Booming or Not, She’s Easily the Best Around

It is not characteristic of me to offer advice to (quasi)rival publications, not even my alma mater, Sports Illustrated.

But, it has come to my attention, the magazine is casting about for its annual sportsman of the year cover and candidates are coming from all over.

I have one for them, the individual I would like to see on the cover of the last issue of the year.

It’s a West German tennis player who may be the best ever to play the game. Fair-haired, cat-like, No. 1 in the world. Hits the ball with the booming authority of the born slugger, has this long sweeping stride and is the most-feared competitor in the game today. Never throws a racket, curses an umpire, describes the host country as “the pits” or acts the spoiled brat. Never talks much at all. Just smiles. And wins.

Boris Becker? Who said anything about Boom-Boom?

No, my candidate for sportsman of the year is a fraulein , the other half of the umlaut entry in the world of pro tennis.

Becker is good. But he’s not one set better than anybody playing his game.

Steffi Graf is. There are those who think she’s a set better than anyone who ever played her game--Helen Wills Moody, Mo Connolly, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, Margaret Court. She is better than any of them in the view of longtime tennis coach and scholar Vic Braden. “She hasn’t even begun to scratch the surface of her talent,” Braden insists. “She just stands at the baseline and beats your brains out. The only time she comes to the net is to get the check. As soon as she needs some other strokes and other parts of the game, she’ll get them.”

She is only 20 years old. She has earned $5,251,345 on a tennis court. She won 83 of 85 matches she played this year. Of the 16 tournaments she entered, she won 14 of them and was a finalist in the other two. She has won seven of the last eight Grand Slam events (French, U.S. and Australian opens plus Wimbledon) and was a finalist in the other.

She looks more like a Rhine maiden than an athlete. You imagine the Lorelei looked like this. Or it’s a face right out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. She was born in a gingerbread house. You want to ask her whatever happened to Hansel.

She is as German as a glockenspiel. And fittingly, she plays this kind of Wagnerian game, full of crashing crescendoes, heroic passages, lyric transitions. She attacks. She doesn’t have quite the tenacity of a Billie Jean or the stately elegance of a Helen Wills. She’s a pouncer. She leaps on a mistake like a leopard on a waterbuck.

If Orel Hershiser won 83 of every 85 games he pitched, there’d be no question who’d be Sportsman of the Year every year. If a golfer won 14 of every 16 tournaments he entered, including all the majors or even three out of four, he’d be a statue in every clubhouse in the country.

Age 20 is a little young to be a figurehead for an entire industry. At 20, you’re supposed to be barely out of teeth braces and Michael Jackson records. Steffi Graf is a world figure and she doesn’t even wear lipstick yet.

Is it a drag?

“It’s all right if you like what you’re doing--and I like what I’m doing,” insists Graf, in Los Angeles to play a Michelin challenge match with her No. 4 pursuer, Zina Garrison. “I have good surroundings. I feel good about what I do.”

Does she find the responsibility a bit sticky--the lack of privacy, the demands on her time? “Well, I’ve had 2 1/2 years to get used to it,” she says. “I’ve been No. 1 for that time. And I just grew into (the role). I know what my responsibilities are, what’s expected of me, what my obligations to tennis and the public are.

“In Europe, I’m more instantly recognized, but I’m more left alone. They say, ‘Oh, it’s Steffi!’ But they don’t bother you for autographs while you’re eating. Here, they are not so considerate.”

How does West Germany react to having not one but two international sports heroes in Becker and Graf? Who’s seeded No. 1 in their little tournament there?

“We are equal in attention,” Graf shrugs. “I don’t think about it really. I am not in competition with Boris Becker. My focus is Martina or Gabriela (Sabatini).”

Graf has been the best player in the world since the day at Wimbledon in the final in 1988 when she stopped Martina’s win streak of 47 matches there--three short of Helen Wills Moody’s Wimbledon record.

But she admits there is a double standard in tennis. Could she, she is asked, indulge in the luxury of orbiting a racket into the stands, scorching the ears of a chair umpire with a collection of epithets more suited to the cab of a truck than a center court? Graf smiles. “I don’t think it would be so good,” she admits. “For me or the game.”

Does she not feel like exploding at times? Graf nods. “I have a temper,” she agrees. “I get angry when a call is wrong. But I control it, just as I control the rest of my game. Tennis requires concentration.” So does anger.

For Steffi Graf, life has a net in it. She is either on a baseline or an airplane. It is the notion here, given gratis to the editors of Sports Illustrated, that she should be on their cover as sportsperson of the year. One thing is sure: Her record of success will outmeasure anyone else who may make it.