Capriati Doesn’t Win as Much as She Survives

Life is hard.

Tennis is easy.

Now that we’ve established that, I assure you that there was absolutely nothing easy about Jennifer Capriati’s 6-7 (4), 7-5, 6-3 victory Tuesday over Serena Williams in Wimbledon’s quarterfinals.

For Capriati, there was a promising beginning in which she looked as if she might dominate, a shaky middle in which she almost lost it all and, finally, an inspiring rally.

In other words, the match was much like everything she has gone through off the court in recent years.

Sport imitates life.

Life imitates sport.

If you’re not familiar with Jennifer Capriati’s story, you haven’t been paying attention to the sports pages since January.

She was a teenage phenom from Florida, becoming the youngest this and the youngest that and winning the Olympic gold medal in 1992, when she was 16, with a victory over Steffi Graf.

Then came the fall. She was cited a year later for shoplifting a $35 ring from a Tampa, Fla., shopping center kiosk, then arrested in 1994 on a misdemeanor charge of marijuana possession.

Everyone blamed everyone else--her parents, the media, the tennis establishment. But, in retrospect, it’s pretty clear that she was merely experiencing growing pains. You don’t want your teenagers going through them to the extent that she did but, let’s face it, her experiences weren’t all that extraordinary.

It was extraordinary, though, that she experienced them in public. She and her family weren’t able to resolve her problems in private. She was a famous tennis star who, suddenly, had her police mug shot in newspapers and magazines throughout the world. It was as if she were starring in “The Truman Show.”

At her lowest point, she says, she contemplated suicide.

But she fought back. She began playing tennis again and then started playing well again. Now, here she is on Center Court of tennis and life. She is more than halfway to a Grand Slam, which no woman has accomplished since 1988, with titles in the first two major tournaments of the year and a semifinal berth in the third.

Then again, maybe it’s life that’s easy and tennis that’s hard.

It’s not as if Capriati had to overcome a life-threatening illness, as Lance Armstrong did, or a disabling addiction, as John Lucas did, or battle an addiction and a life-threatening illness, as Darryl Strawberry has had to. She just had to get her priorities back in order and grow up.

In tennis, though, you have an opponent on the other side of the net who is trying to prevent you from succeeding, and sometimes that opponent has been through as much as, maybe more than, you have to get where she is.

Capriati’s opponent Tuesday was Serena Williams, the younger of the Williams sisters, who grew up in Compton. I’ve seen a lot of exaggeration about their childhoods in the media here, about how they grew up hitting volleys while dodging gang bullets. Maybe that’s true in some figurative sense, but it’s not literally true.

That doesn’t mean they weren’t underprivileged. And no matter what you think about them or their controversial father, you have to acknowledge that it took incredible fortitude for them to get from there to the top of the tennis world.

It quickly became clear Tuesday that the match between Capriati and Williams would be determined by which player’s life experiences had better prepared her for the moment.

That’s because it quickly became clear that the match wasn’t going to be determined by the tennis they were playing. Maybe it was because of the importance of the match, the gravitas of playing on Center Court in Wimbledon’s second week, the unseasonable heat and humidity, or the physical discomforts suffered by both, but neither played as if she belonged in the quarterfinals. That was particularly true of Williams, who committed a stupefying 44 unforced errors.

The match lasted 2 hours 27 minutes, which, in some cases, would indicate a classic. In this case, much of it was dreadful. At the same time, it was compelling drama.

Perhaps that reminds you of the restaurant patron who says, “The food was bad, but at least there was a lot of it.” Perhaps it was the same phenomenon that causes us to slow down so we can look at wrecked cars while driving by on the freeway.

But there was more to it than that. This was an opportunity to see which player had more resolve, which was prepared to stay longer on the court under adverse conditions in order to win.

On this day, in this match, it was Capriati.

She was two points away from losing in the second set but battled back not only to win her serve in that game but to break Williams’ serve in the next. Then she won the first five games of the third set.

That was despite a strained buttocks muscle that forced her to take an injury timeout in the second set. Williams also was less than 100%, revealing afterward that she suffered from a lingering stomach ailment that she said almost caused her to withdraw before her fourth-round victory Monday. She had to leave the court once during the third set because of nausea.

Still, she didn’t quit, winning three consecutive games in that set to again put the outcome in doubt before Capriati served out the match.

“I still think I could have won if I had just toughed up for a couple more points,” Williams said, acknowledging that the difference was that Capriati “sucked it up” and she didn’t.

It wasn’t classic tennis, but it was a classic match.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.