Grand Slammer

She belongs on the side of a Wheaties box, this girl next door who just happens to be the best female tennis player in the world. If this were the 1940s, they’d have a ticker-tape parade in her honor.

She is Lindsay Davenport of Newport Beach, at age 22 the too-good-to-be-true queen of women’s tennis, who has amazed herself, and the experts, with her recent ascent to the world’s No. 1 ranking.

Bud Collins, for one, never thought she’d make it. “I’m quite surprised,” says the internationally respected tennis writer and commentator. “I always thought she’d be a nice schoolgirl who’d be happy to weigh 210 pounds and be No. 8.”

Collins hastens to add what almost everyone else says in any conversation about Davenport: “I like her very much. I’m pleased for her.”

Davenport has made Leo Durocher a liar. Nice girls can finish first.

When she steps on the courts in Melbourne this week for her first match in the prestigious Australian Open, she will do so as the top-seeded player, the leading choice to win her second Grand Slam event. And she will do so as one of the least complicated, least baggage-carrying female athletes of our time. She is a celebrity with no limos or entourages. Her only connection to Hollywood is that she lives 60 minutes south. She is a household name who doesn’t mind cleaning up around her own household.

In a tennis world ofspectacular wealth and spectacular egos, Davenport is spectacularly normal.

Listen to her coach and traveling companion, 10-year pro Robert Van’t Hof, the 1980 NCAA tennis champion from USC who has focused her career and plotted her successes since he joined her full time in December 1995: “Lindsay is pretty much what everybody sees. She is intelligent, funny, independent, social. She has a lot of friends. She likes people.”

Apparently, vice versa.

Davenport became No. 1 in October, at a tournament in Filderstadt, Germany. (Rankings are determined by a computer that awards points weekly based on results from the Women’s Tennis Assn. tour.) The coronation started inauspiciously, as Davenport waited in the players’ lounge for a match. On the court outside, and on the TV set, was the current No. 1--Martina Hingis of Switzerland, who suddenly lost a match she was expected to win easily. That meant Davenport, no matter what she did that night (she won), had become No. 1.

At that moment, she joined an elite group of world No. 1-ranked players that, since the rankings system began in 1975, has included only Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Tracy Austin, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and Hingis.

Davenport quickly heard from all but one. She received verbal congratulations from Sanchez Vicario and Hingis, and took a phone call from Seles and a fax signed by Evert, Navratilova and Austin, as well as another former star player, Billie Jean King. The only one she didn’t hear from, and still hasn’t, was Graf. “It’s funny,” Davenport said. “Every time I’ve beaten her, she [Graf] is always injured. I’m a little tired of that.”

The Evert-Navratilova-Austin-King fax read: “Welcome to the club.”

Said Davenport: “I’ll treasure that forever.”

it wasn’t that many years ago that lindsay davenport was just another kid being dragged along to the tennis club by her mom.

It was 1982 in Palos Verdes, two years before Steffi Graf was to win the gold medal in women’s singles in the demonstration sport of tennis at the Los Angeles Olympics. Ann Davenport joined a regular group of women’s doubles players and her youngest daughter, 6, had to come along.

The Davenports had been a volleyball family. Her father, Wink Davenport, 6-foot-8, played on the U.S. Olympic team in Mexico City in 1968. No medal, but a nice seventh-place finish. Ann, 5-10, had also played competitive volleyball, the sport of choice of Lindsay’s older sisters, Shannon and Leiann.

Lindsay was already tall for her age. And determined. She started taking tennis lessons while the moms played doubles. She went through a few sessions with Robert Landsdorf, famous for his development of Tracy Austin into a star player. Lindsay wanted more lessons. He was a man in demand and said no. She cried, he relented, and another tennis star was about to be born among the fancy homes and ocean breezes on Southern California’s Palos Verdes peninsula.

The early years of her development weren’t without bumps.

“I guess in many ways I was a typical kid on the tennis courts,” she says. “I didn’t throw my rackets a lot, but I was always whining. My parents hated that. One time, I think I did throw my racket during a match, and then I yelled, ‘Oh, my God.’

