Finally, a Hit for Motown Rapper

Back when I lived in Michigan, there was this shy little girl from the Detroit suburbs who seemed destined to make it big. No, not Madonna.

Her name was (and still is) Amy Frazier and she was always popping up somewhere, dominating junior competition, dragging that huge racket around like a guitar. Every weekend, someone would call in with her scores--Amy Frazier advanced here, Amy Frazier qualified there. Around Motown in those days, Aaron Krickstein was the teen sensation of tennis and Amy Frazier was the preteen sensation.

She hailed from pleasant Rochester Hills and began hitting backhands at the ripe old age of 3, a prodigy before she was tall enough to see over a net. She was part Tonya Harding (the good part) and part Jodie Foster, someone who found her calling very early in life and evidently never found anything she liked better.

Did she make it big?

Mmmm, yeah, she did, but it could be she is ready to make it bigger. At a tournament that included Wimbledon champions past and present, Martina Navratilova and Conchita Martinez, the winner Sunday in straight sets was, indeed, Amy Frazier, who was overdue. She smoked Ann Grossman in a Virginia Slims final, 6-1, 6-3, during which both players avoided the net as though it were laced with barbed wire.

Nice to be back reporting Amy’s scores again. Now 21 and a journeywoman of the pro tour, Frazier had not won a pro tournament in this country since 1990. This year alone, her only second-place finishes had come in those hotbeds of tennis, Lucerne, Switzerland, and Oklahoma City, Okla., two towns almost never mentioned in the same sentence.

I had to search the tour’s guide hard for pertinent Amy Frazier information.

“Favorite color is blue,” her biography actually includes.

The record book also dutifully reports that in 1993, while playing team tennis for the Newport Beach Dukes, the exact actual earnings for Amy Frazier came to $3,609, an amount probably spent by Navratilova during the weekend on ski wax.

It goes on to explain that Frazier was unable to play tennis for six months of last year, from February until the U.S. Open, because of a “chronic case of the flu.” Please forgive me for making light of someone’s illness, but this must have been the worst case of flu since careless germ-spreading missionaries wiped out entire Amazon tribes.

With another U.S. Open coming right up, however, Frazier has seldom looked or felt better, thank you.

She frustrated her longtime friend, the enjoyably animated and topspin-happy Grossman, to win an 80-grand first prize, never once leaving the baseline except to shake hands after the match. Frazier served 10 m.p.h. harder and easily overcame her opponent’s methodical, no-risk tennis, whereas Grossman, who had made wonderful comebacks all week, gradually sensed that this was not to be her day, accepting her fate gracefully.

At face value, Frazier vs. Grossman did come across as Who’s She vs. Never Heard of Her, and I must admit that my first instinct was to avoid this all-Jane Doe final, stripped as it was of the big names. Then suddenly I realized that no, that was the beauty of it. These were two fresh faces who were finally getting their day in the sun, two deserving women to whom the prize money would do more than pay for Lear-jet fuel.

Frazier downplayed that part.

“Is this the most you’ve won?” someone asked.

“The most what?” Amy asked.

“Money--$80,000.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Is that the question?”

Not much of one, but yeah, how’s it feel?

But Frazier has been playing for too long to be playing only for money. She gave a matter-of-fact shrug and said, “It doesn’t even enter into it. I play tennis because I love to play tennis. I never even thought about the money. I didn’t know until they said after the match how much it was.”

She is hardly a pauper, and tennis has taken her around the world. Today in Japan, where she once defeated Monica Seles indoors, Frazier is more prominent and publicly recognized than she is in the United States. Even with her triumph at Manhattan Beach, and even with the superstars of women’s tennis dropping like flies, Frazier is not likely to be mentioned among the favorites, or possibly even among the contenders, for the championship at Flushing Meadow.

“The U.S. Open’s two weeks away,” she said, as though that was too far off to think about.

But I suspect she’s ready.

She’s been preparing for it since she was 3.