She never had the luxury of time or space or any comfortable zone that allowed for outlandish success or routine failure.
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Jennifer Capriati signed her first autograph at age 6–before she knew what an autograph was or why anyone would be asking a child for one.
By 9 she was hitting tennis balls with Chris Evert in Ft. Lauderdale, where her family had moved, so she could train with Evert’s father, Jimmy.
By 12 Capriati was in Haines City, Fla., living at a tennis resort with her parents, Stefano and Denise, and little brother Steven because Ft. Lauderdale had run out of suitable competition.
And by 13 she was petitioning the Women’s International Pro Tennis Council to allow her to qualify for pro events in Florida.
To be fair, Capriati’s parents always seemed to want the best for their daughter. They bristled at suggestions that she was an investment in the family’s future and never did fit the typical stage-parent stereotype.
If Stefano was anything, he was overprotective, but he had little choice given the world he was allowing his child to enter. And make no mistake. Jennifer Capriati was a child, a little girl whose first pro biography included “making bracelets” as a hobby, pink as her favorite color and interior decorator as her ambition beyond tennis.
“If I become rich and everything, I want to help people who don’t get the chance to play tennis,” she said in April 1989. “I want to help people who are poor and starving.”
She was an innocent kid, a sweet kid, a kid you could not help but be worried about, given her unusual talents and even more extraordinary circumstances.
If not in the public eye, she has her period of rebellion and gets on with her life, puts it behind her, maybe laughs about it when she’s 35 and telling her kids what a devil their mom used to be.
Instead, when her parents get divorced, her pro career becomes overwhelming and she acts out her teenage angst by shoplifting and smoking pot, Capriati is front-page news, a bona fide public figure having to deal with the very public nature of her transgressions.
Even now her comeback is out of kilter, a 24-year-old talking about how she was washed up at 19 and wise by 21. But it is certainly better than the alternative.
Capriati won her first Grand Slam event last weekend when she defeated Monica Seles, Lindsay Davenport and Martina Hingis en route to the Australian Open championship, an accomplishment preordained at 13 and seemingly overdue at 24.
Too bad, of course, that anyone should believe that a major title is ever overdue. Nonetheless, hers is a comeback easy to root for considering that, unlike so many fallen athletes old enough to know better, Capriati was truly a child when she went astray.
To see Capriati in the well-circulated ’94 police mug shot at the age of 17 was as jolting as if she were a favorite young cousin or niece.
To see her now with the same light-hearted smile she had at 13 is to hope she continues to find fulfillment as a tennis player and person.
Speaking the other day by conference call from her home near Tampa, Capriati said she never seriously considered leaving the game.
“I was young,” she said, in case anyone needed to be reminded. “I couldn’t say for sure on anything.”
That was always one of the sadder aspects to the Capriati downfall. She wasn’t mature enough to understand her problems any more than she was capable of extricating herself from them. To expect her to pull together her game on top of that and develop it to the point where she could compete on the highest level, because nothing less would be acceptable, was simply unrealistic.
The refreshing part is that with age has come the ability to accept responsibility for her own actions and to count her blessings.
“Sometimes, I think, `Geez, why have all these things happened to me? Why is my life like this?'” she said. “But I wouldn’t trade it because it is interesting and I have had so many opportunities that people don’t get and there are more opportunities ahead. I’m sure it will just get more interesting.”
Being away from the game, she said, gave her a fresh perspective.
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“I just realized that I can still be who I am and I don’t have to care what people say or think … and I think that comes with age too,” she said. “That comes with maturity.
“There’s no reason I shouldn’t be happy.”
No, there sure isn’t.