“Well, as soon as I got done playing, my dad was so mad at me that he grabbed my rackets, threw them in the trunk of the car and said, ‘That’s where they are going to stay.’ ”

Ann and Lindsay, in a mother-daughter conspiracy, snuck the rackets out of the trunk and continued with the lessons and dreams.

Soon she was No. 1 in the country in girls’ 10 singles, then in girls’ 12. She was always bigger than the others in her age group, could always hit harder. At one major tournamament, a mother of another player challenged her eligiblity, asking to see a copy of her birth certificate.

Davenport went off to Chadwick High School, a private school in Palos Verdes that gave her a strong footing in academics. By the end of her sophomore year, she had led her tennis team to the CIF 1-A title. She was seldom challenged in her high school matches--and she soon acquired the nickname “Bagel,” which in tennis is slang for a 6-0 set.

“I remember winning a lot, 6-0, so I started giving my opponent a game in some matches so it wouldn’t always be 6-0,” she says. “What’s the difference whether it is 6-0 or 6-1? I don’t want the other girl to feel bad. When I started doing that, my teammates started calling me bagel.”

When she moved with her family to Murietta, 20 miles south of Riverside, for her junior year of high school, “Bagel” Davenport had almost zero stature on the women’s pro tour. She was merely a top junior player in a game in which many top junior players never quite make the next step.

She had, however, been invited into the main draw of the U.S. Open at the age of 15, where she lost in the first round. At 16, in a new area and a new high school, she opted to prepare for a career in pro tennis by playing, as an amateur, a selection of WTA events that still allowed her enough class time to catch up on her academic work.

“I’d be gone for a week or so for a tournament,” she said, “and then I’d come back and they’d put me in a room with a computer and most of the football players. They were my buddies. I’d take tests on the computer and that would tell them if I was keeping up.

“But nobody really knew me. They knew I was new and that I was tall.”

That quickly changed in the spring of her junior year. Three months before her 17th birthday, she played in a women’s event at Indian Wells, made it far enough to win $8,000, signed a sheet given to her by the WTA that said she was now a pro and, for the first time, kept the check. “One of my sisters told me to keep it and hang it up on the wall,” Davenport says, “but I just put it in the bank.”

The next week, she traveled to a tournament in Delray Beach, Fla., and upset the No. 5 player in the world, Gabriela Sabatini of Argentina.

Now everybody at Murietta Valley High School knew who she was.

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Strangely, a match against Sabatini more than two years later would also prove to be a major moment for Davenport. After she turned pro in the spring of 1993, Davenport moved with almost frightening ease into the top echelons of women’s tennis. She won a tour event in ’93 and again in ’94 and ’95 and pushed her ranking as high as No. 6 in ‘94, the year she graduated from high school. She played the U.S. Open that year seeded No. 5, the highest of any American woman.

But the rush to canonize her as the next coming of Evert or Graf just wasn’t there. The explanation lies in part with the press and public obsession with Hingis, plus the ongoing dominance of Graf and the fascination with when and if Seles would come back from the trauma of being stabbed in the back in the now famous incident in 1993 in Germany.

And part of it, sadly, was that Davenport just didn’t quite fit the mold that brought the most fame and fortune on the WTA tour. It was great if you could play, but even greater if you could play and look like an aerobics teacher while doing so. Cute was great. Skinny was OK. But slender and hard-muscled was even better. The British tabloids wrote poetry about Graf’s legs and sent half their photo staffs to matches involving Sabatini. Hingis, barely old enough to own a purse, was already showing up in little skirts and little tops in various fashion magazines. Davenport, in her late teens, was not just tall at 6 feet 2 1/2 inches, but big, at nearly 200 pounds. There were no offers to appear on the cover of GQ in a tiny white dress, a la Hingis.

A recent New York Times article pointed out that women’s tennis is seeking a more glamorous image by allowing its stars, literally and figuratively, to “raise the hemlines.” But Davenport, not surprisingly, remains a holdout in this marketing push. She was quoted as saying: “For me, being an athlete is enough. I get paid to win, and I’m just not comfortable with the idea of posing around town in a fancy hairdo and a ton of makeup.”

