Garrison Jackson Looking Beyond Match Point : Tennis: Aside from helping her foundation teach inner-city children the sport, she’d like to have children.

Zina Garrison Jackson is 30 now. She has won more than $4 million in her tennis career. But she still plays every shot as if a Grand Slam singles title, which has eluded her, is at stake.

She has the same driving spirit and enthusiasm for the game she did more than a decade ago.

But she has been on the pro tour for 12 years, and is starting to think seriously about the day all this ends: the glamour, the attention, the big victories and, yes, the unrelenting travel, the constant practice and the emotion-draining pressure that have been so much a part of her life.

Her determination has not waned. But her priorities are beginning to shift.

“I really want to have kids of my own,” said Garrison Jackson, the youngest of seven children. She has been married since 1989 to Willard Jackson, who founded a hazardous-waste disposal company in Houston, and she says they are ready for their own family.

“In September, I have to make out a new schedule for next year, and I’m going to probably put down the minimum amount of tournaments,” she said. Garrison Jackson said she might retire by the end of the 1995 season.

In addition to having her own children, she also wants to be more active in the group she founded in Houston that provides funds for the homeless, youth organizations and anti-drug groups.

Part of the foundation’s work is to provide tennis programs in the inner-city areas where she grew up. She started playing when she was 10 in a similar public-parks program conducted by her longtime coach and friend, John Wilkerson.

“It’s a year-round program at two parks in Houston, and the mayor and the city council have really gotten behind it now,” she said. “Some of the kids who have been in the program for a while have improved so much it’s amazing. Another thing I really want to do is have my own homeless shelter in Houston for families, too. I have a real love for kids, and there are a lot of them who are homeless.”

In the meantime, Garrison Jackson is committed to giving tennis her best effort. “I want to give it all I’ve got until I finally decide I’m not ready to play anymore,” she said. “The worst thing for me would be to feel I’m not able to give it my best. I feel I give it 100% every time I go out there.

“But I want to enjoy it and have fun, more than anything else right now. I’ll try to continue to improve my game. But I don’t think it helps that much at this stage to have big goals. If you just work on your game, the rest will come.”

She says one of her concerns is staying healthy.

Garrison Jackson, who is playing World TeamTennis for the Dukes and will play in the Virgina Slims tournament at Manhattan Beach in early August, suffered from shoulder problems earlier in the Dukes’ season.

“I was a little tired after Wimbledon,” she said. “I had played so much before Wimbledon to get ready. I had the shoulder trouble after that, then I went over on my ankle. Fortunately, it was only a mild sprain. Through the years, though, I’ve been blessed that I haven’t had any major injuries. “

Garrison Jackson lost in the Wimbledon quarterfinals to Gigi Fernandez after beating Arantxa Sanchez Vicario in three sets in the round of 16. “I still felt I had a good tournament, though,” she said.

Garrison Jackson says she is enjoying playing in Billie Jean King’s team tennis league this month. “I really like it, although I don’t like the traveling, being in a city for only one night and then out again,” she said. “I played it for 10 days last year, and saw the difference it made in my game. I had a pretty good year, and wanted to see what would happen if I played it a full year.”

The playing format, which has no-ad scoring, puts a heavier emphasis on each point, and the match winner is determined by total games won in men’s and women’s doubles, men’s and women’s singles and mixed doubles.

“It’s good for me because it gets me out of the same routine,” she said. “When you get older you need to have different things to motivate you. In this format, you can’t have any mental lapses, the kind we all have sometimes, when you can’t seem to hit a ball on the court for a game.”

Garrison Jackson wishes some of the TeamTennis emphasis on cheering and lively crowd involvement could somehow be part of the regular tour.

“You need to have a rush, the way fans feel after they’ve come out of a good basketball game,” she said. “Especially the younger people need something to capture their attention. I looked up into the crowd the other night, and some of the younger kids were doing the wave and some stuff like that. You have to find ways for them to get into it, to keep their attention, instead of when they go to a match everyone saying, ‘Shhhh, be quiet. And don’t stand up.’ ”

Garrison Jackson believes tennis’ stodgy image is one of its biggest problems. But she also sees others. She thinks the new high-performance rackets have turned men’s tennis into such a power game that it has lost some of its luster. She feels average players are having more trouble identifying with it.

She thinks the new rackets actually have been more beneficial to the women’s game, where the added power has made points far more lively than the days when Chris Evert and her opponents of that era constantly were hitting “moon balls” from the base line. “The women are putting the power and touch together well now,” she said.

But Evert has been in retirement for almost five years now, Martina Navratilova will be on the sidelines soon, and Garrison Jackson might not be far behind. Where will the game find new life?

“There are other personalities out there who are able to give the women’s game a lift,” Garrison Jackson said. “Mary Pierce has had a lot of people noticing tennis lately, and Arantxa is good at that, too. Gabby (Gabriela Sabatini) always has been a good draw.”

Garrison Jackson hopes some young newcomers to the tour will learn some things from the older players that she did.

“I learned a lot from Chris and Martina about the off-court things,” she said. “When I first came on the tour everyone thought I was shy, but I was quiet because I was observing everything. It was more a matter of me watching Chris and Martina than anything they actually said to me. I’d watch them go into a room full of people and make sure they talked to everyone, and they always seemed to want to help the game move forward. It opened my eyes. It’s not just about being good on the tennis court. It’s doing good things off the field, as well.

“Now everything is about what your management group thinks you should do, and how you should act like this or like that. And when you call somebody, you’ve got to call five different people before you’re able to reach them. I mean, like pleeeeease . One time I tried to talk to a player, and I had to go through 10 different people and never did get in touch with her. And she wasn’t even in the Top 10 at the time.”

Garrison Jackson thinks an athlete being someone for kids to look up to is fine, as long as the athletes don’t portray themselves as someone they’re not. “I feel I’m the same person on and off the court,” she said.

King said Garrison Jackson has been a “perfect role model.”

“I did a clinic with her in Houston, and that’s where she’s great . . . working with the kids,” said King. “She’s passing down her legacy to them.

“Zina is one of those players who gives something back to the game, and I really like that. Other players put their names on things, but they don’t put the effort into it the way she does. She’s just been great.”

Larisa Neiland, who has played doubles with Garrison Jackson this season in TeamTennis, says she has been impressed with her as a person as much as she has as a player.

“She tries to help everybody and to be nice to everyone . . . starting with kids as well as regular people,” Neiland said. “You can see it’s inside her, not something she feels she has to do.”

Regardless of what happens in her career in the future, Garrison Jackson said she will be pleased.

She has won more than 500 matches on the pro tour, becoming only the 12th woman ever to do that.

In 1990, she defeated Monica Seles and Steffi Graf in dramatic back-to-back three-set matches to reach the Wimbledon final, losingto Navratilova at a time when Navratilova was virtually unbeatable in big matches. Garrison Jackson became the first black woman to reach the singles championship match in a Grand Slam event since Althea Gibson won Wimbledon in 1957 and 1958.

In the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, Garrison Jackson won the bronze medal in singles, and the gold medal in doubles with Pam Shriver as her partner.

“Some people have a tendency to say, ‘Well, you never won a Grand Slam,’ and it’s like your career is nothing if you haven’t won a Grand Slam,” she said. “But I feel I’ve been fortunate. I’ve been around a nice group of people who have accomplished a lot. I’ve had a good career, and I’m still playing, and anything can still happen.”