Tennis : Age of Little Consequence to Minor Who Plays Well Beyond His Years

As an actor, Chris Minor has played basketball with Eddie Murphy in “The Golden Child” and cops and robbers with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks in “Dragnet.”

But Minor’s best performance came two weeks ago as a tennis player in the 18th Thousand Oaks Racquet Club tournament. Minor, 12, lost in the second round of the boys’ 14-year-old and under division, jumped to the 12-and-under division as an unranked player and won three consecutive matches before losing in the championship match to the tournament’s top-seeded player.

“I’ve never played that many seeded players before and I didn’t know what to expect,” Minor said. “I was really surprised I beat them.”

Minor was not the only one.

“At each match, the guys were saying, ‘Minor, you’re going to lose, 6-0, 6-0,’ ” said Paul Minor, Chris’ father. “And he just picked them off, one after one. He was really the talk of the tournament.”

Minor, a seventh-grader at Frost Junior High, lives in Northridge. He was mistakenly registered in the 14-and-under division at the start of the tournament and advanced to the second round before losing. Although the 12-and-under bracket was full, Minor hung around the clubhouse hoping someone would drop out so he could take that player’s place.

When that happened, Minor stepped to the fore. He beat his first opponent, 6-0, 6-1, then beat the tournament’s second-seeded player, 6-1, 4-6, 6-2, in the quarterfinals. Minor beat the third-seeded player, 7-6, 6-2, in the semifinals before losing in the final to Neal Newman, 1-6, 6-4, 6-4.

Minor deployed a strong serve-and-volley attack that had the other young baseliners running. Newman jumped to a 5-0 lead in the third game before Minor rallied to take the next four games.

“I’ve never seen anyone else serve and volley at my level,” Minor said. “I know it’s going to help me in the long run, everyone else is just playing for now.”

Junior update: Calabasas’ Stacy Jellen advanced further than any local player in the USTA Nationals this week. Jellen, who competed in the girls’ 16-and-under division in Atlanta, won three consecutive straight-set matches before losing to Amy Chimineelo of Melrose, Mass., 7-6, 6-0, in the quarterfinals.

Frank Salazar of Glendale advanced to the third round of the boys’ 18-and-under division in Kalamazoo, Mich., before losing to Carlos Bustos of Coto de Caza, 6-2, 6-3.

Camarillo’s Danielle Ouwendijk, who competed in the girls’ 14-and-under, and Granada Hills’ Alicia Portnoy, who competed in the girls’ 16-and-under, were the only other local players who advanced past the first round. Both, however, lost their second match of the seven-day tournament.

Best of the Valley: Although the area’s juniors faired poorly in the Nationals, they are expected to do well in the 2nd Subaru Junior Tennis Classic, which begins Aug. 19 at UCLA’s Los Angeles Tennis Center.

Portnoy and Calabasas’ Natasha Pospich are two of the highly ranked players in the 16-and-under division of the invitation-only tournament, which brings together the top two finishers from each of this year’s 16 Subaru tournaments.

Pospich, a sophomore at Calabasas High, qualified by winning the Arcadia Park tournament in May, and Portnoy, a senior at Granada Hills, was the runner-up in April’s Anaheim Tennis Center tournament.

Jellen, who won the South Bay tournament in February and finished second in two others, is one of the top-rated girls in the 14-and-under division. Mike and Bob Bryan of Camarillo head the list of boys’ 10-and-unders.

Information: (213) 208-3838.