Sounds sensible enough, but in many not-so-subtle ways, her amazing emergence as a force to be reckoned with on the world tennis scene has been lost in the analysis of how she looked doing what she was doing, rather than what she was doing.

The tennis pundits weighed in. Davenport became the player with killer strokes and no killer instinct. Her career was moving faster than her feet. Her departure from most major tournaments along about the quarterfinals was because she was too heavy, too slow, unfit. She was, as per Bud Collins, somebody who would be happy to be No. 8 forever.

It hurt. She would slump her shoulders, trying to appear shorter, until her mother would jab her to make her stand up straight. Always bright and sensitive, she would cry more than even she cared to admit.

“It was hard,” she says. “I’d get used to it, most of the time. It wasn’t like it was untrue. I wasn’t in as good a shape as I needed to be. But I was 17, 18 years old, and I was having a couple of tough years. It wasn’t like I was heavy all my life, or that all I did was sit around and eat cheeseburgers.”

Even as she struggled with the weight and height, her home support system, a normal family that gave her space and love and the freedom to grow up at her own pace, was struggling. After 28 years of marriage, Ann and Wink were getting a divorce.

These were the same Ann and Wink whose laid-back, hands-off handling of their daughter’s tennis career in a sport of disproportionately dysfunctional parents, who seem to see their daughters as meal tickets and personal photo ops, prompted the famous quote from veteran player Pam Shriver.

“I have never met Lindsay Davenport’s parents,” Shriver said, “and I love them for it.”

So the tennis career of Lindsay Davenport headed south in 1995. Her best Grand Slam showing that year was the quarterfinals of the Australian.

In the French Open, she was leading Iva Majoli of Croatia in the fourth round, up a set, 4-0 and 40-love. And she lost.

“I went back to my hotel and cried all night,” Davenport says. “It was the first time in my life I had ever truly choked. Majoli was tanking and I was way ahead and I didn’t put it away. Then she started to play hard. It was the first time in my life I had been up that big and lost.”

She went out in the fourth round of Wimbledon and the second round of the U.S. Open, and her ranking slipped to No. 12.

Rock bottom came in New York City, in the season-ending Chase Championships in ‘95, where fate would put her back on the court with Sabatini. She played her in the first round, lost badly and, after a good cry in the shower, headed back to the hotel.

“I didn’t sleep at all that night,” she said. “I was at the heaviest I’d been at that point and I was just so unhappy. So I just got up, went to the airport and got on the 6 a.m. flight back to Los Angeles and home to Newport Beach.

“When I got home and walked in the door, I just felt so good to be there, to have the time off, to be away from it all for a while.”

The next day she hired Van’t Hof, resolved that she would never feel that low again. Aptly, she promised herself an Olympian effort to make 1996 better.

*

Basically, the Olympics aren’t for tennis players. most of them, their schedules packed with Grand Slams and Super Nine events and First and Second Tier tournaments and Davis Cups and Federation Cups, would prefer to get their Olympic experience from one of Bud Greenspan’s films. As a rule, tennis players don’t have time for 16 Days of Glory.

The Olympics went without tennis from the Paris Games in 1924 until it came back as an official medal sport in 1988 in Seoul. But it remains an afterthought to track and field, gymnastics and swimming.

None of that mattered to Davenport. In the spring of 1996, she had Olympic fever. Still a few months shy of her 20th birthday, she was excited about Atlanta, desperately wanting to go but in jeopardy of not making the U.S. team. When the qualifying deadline passed in April, Davenport had edged ahead far enough in the rankings to get a spot, and the badly needed turn in her career had arrived. She just didn’t know it.

In May at the French, she lost a lackadaisical quarterfinal to Conchita Martinez. Her ever-understanding coach, Van’t Hof, suddenly wasn’t.

“It was the first time Robert ever yelled at me after a match,” she told a New York Times reporter later. “Hopefully, I’ll always remember how bad I felt that day.”

