She Looks Undersized Till Swinging Oversized Racket

If you saw Arantxa Sanchez Vicario wandering around Disneyland, you would be tempted to buy her a lollipop and take her to security and sit her on a desk in a mouse hat till her frantic parents showed up to scold her for getting lost.

But if you saw her with a tennis racket in hand, you’d better get back to the baseline quick and get ready for a bombardment of backhands.

Arantxa is just another of those precocious tennis moppets abroad on the courts today who look as if they arrived by tricycle, put down their dolls, popped their bubble gum--and won the French Open. With this little headband she wears, she looks like a cross between Little Orphan Annie and Baby Snooks.

She’s the fourth-best tennis player, female, in the world. She’s 19 years old, looks 12, but has the mature, indefatigable playing style of a 30-year-old. When she won the French Open, at 17, in 1989, the tennis world was stunned only because she was playing Steffi Graf. Otherwise, they might have wondered what took her so long.

Women’s tennis used to be played by Helen Wills Moody, Helen Jacobs, Alice Marble, or women who had been married so many times their names had more hyphens than vowels. Nowadays, if you don’t have braces on your teeth, you’re over the hill. Jennifer Capriati begins serving in a high chair. Her first step is to a baseline.

Even by these standards, Sanchez Vicario looks cherubic. In some light, she could be Capriati’s kid sister.

You expect to get tennis players out of California, Florida, even South America or Australia. The north of Spain had not exactly been a hotbed of the sport. But Sanchez Vicario’s two brothers became world-class players and she remembers picking up a tennis racket in Barcelona when she was 5. By the time she was 12, she was the Spanish women’s champion. By 13, she was a pro. By 15, she was playing in Wimbledon.

By 21, she hopes to be No. 1 in the world. She hardly took the tennis world by storm. But she improved steadily, learning as she went.

It is the conceit of men that women are inconsistent. The incorrectness of this attitude can be seen in the fact no man ever won Wimbledon nine times--as Martina Navratilova has done--or eight times, as Wills Moody did.

Sanchez Vicario has been a model of consistency. If she’s not in the semifinals, look for her among the quarterfinalists. If not there, try the final. Don’t look for her to play a bad match. Don’t look for her to give up. You have to beat Arantxa. You get no help from her.

As with all tennis, there is a pecking order to be dealt with. You get in line and wait for room at the top. In the case of women’s tennis today, there are Monica Seles, Graf, Gabriela Sabatini--and Arantxa Sanchez Vicario. The rest, save for Navratilova and Capriati, are in the chorus.

Sometimes, players just don’t escape the also-ran slots. They reach their level of competence and either stay there or back off gradually. Others serve their apprenticeships and suddenly blossom into stardom.

Sanchez Vicario thinks she will make it to the top of the heap. She found out very early that she could stay with the big girls.

“My first tournament in this country, the Lipton, I lost to Navratilova, 7-5, 7-5. I was 5-4 up in the second set. And she was No. 1 in the world at that time. That told me I could play. I went from 150 in the world, to the top 70, then to the top 50, then top 25 and then top 10.”

She went to the semifinals in the U.S. Open last year--she lost to Graf. She has been a quarterfinalist at Wimbledon and was a quarterfinalist twice at the French Open before her victory in ’89.

She is one of the star players in the $350,000 Virginia Slims of Los Angeles at the Manhattan Country Club this week.

We know one thing: She will be in the final four. In 1990, she was a winner three times, a finalist five times and a semifinalist twice.

She has been a finalist three times this year--she lost in Germany to Graf, 3-6, 6-4, 6-7, and she lost the French Open to Seles, 6-4, 6-4.

She has retooled her game and become more aggressive.

“I leave the baseline and attack more,” she explains.

Like every teen-ager who ever lived, she has to fight the junk-food syndrome. At 5 feet 6 and 110 pounds, her worst nightmare is seeing the word chunky in a lead story.

The seedings at Manhattan this week will include Seles, Sabatini and Zina Garrison.

She can play at their level. Her hardest set may be in convincing the guards that she came to play and not to chase the balls at the net.