Capriati Putting Career on Hold : Tennis: Teen-ager, ranked 12th in world, not expected to return to tour until after French Open.

Jennifer Capriati, teen-age tennis star, has decided to become Jennifer Capriati, teen-ager. And the two people most happy with that decision are her parents.

Capriati, who will turn 18 March 29 and who will graduate from Pascual County High in Saddlebrook, Fla., on June 9, announced over the weekend that she has put her highly lucrative career on hold for a while.

She is ranked 12th in the world and would have been among the seeded players at the first Grand Slam event of the year, the Australian Open, which opened Monday in Melbourne. Although she wasn’t specific about a date of return, she is expected to sit out the French Open in May and probably will not return to the tour until sometime before Wimbledon, which starts in late June.

“It’s really hard to say,” said her mother, Denise, from Wesley Chapel, Fla. “She could turn on TV, watch a little bit of the Australian and want to get back out and play. But I don’t think so.”

Capriati’s announcement was brief and noncommittal. “I need a break from it,” she told the New York Times.

In a little more than four years on the tour, Capriati has amassed considerably more than $1 million in winnings.

When she was 13, she reached the final in her first pro tournament. When she was 14, she made it to the French Open semifinals, and also became the youngest ever to win a match at Wimbledon. When she was 15, she made the semifinals at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and her advance at Wimbledon that year, 1991, featured a victorious two-day, rain-delayed quarterfinal drama over Martina Navratilova on Centre Court.

And when she was 16, she won the Olympic gold medal, beating Germany’s Steffi Graf in the final on the red clay at Barcelona.

But the combination of media attention, an arm injury that has bothered her since March and has only recently been diagnosed as a fracture, and an alleged shoplifting situation in a Tampa mall in December finally pushed her to a decision to get out for a while.

“We all kind of talked about it, her father and Jennifer and me,” Denise Capriati said. “Originally, she was planning to return sooner. But then, with what happened at the mall, it was just tough to come back now, to face the media again and all the questions.

“She’s very strong, but she’s just not ready to talk. I think she made a good decision. Stefano (Jennifer’s father) and I couldn’t agree more with what she has decided. She’s only a senior in high school once, and this lets her go to school, not have to travel all over the world with school books, and come back when she wants to with a clear head.”

Stefano Capriati called the decision “a good one step back,” and said he was very happy that his daughter had the nerve to do this.

Both parents said that the mall incident probably was the final straw for their daughter. Capriati was cited by Tampa police for allegedly shoplifting after trying on an inexpensive ring and walking out of a store with it still on her finger. The Capriatis have said it was all a mistake, that she simply forgot she had the ring on. She will have a private hearing before juvenile officials this month.

“We were furious over how some of the local media here overplayed that story,” Denise Capriati said. “And we still are.”

According to her mother, Capriati should be injury-free when she does come back.

“We just were told recently that what we had been told was bone chips on her elbow really wasn’t that,” Denise Capriati said. “It turned out that what the X-rays were showing was really a small fracture, and that has almost completely healed now. No surgery will be needed.”

Capriati lives in an apartment nearby and stops at her parents’ home after school each day, her mother said.

“I really don’t know if she’s playing tennis at all now, even just with some of her friends,” Denise said. “But I do know one thing, she’s growing up a lot.”