Book Dishes on WTA Soap Opera

This sport has had trouble generating decent movies. Actually, if you think about the recent embarrassing Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs movie, decent would be a significant upgrade.

Fortunately, those difficulties do not extend to the book world. At least every half decade or so, there is one insightful, readable tome about the tennis circuit. As with other sports, the framework of the season best serves as the guiding device. The latest offering, “Venus Envy,” by L. Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated, does the same, starting with the 2000 Australian Open and concluding with the U.S. Open.

Wertheim was approached about two years ago about the project, and for those who don’t closely follow the sport, the query was about women’s tennis, not the men’s game. Why is this?

Think about it. The raging computer virus creating havoc earlier this year was called Kournikova, not Kuerten. The men play golf after they compete on the court. The women? More often than not, there is a soap opera on the WTA tour--not quite like J Lo vs. Mango, dueling divas, on “Saturday Night Live,” but frequently contentious.

“What sealed the deal--just when things couldn’t get more ridiculous--was Alexandra Stevenson,” Wertheim said of the daughter of retired basketball star Julius Erving and journalist Samantha Stevenson, who reached the Wimbledon semifinals in 1999.

“That was when you realized it had gone into the theater of absurd.”

Wertheim has good relationships with the major players, in particular Martina Hingis and Lindsay Davenport, and his insight helped him go beyond the usual superficial depictions.

“The biggest cliche--it’s not all that glamorous a life,” Wertheim said. “I came away pretty impressed with the players, barring one. The whole life is a grind. We see them with their U.S. Open checks, but then there’s Tuesday morning in Philadelphia when they’re waiting for the vans to take them to an indoor practice court. This is even Lindsay Davenport and [Monica] Seles.”

Oracene Williams, the mother and coach of Serena and Venus, helped connect the dots too, as Wertheim examined the Williams family. He interviewed one of Richard Williams’ daughters from his first marriage, Sabrina DeVille, who told Wertheim that her father claimed that “he studied law at Yale, he went to UCLA, he played for the Lakers.” DeVille said “it broke my heart” when she was a little girl when friends told her otherwise.

Oracene Williams tells Wertheim, “You should know by now to take [Richard] with a grain of salt.”

“Everything about the family makes more sense when you talk to her. She’s everything Richard isn’t,” Wertheim said. “No one knows who she is because of Richard. Everything we like about the girls--they are proud and confident--everything makes a lot more sense when you meet her.

“She doesn’t even like being around. When they played at Wimbledon [in 2000], it was this huge match, she was driving to Mississippi and they [Venus and Serena] called her on the cell phone.”

The next step will be interesting. The buzz around the women’s tour has lasted beyond the usual 15 minutes. It was more than three years ago that Hingis hit the cover of GQ--”The Champ is a Vamp”--and as Wertheim notes, the women didn’t suffer when Anna Kournikova, Seles and Davenport missed this year’s French Open.

Though Venus Williams lost in the first round, Serena reached the quarterfinals in Paris, and Jennifer Capriati dominated coverage when she completed the first half of a Grand Slam, defeating Kim Clijsters in an epic final, 12-10 in the third set.

“The interest in women’s tennis, I don’t think it’s going to fade,” Wertheim said.

“They got a lot of mileage out of ‘The Champ Is a Vamp’ and the Williams sisters, Kournikova and Hingis who were willing to do the crossover [promotion]. It will be interesting to see if the sport can sell itself.”

Wertheim doesn’t need to say which player did not impress him. It’s fairly obvious when he writes about a Kournikova photo shoot for the cover of Sports Illustrated for Women:

“Five minutes into the shoot, [photographer] Nesti Mendoza frantically changed lenses on his camera. As he reached into his bag, he absent-mindedly said to Kournikova, ‘Just hold one second and we’ll make you beautiful.’

“Arms akimbo, Kournikova shot back, ‘I already am beautiful, just take the picture.’ ”