She Puts All of Her Love in Her Scores

It seems a shame to make Steffi Graf go through a whole lot of Wimbledons, U.S. Opens, French Opens, clay courts and weekly WITA tournaments.

Everyone knows she’s going to win them. Everyone knows she is the next Martina Navratilova, the next Helen Wills Moody, Suzanne Lenglen, Billie Jean King, Mo Connolly.

It’s a waste of everyone’s time to make her undergo them. Why not shortcut it and let her go directly to the Hall of Fame and save the game and everyone in it from a good thumping?

Everyone knows her career is going to be a tedious succession of victories, service aces, forehands down the line. She’s going to go through life love, love. God help the game and those other poor little girls who think they can play.

It’s like when the young Dempsey first showed up on the horizon. Joe Louis in his bum-of-the-month campaign. The first look anybody got at Koufax’s fastball, Dr. J’s dunk shot, Babe Ruth’s swing.

Tennis, you have to know, is the most formful of sports. The king of the hill stays there. You never see the headline, “Unknown Wins Open” in tennis.

You see it all the time in golf. The World Series hero is often a banjo hitter who couldn’t get the ball out of the infield in the regular season. Banjo hitters never win Wimbledon. Form prevails.

It’s almost as if tennis had a caste system. The peasants know their place. There’s even a caste within a caste. The upstairs maids lord it over the downstairs. The house slaves look down on the field slaves.

You watch Steffi Graf play the game. She knows she’s in charge. Watch her as she makes a shot. She never changes expressions. No little moues of annoyance, no gestures of exultation. She’s like a housewife making bread.

She makes her fight like a leopard. Nothing personal. She hits a winner and just walks away like Joe Louis going to a neutral corner after leaving an opponent in a heap.

She has played in 47 matches this year. She has won 46 of them. The only match she lost was to Navratilova in the final at Wimbledon.

She has beaten both Chrissie Evert and Navratilova this year. The reigning queens of tennis must hear footsteps. All they have on her is age and experience. That may not be enough. She is only 18 years old. When she grows up, they may have to make her play left-handed or invent a new category for her.

She is a hitting machine. She hits every shot like a cleanup hitter going after a fastball or Jack Nicklaus hitting a driver. She doesn’t leave anything in the bag. She doesn’t try to fool you. Hers is a power game, a “Here, hit this if you can” game. No junk pitches. All rising fastballs.

They are playing a “Little Wimbledon,” a mini-U.S. Open, in the Virginia Slims of Los Angeles tournament at Manhattan Beach this week. This ordinarily pastoral little tournament, being played on the eve of the U.S. Open, suddenly finds itself with an entry list the Australian Open would like to have. All eight of the top women players in the world are here.

Hardly anyone looks up from the iced tea and salad when most of them play, but when Graf takes the court, it looks like a prison break. Even the locker room attendants run to the windows.

It’s unnerving playing Steffi. It’s like looking across the ring and seeing Dempsey in a crouch, Marciano practicing knockouts. She goes through opponents as if they weren’t there.

She dispatched a pretty good New York player, Terry Phelps, who was 20th in the computer rankings last year, in about 50 minutes Tuesday. Phelps was down, 4-0, before she got her racket loose.

“I was definitely bummed out when I saw her name on the draw,” she said, adding: “She kind of shocked me.”

It’s another thing Graf has in common with the great pugilists. The first thing that would happen to anyone who fought Joe Louis would be the surprised expression that would cross his face the first time Louis hit him. He had been told Louis hit hard but nothing prepared him for how hard.

Graf is that way. The first forehand that explodes at an opponent’s feet, you can see her thinking a mistake has been made. A ball should not be a blur.

Can it last? Burnout is a word that was invented for tennists and football coaches. Will Steffi Graf be another Martina, Billie Jean, Helen Wills, Chrissie? Or will she be Tracy Austin or Andrea Jaeger?

She comes into focus as a girl who never had much say in the matter of whether she would become a tennis star or not. She didn’t have a rattle in her hand as a baby, she had a racket. She didn’t play dolls, she played doubles. Love is a score, not an emotion.

Dad cut down a tennis racket for her when she was still a toddler, and Steffi remembers hitting plastic balls across a dining room table in her native Rhineland country.

But Steffi could have taken up the flute or medieval poetry if she wanted to.

“I liked it,” she says of her tennis start. “You have to love it to play top tennis. And I love it.”

That may be the worst news tennis can get. She is not out there dismantling tennis with the kind of bored perfection of one of those Swedish robots. She’s having fun. At most tournaments from here on, she’ll be the only one.