She also floundered at Wimbledon, but then started to play better and got the attention of Billie Jean King, U.S. Federation Cup captain, after an impressive Federation Cup win over Japan’s highly ranked Kimiko Date. King told Davenport that, if she kept playing like that, she could win an Olympic gold medal.

Van’t Hof also saw the Olympics as an opportunity for his prize pupil. “Lindsay is so social, she just felt at home in Atlanta,” he says. “She loved watching all the other sports and her family was there. Everything just felt right.”

Davenport agrees.

“It was so much easier than a Grand Slam. At the French, for example, everything is on the front page, every day. But in the Olympics, things are focused on other sports.

“I remember I was trying to win, not really for myself, but for other people. I guess that’s what playing for your country does.”

Seeded ninth in the tournament--and rated fourth in her own country behind Seles, Chanda Rubin and Mary Joe Fernandez--Davenport took the center court at Stone Mountain, Ga., for the Friday, Aug. 2, Olympic final, full of resolve and fresh from yet another pep talk from King, who pointed out that these sorts of opportunities don’t come along often.

Her opponent, Spain’s Sanchez Vicario, had already won the French and U.S. Open titles in her career and had been to the finals of the Australian, French and Wimbledon the year before. Davenport had never beaten her, never been to a Grand Slam final.

What happened is best described by Mike Penner’s story in The Los Angeles Times the next day:

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ATLANTA--Lindsay Davenport’s weight-loss program suffered a setback here Friday. Davenport spent an hour and 35 minutes on Center Court at the Stone Mountain Tennis Center in the midday Georgia humidity, running down Arantxa Sanchez Vicario’s forehands, and actually gained a pound.

*

And it will stay there until Davenport finally decides to remove the green ribbon from around her neck and stash the Olympic Gold Medal someplace for safekeeping.

Assuming she ever does.

The score was 7-6, 6-2, and the gold medal eventually went home to Newport Beach, where it remains today, so precious that it is hidden rather than displayed.

If combinations of joy and relief could be measured on the Richter scale, the Davenport camp registered an 8.0. “This means everything to me,” Davenport says. “No matter what else happens in my life, I’ll always be a gold medalist.”

A few days later, she saw U.S. swimming hero Amy Van Dyken showing off her tattoo of the Olympic rings.

“I knew right away I had to have one, but it had to be somewhere out of sight,” Davenport says. “So I went and had it done right behind my right hip. Then I went home, and my family was all there and they asked me where I had been. And I said I better tell you all now, and I showed them the tattoo.

“One of my sisters was kind of surprised and said, ‘You know, you won’t ever be able to get that off.’ And I told her, ‘Why would I want to?’ ”

*

To the truly tennis elite, Davenport wasn’t there yet. the Olympic gold medal was nice, but, heavens, it wasn’t a Grand Slam. After all, the previous Olympic gold went to Jennifer Capriati in Barcelona, and what had she done since then?

Davenport had her medal, her tattoo and a special album she cherishes of clippings, keepsakes and pictures from the Olympics put together by her mother. But after a ’97 season that produced $1.5 million in prize money, a semifinal spot in the U.S. Open and a title in the season-ending Chase Championships in Madison Square Garden, she and Van’t Hof knew that there was still another level. Peter Bodo wrote about it in Tennis magazine. He likened winning Grand Slams to the elite mountain climbers operating in the death zone above 25,000 feet. Davenport, he wrote: “. . . had been safely bivouacked in her base camp at 25,000 feet while others have gone on toward the top.”

As the 1998 season began, Hingis was ruling the roost at No. 1, the tennis paparazzi were clicking away at Russia’s Anna Kournikova, a 16-year-old who dated a pro hockey player and didn’t look or act a day under 35, and the experts were again relegating Davenport to the status of perennial quarterfinalist.

Davenport, good at not letting perceptions destroy her, continued to drop weight, slimming down to around 160. “I’m good at dieting,” she says. “I can have a half a salad and push the plate away. And when it was all done, it was nice to able to go out and buy some new clothes.”

Then the summer run began. She won the title at Stanford on Aug. 2. She won the title at San Diego on Aug. 9. And on Aug. 16, at the Acura Classic at Manhattan Beach, facing Hingis in the final, she ran down a drop shot by Hingis on match point and slapped home the winner.

