BALANCING ACT

Just another interesting tennis family.

Marissa Irvin’s mother is going on about the lack of morality in the Arizona State nickname and how she would have sent her daughter to Santa Monica College before letting her near Duke and those Blue Demons.

But get to know Irvin, a Stanford freshman from Harvard-Westlake High who is conquering college tennis in short order, and it’s clear she has a mind of her own.

Irvin, 18, is as devout as her mother and as sheltered as any teen-age tennis phenom, but she insists upon a balanced life. She has lots of friends, lives in a dorm and is an excellent student who would as soon study political science as spend that extra two hours working on her service return.

She stays in the moment, steadfastly refusing to discuss an imminent professional career until the NCAA season is over.

“I love being part of a team and I love school,” Irvin said. “Stanford has been amazing. I wouldn’t have traded my freshman year for anything.”

All this delights her parents, Richard and Helene, whose allegiance to the rigorous demands of big-time tennis is tepid at best.

“We could care less if [Marissa] plays pro tennis,” said Richard Irvin, a successful businessman and former UCLA volleyball star. “Tennis is her thing, not our thing. It will not change our life one iota.”

Helene is an admitted non-athlete to whom Marissa had to explain the term “winning streak.” Much of mom’s counsel is solid, contained to reminding her daughter to focus on what she can control and to simplify her thoughts during competition.

But Irvin deviated from that advice during an April 10 debacle at Arizona State.

She took the court against the Sun Devils’ Allison Bradshaw with as much momentum as any college player in the nation, a 16-1 record in dual matches and victories in the National Collegiate Classic at Lake Sherwood and the Rolex National Intercollegiate Indoor Championships.

It was just another Pacific-10 match for powerful Stanford to roll through. And as happens at Arizona State athletic events, fans began yelling, “Go, Devils.”

Irvin couldn’t believe her ears.

“I know that is their mascot and I’m not suggesting they are bad people by any stretch,” she said. “But shouting, ‘Devil,’ like that? It was kind of bizarre.”

Bradshaw won, 7-6 (7-4), 7-5, and the shaken Irvin retreated to her parents’ home in Santa Monica for the weekend. Her mother, who was not at the match, pried the story out of Irvin and greatly sympathized.

“I was so shocked, I couldn’t even tell you,” Helene said. “Who could have a child attending a school with the word devil or demon in it? What’s wrong with this society of ours? Disgusting. Where is the morality and dignity of it all?

“I said, ‘Marissa, I always tell you that you are entitled to nothing in this world, but you were entitled to lose that match. Do not feel bad about it.’ ”

Helene told her daughter how to combat the next ill-timed reference to Satan.

“She’ll pray,” Helene said. “It won’t bother her any more. She’ll have a good little weapon.”

Irvin used more visible ammunition--a heavenly serve, deft volleys and consistent groundstrokes--to defeat Bradshaw in straight sets in the Pac-10 quarterfinals at Ojai.

The rest of the tournament was no different. Irvin did not drop a set in five singles and four doubles matches in the tournament.

Her poise and impressive array of shots are a far cry from her first experience at Ojai in 1993. Irvin advanced to the girls’ 14 final at the age of 12, only to be awestruck by the crowd and pageantry.

“I’d never played in front of more than 10 people and I just could not even do it,” she said. “I froze up.”

The thaw came quickly. Two years later playing girls’ 16, Irvin won championships at the USTA National Indoor championships in singles and doubles, at Ojai in singles, and at the USTA Nationals in doubles.

In 1996, she won the USTA International Hard Court championships and the singles and doubles titles in the USTA International Grass Court tournament.

Irvin achieved her best result in a junior Grand Slam event in 1997, reaching the quarterfinals of the Wimbledon Junior Championships, and finished the year ranked No. 4 in girls’ 18s.

She won the singles title at the Easter Bowl last year, defeating Lauren Kalvaria in the final. Kalvaria acceded to Irvin’s wish that the match not be played on Easter Sunday.

Irvin, a member of Athletes in Action, also refused to play on Christmas Day in the Orange Bowl last year for religious reasons and dropped out when officials would not change the schedule.

“My religion is important to me,” she said. “I’m not going to compromise that.”

It’s a pattern. Irvin doesn’t want to compromise her education, either. She enjoys school so much she is tempted to return for her sophomore year even though she has little to prove at the NCAA level.

Because Stanford is playing in the NCAA Championships this weekend, she is appropriately diplomatic regarding turning professional this summer. Should she do so, Irvin will genuinely miss the late-night political discussions with dormmates and intellectual stimulation of the classroom.

“There’s nothing like it,” she said. “Politics have always been prevalent in our house. That’s what we discuss at the dinner table.”

Since she met Ronald Reagan and attended the Bush-Dukakis debates as a child, Irvin has had political aspirations. Her parents have long been active in the Republican Party.

“I still want to run for office someday,” she said. “I really do.”

First will come pro tennis, a career without term limits. Helene will be close at hand, no doubt warning her daughter that devils and demons abound, ones that don’t normally identify themselves from the gallery.

“That whole other world [of pro tennis] is nuts,” Helene said. “I don’t like anything about it. But that is because I don’t like sports. I like watching my daughter.”

Helene, a former high school cheerleader who attended USC, believes that if Marissa was destined to become an athlete, tennis beat the alternative.

“She liked all kinds of sports, but I liked tennis because she could wear a skirt,” Helene said. “She was not going to play volleyball, basketball or softball. I didn’t like the things going on in those sports.”

Even in tennis, Helene can’t escape people she perceives as odd. In Irvin’s first tournament at age 9, her opponent was Venus Williams. The first tennis parent Helene met was Richard Williams.

“This man is talking to me about the most bizarre things you can imagine,” Helene said. “I’m thinking, ‘These are the people I’m going to be associating with.’ ”

Irvin plans to play in professional tournaments as an amateur this summer. Then will come her decision. Should she opt to take the plunge into the pros, her parents must adjust, like it or not.

“Marissa is a nice person,” Richard Irvin said. “She is idealistic and inquisitive. Those are her best qualities. And I don’t think that will change.”