Promising Prodigy : Debbie Graham Is Top-Seeded Player in Her Age Bracket in Seventeen Tennis Tourney

In the beginning, there were no dreams of spawning another Martina Navratilova, or even a Tracy Austin for that matter.

James and Jacqueline Graham weren’t thinking about a big-bucks future for their 9-year-old daughter, Debbie, when they enrolled her in a tennis program. They were just looking for another way to wear her out.

“Debbie has always had a lot of energy,” Jacqueline Graham said, raising her brows to underscore the understatement. “She had already tried a lot of different sports, including swimming and gymnastics.

“There was a free tennis clinic at our local (Fountain Valley) rec center, and she thought it might be fun. After the first day, the coach told us, ‘This kid’s got a natural backhand,’ and encouraged us to stick with it.”

A lot of the other players in her age group were already four- and five-year veterans, but Debbie Graham has this way of getting to the head of the class, despite the obstacles.

She’s only 15, but is ranked fifth in the nation in the United States Tennis Assn. 16-and-under division. And she’s the top-seeded player in that division at the Seventeen Tennis Tournament of Champions, which continues through Saturday at the Marguerite Recreation Center in Mission Viejo.

Graham, who meets Florida’s Andrea Berger at 10:30 a.m. today, was not especially pleased with her play during Wednesday’s 6-2, 7-5 first-round win over Lisa Albano of Massachusetts. But then Graham, who has set some pretty lofty standards, is not easily satisfied.

She doesn’t let her tennis-imposed absences from school get in her way, for instance. She’s a sophomore at La Quinta High School and maintains a 4.0 grade point average. She was one of 10 students in the country to make the Academic All-American team. And she still finds time for the Latin Club, for playing the clarinet, for an occasional ski trip . . . well, you get the picture.

It wasn’t long before tennis became more than just another thing she did well, though. She soon realized that tennis could be more than a fun way to work off excess energy.

“I saw what the better players were getting out of the game,” she said. “The traveling, meeting new people. . . . I told my parents, ‘If I concentrate harder, I could do that, too.’ ”

And since ‘failure’ is not included in the Debbie Graham Personal Dictionary, she never wasted time doubting herself.

Last February, Graham concentrated herself all the way to Melbourne, Australia, where she and five other girls represented the United States in the Maureen Connolly Brinker Cup competition.

“It was really a lot of fun and really different,” she said. “We played on grass for the first time, and girls were slipping all over the place. The Australians gave us grass-court shoes and then we beat them.”

Graham is 5-10 1/2 (“That’s all she’ll admit too, anyway,” her mother says.) and she’s got a big-league first serve. But when you listen to her describe her trip to Australia, it’s not hard to remember that she’s only 15.

“We stayed with local families--everybody wanted to have an American--and they were real nice, but the way they lived was, well, behind the times,” she said.

“I stayed in a nice, upper-class area, but they didn’t even have a garbage disposal and they had those old-fashioned dial phones. And they only had one little TV with about a 12-inch screen that everyone in the family had to watch.

“They didn’t even know what a Walkman was,” she said.

Her view of the world may be typically naive for a 15-year-old, but her tennis game is maturing at a rapid rate.

“When she first came to me a couple of years ago,” said Bob Hochstadter, her coach at Laguna Niguel Racquet Club, “her strength was she could hit the ball hard and her weakness was it didn’t always end up in the court.

“We’ve worked mainly on consistency and her serve-and-volley game. With her size and reach, she makes for quite a presence at the net. Still, we’re barely beginning to scratch the surface of what she can do.”

Hochstadter can’t fight back a laugh when an onlooker admires a Graham service ace.

“Her serve? She’s just now getting comfortable with it,” he said, still chuckling. “But I’ll tell you, she got through two years of national tournaments with the ugliest serve you’ve ever seen.”

In four national tournaments last year, however, she lost in the finals twice, the semifinals once and won the consolation draw once.

“I used to just play to get things in,” Graham said. “I’d dink in my first serve. I was a pusher. People used to hate to play me.

“Now I whale on the ball,” she said, smiling.

Graham has professional aspirations, but plans to use her tennis skills to get a free college education before she starts worrying about the pro tour.

“I’d like to go to Stanford and major in something to do with math because that’s my favorite subject,” she said. “Then, if I do well in the NCAAs, I’d like to try to play pro tennis. I just want to see what it’s like.”

Hochstadter figures Graham will be able do just about anything she wants.

“Debbie’s got a great mental attitude,” he said. “She’s level-headed and doesn’t get too emotionally high or low. She grew a lot in a short time, but never lost her coordination and her quickness is improving.

“She’s got a very bright future. . . . In fact, I wish I had her future.”