asserting, “When the fruit is ripe, you eat it” (Fein, p. 140). In a few years, she admitted, “I really was not happy with myself, my tennis, my life, my parents, my coaches, my friends…when I looked in the mirror, I actually saw this distorted image: I was so ugly and fat. I just wanted to kill myself” (Fein, p. 184). Instead, she drifted into teenage delinquencies–soft drugs and shoplifting. But when she launched her comebacks, she brought back her father as coach. Andrea Jaeger’s father would say, “Your child plays for himself last. First he plays for you, then for his coach, then for himself.” Andrea was driven to play in so many tournaments that her body failed; with her shoulder permanently wrecked, she retired at age twenty-one. Other players, like Mary Pierce and Jelena Dokic, with notoriously abusive fathers, far from being critical, heap gratitude and praise on them. “Sometimes,” Pierce wondered in 1994, “if things hadn’t been so tough, would I have been the tennis player I am today?” (Fein, p. 138). On another occasion she asserted, “He made me the player I am today” (Wertheim, p. 126). When her game sagged, she also resorted to her father. “I owe everything to my dad,” Dokic echoed in the face of his public outrages (Wertheim, p. 166).

In contrast, when at around age eleven, Lindsey Davenport made a “sloppy error” in a tournament, her “father groaned aloud and shook his head. Lindsey stopped her match, and told him, ‘Dad, if you do that one more time, you’ll never get to come watch me again’” (Wertheim, p. 13). Martina Hingis’s mother told an interviewer, “Tennis is just a short stage of your life, and it can be good preparation for the rest of it. I want to help Martina to become independent and self-analytical until someday she finds a partner” (Fein, p. 18). All the same, naming one’s daughter after Martina Navratilova does send a message. At her Wimbledon final when asked if her parents were coming, Davenport replied, “Oh, God, no. They have their own lives. Besides, they’re kind of over my career” (Wertheim, p. 41).

But for many players, tennis starts out as fun only to be burdened with parents’ agendas, their unresolved conflicts and displaced ambitions. Monica Seles instinctively gravitated to the game at age six while her father was giving lessons to her older brother, and later when she was suffering acute loneliness in a Florida tennis camp whose instructors were trying to change her game, she summoned her father who helped her get back on track (Seles, Monica: From Fear to Victory, 1996, p. 24). After her traumatic stabbing by a self-styled Steffi Graf fan, Seles was only able to begin reconnecting with her former self by rediscovering the unalloyed pleasures of smacking a tennis ball.

The tennis court may be a public arena of concentrated competition, but it also has a more private zone where identities are being negotiated: withheld or rewarded, gained or scrubbed, and, in rare instances, rediscovered. What serves to unify the multiplicities of women’s tennis experiences are these identity-themes. Putting identity in the center, one circles the clock for its constituents: at 1-3, competitions define players; at 3-6, attitude; at 6-9, the physical self (including injuries, stamina, and training); at 9-12, the separation-individuation process emerges and proves the most significant for grasping the dynamics of women tennis players. But the degree of success in the psychological quarter does not impact on their performance in conspicuous or predictable ways. Lindsey Daven-

Page 24

port, who is happily married, displays a buoyant self-esteem in contrast with her hunched shoulders and lowered head previously, but she is now suffering the impact of physical wear-and-tear. Still, she emerges as the most balanced of the present group, as Chris Evert had been before her. Both appear to have consolidated early love relations (object-relations in psychoanalytic terms), learned to deal with issues of self-esteem, and maintained realistic perspectives. Martina Navratilova has managed to survive post-tennis malaise, partly through the thrill of briefly returning to doubles competition, but also by enriching her life with political causes, creative work, friends, and travel. But multiple interests have had the reverse effect for Serena Williams, whose dabbling in acting and women’s dress styles have turned her court appearances into fashion statements. Too many balls to juggle, erratic training, lack of preparation, over-confidence, and over-reliance on her father-coach Richard Williams have combined to slow her pace and send her shots askew. Here there may be an instance of Erikson’s identity diffusion in a daughter who was taught she could be anything by a parent notorious for his tall-tales, farfetched schemes such as buying Rockefeller Center, and re-invented pasts (Wertheim, pp. 70-79). Venus Williams, who won Wimbledon in 2005, has kept her goals simpler and better focused.

Variously dysfunctional fathers violate their daughters’ boundaries before they have been formed. A contentious merger experience is reestablished, which players must battle through, on and off the court. They have to be the invincible I on the court, but accept being the weaker I in the paternal bond. They may find that the love and acceptance they are striving for is determined by the father’s secret or not so secret agendas. These include narcissistic vindication from old slights or injuries and garden-variety greed, or, in the case of Jim Pearce, traumatic reliving and revenge. Himself an abused child, he would yell during Mary’s junior tournaments, “Kill the bitch!” (Fein, p. 138).

One consistent correlation is that tennis daughters of father-coaches tend to wallop their strokes, hit killer overheads, and serve nearly as fast as top men players. The tradeoff of having disruptive, overly-possessive fathers is in giving their daughters permission to hit-out much harder than other women players (there may be a psychosexual subtext here). The downside of women players with a big game seems to be the toll taken on their physical condition: body-parts tend to wear out faster. In contrast, Martina Hingis, who was coached by her tennis-playing mother, relies on strategy and anticipation—a mental game of outwitting her opponents.

Struggling through their psychological ordeals may make the women more whole and better human beings, but have but marginal impact on their level of play. Asked why she looked much happier than in the past, Jennifer Capriati in her comeback-kid mode replied, “I guess I’ve stopped thinking what the world thinks of me” (Wertheim, p. 34). Her return was impressive but short-lived. She soared to the top after winning the French Open in 2001, but by late 2004 she left the court after a quarter-final loss in a minor tournament, perhaps for the last time, plagued by shoulder injuries. Interviewed in her Tampa residence, she reflected on the costs of overtraining and overscheduling events, of too much pressure from her father and poor advice from others. But she also recalled her teenage daydream of hearing others remark as she passed by: “There’s Jennifer Capriati, the greatest tennis player who ever lived” (New York Times, May 25, 2006). Now, without tennis defining her life, she spends countless hours “inside her head.” She surmises she needs to find an appropriate hobby because “A lot of the time my hobby is thinking.”

A Brief Update (May 2008)

After a successful bout with motherhood, Lindsey Davenport returned to the tennis circuit in September 2007 and made up for lost time by winning two tournaments and coming close in others; in Spring 2008 she was sidelined temporarily for injuries. Enjoying mixed successes in her comeback, Martina Hingis retired after testing positive for a banned substance, cocaine, which, if true, may have stemmed from her earlier foot injury, but she has contested the ruling and denied any drug use. The careers of the Williams sisters continue to soar and plunge. Venus won Wimbledon in 2007, but after a lackluster performance in the Australian Open has taken a leave of absence to deal with issues, apparently concerning her physical well-being. After dropping from the top fifty in

Page 25

2006, Serena also had a mediocre run in the Australian Open, but has gotten better focused and managed a seventeen-match winning streak in Spring 2008. (See page 9 for author credit.)

Page 26