It all added up to a buzz in the tennis world about the new Davenport: three weeks, three titles, a slimmer look, a more confident jaunt, just a few hundred points away from Hingis’ No. 1 ranking and a No. 2 seeding for the U.S. Open, the one event she had always pointed to as her ultimate goal.

And so it was, in the early morning hours of Sept. 13, 1998, in a midtown Manhattan Hotel, that reality came home to Davenport. She had beaten Venus Williams in a U.S. Open semifinal. In a few hours she would face Hingis in the final, her first-ever appearance in a Grand Slam final. And she was wide awake. “I just woke up, thought about it and knew it,” Davenport says. “This was my tournament, my time.”

A few hours later, in front of 22,547 people in Arthur Ashe Stadium and several million more watching on TV, Davenport shrugged off a chance to fold when Hingis came back from a one-set and 4-2 deficit in the second to take a 5-4 lead. In the stands, Van’t Hof was still working mentally with the old Lindsay Davenport.

“I was thinking about a third set,” he admitted later.

But Davenport got it back to 5-5, then got herself to match point at 6-5, where Hingis, like Van’t Hof, also was working mentally with the old Lindsay Davenport, the heavier, slower, less-fit one. She tried a drop shot (“It was almost like a nerve thing with her,” Davenport says. “It was the same shot she tried on match point at Manhattan Beach. It was bizarre.”) and Davenport ran it down, flicking a two-handed, cross-court backhand winner into Hingis’ backhand corner and well out of her reach.

Game, set, match. New world dawning for Lindsay Davenport.

*

Van’t Hof watched the early moments of that new world from his stadium seat. Among the things that Davenport had confided to him and a few others over the years was that she wouldn’t do the traditional raise-the-trophy-over-your-head routine for photographers after regular tournament wins. Only a Grand Slam trophy would get the special lift. About the time she started to raise the U.S. Open plate, she caught Van’t Hof’s eye in the stands. Tears began.

Half an hour or so later, when Van’t Hof finally got to see her face to face outside the locker room, she emerged sopping wet and gave him a hug. She had been drenched in beer by the attendants, and now Van’t Hof shared that freshly brewed smell with her. They both liked it. No champagne showers, or champagne tastes, for this championship team.

Eventually, Van’t Hof brought his pupil back to earth with the knowledge that they had five more tournaments left to play. Off they went to Europe, to a finalist berth at Filderstadt in the tournament where she took over No. 1, and to yet another title at Zurich. It was Nov. 22, four days before Thanksgiving, when she finished the year with a four-set loss to Hingis in the Chase final in New York. “I was exhausted,” she says.

December meant home in Newport Beach, where she lives with Ann in a four-bedroom home that, like her approach to most everything, is nice but not ostentatious. December also meant family gatherings, and a chance for her sisters to needle her about starting a relationship, something she wants but for which she has no time.

“I want a man who is secure on his own,” she says. “Not somebody who follows me all around the place while I play.”

December also meant media mania: newspaper and magazine interviews, photo shoots, TV interviews. Were she Graf, or many others on the tour, she would have shut them off. But the best female tennis player in the world also happens to be one of the nicest.

And so it came to pass that she found herself in a Los Angeles TV studio being interviewed by Gary Miller on ESPN’s “Up Close” show. Things went routinely until, near the end, Miller asked her about the tattoo, shocking Davenport that there was some public knowledge of its existence.

During a commercial break, Miller asked if she’d show the tattoo in the final segment of the show, and hastened to add that it would make the show a much bigger hit if she did, and that it would enhance his chances of getting the interviewer a spot on the show on a full-time basis.

So when the cameras turned on again, nice, friendly, accommodating Lindsay Davenport, not wanting to be the cause of Miller’s not getting his best shot at a job, turned her back to the camera and tugged on her pants until the Olympic rings came into view for millions at home.The next day, when asked about it, Davenport said, “Can you believe I did that?”

Yes, Lindsay, we can. And we love you for it.