Alexandra Stevenson is, like, laughing her valley-girl laugh. The 18-year-old Californian, wearing a sporty striped fuchsia dress and totally cool purple sunglasses, is the hostess (with the mostest) of the Pilot Pen tennis tournament draw ceremony on the campus of Yale University.
Four local television cameras battle for position and she launches into her second interview in as many days when the shrill voice of her mother, Samantha, interjects.
|  | | Alexandra Stevenson signs autographs, with her mother Samantha close by. |
"Alexandra, take off your sunglasses," Samantha says, declining to use the magic word.
"Oh, mom," Alexandra says, lower lip pushing into a pout. "I don't want to."
Samantha, insistent: "But they can't SEE you."
Alexandra, rolling her eyes: "Arrrghhhh..."
Eventually, the sunglasses come off. Another victory for the tennis mother of the moment. When it was revealed at Wimbledon that Alexandra's father was Julius "Dr J." Erving, Samantha became perhaps the most famous tennis mom in history. As a freelance sportswriter and a student of the game, she knows how to play the role to maximum effect.
"Even before she picked up a tennis racket, I saw myself at Centre Court Wimbledon, clapping for my daughter," Samantha wrote in a published diary.
ABC's Barbara Walters, who snared the only interview with the Stevensons since Charlie Bricker of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel broke the story, was incredulous.
"Come on," Walters said, "she's a baby and you've already decided she's going to be a tennis champion? Aren't you trying to live your life through your child?"
"No," said Samantha, who has heard this question before. "I've had my ups and my downs and my struggles but I've had a very exciting life. I knew that tennis was a sport for a lifetime. That she could take that sport and walk in any door. This child who I brought into the world, this mixed-race child. I really felt if I put her into tennis she would have more opportunities in her lifetime."
That much, at least, is true.
This tennis season has brought with it three ascendant female phenoms: Jelena Dokic, a 16-year-old Australian, 17-year-old Croatian Mirjana Lucic and Stevenson. They have managed to make quite an impression on the WTA Tour; they are ranked No. 39, No. 41 and No. 43, respectively, a remarkably tight cluster. Of course, they could be ranked No. 1-3, in no particular order, in the category of players with parental issues.
It has been happening a lot these days in the women's game. Butch Buchholz, a high-ranked player in his day and the promoter of Pilot Pen and the Lipton Championships, thinks he knows why.
"First of all," Buchholz says, "this has been going on for awhile. Tennis players are like ice skaters. You can't decide you want to be a world-class tennis player at 16 years old. Somebody has to make that decision for you when you're five, six, seven, eight, nine.
"Today, they're playing tournaments at 12 to 14 years old. Agents and manufacturers are already looking at these kids. A parent being a parent gets involved. Watching them playing tournaments, driving them, getting rackets done, buying new shoes. There is a huge commitment. They're not going to let their kid go.
"They say to themselves, 'I'm still a parent, responsible for this child. It just so happens that she's extremely talented at 16, 17, 18, making more money than I thought would ever exist.' It's a major change from the Ashe-Smith era, when kids at 14 to 16 didn't think they were going to get rich from tennis."
Says Lindsay Davenport, the reigning Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion, "I think it probably grows with the money. The parents want to be the ones that are in control, whether it's so they can control the money or the kids, having such a great career by never letting them do anything. It probably grew when the business of women's tennis grew."
While the goal used to be a four-year college scholarship, it is now millions in prize money and endorsements. For every Wink and Ann Davenport, who made every effort to stay out of their daughter's way, there is a self-involved, potentially dangerously controlling Jim Pierce or Stefano Capriati or Richard Williams.
Williams, who guided Venus and Serena out of the 'hood in Compton, Calif., is hardly an evil presence; he's just a little eccentric. He absorbed a lot of criticism for keeping his daughters off the junior circuit and in school, but he had the last laugh when the level-headed sisters met in this year's Lipton final -- not to mention Serena's remarkable run to the U.S. Open title.
"That comes from the home," Williams says. "Everything was planned. Their repsonsibilities. They had to be responsible when they were two years old. Why is it that parents have to train their kids? In tennis for 10, 15 years or 20 years that's because they don't teach them to be responsible.
"I would tend to think most parents in sports, tennis and golf especially, those parents are half-nuts to start with."
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I would tend to think most parents in sports, tennis and golf especially, those parents are half-nuts to start with.
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Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena
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Marcinko Lucic, who may fit that description, will not be receiving any Father of the Year awards. Mirjana, her three siblings and mother fleed Croatia last year, mostly to escape her father/coach. Years of playing in fear of her father's reprisals for poor performances left her physically and emotionally broken.
After an unsettled year of transition in Florida, where she trained at the Nick Bollettieri Academy, Lucic seems to have found herself. "There's nothing we could do about the past," says her new coach, Joe Giuliano, "so we concentrated on making the present and future great. Mirjana's father told her to hit every ball as hard as she could, but we've added new game plans and shots."
Lucic, who dropped from No. 32 in 1997 to as low as 101 last year, is a rising star again. She petitioned the WTA Tour to bar her father from attending events and the Tour complied.
"I feel like a totally different person now," she says. "Before, hard work wasn't that much fun. It was very serious and tough, but now I feel so happy."
Likewise, Dokic's father and coach, Damir, has made his share of headlines this year. During Jelena's first-round match at Birmingham, England, he was removed from the grounds for unruly, alcohol-related behavior and placed in a holding tank for several hours for his own protection. The tabloids immediately dubbed him the "Dad from Hell."
Actually, the family is from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, but Damir, a truck driver by profession, moved them to Australia five years ago for a better training environment. Damir has already developed a dark history; in January, 1998, he was reprimanded for publicly striking Jelena after losing a junior match in Sydney and there were complaints about his threatening behavior at this year's Australian Open.
Children, however, are remarkably resillient. Two weeks after her father embarrassed her in Birmingham, Dokic, a qualifier, stunned top-seeded Martina Hingis 6-2, 6-0 in her Wimbledon debut.
In a wonderful turn of irony, it was Samantha Stevenson who actually wrote the exclusive story of Damir Dokic's arrest at Birmingham in The New York Times. That was before the story about Dr. J burst into the headlines. The day Erving admitted the truth, July 3, Alexandra Stevenson beat Jelena Dokic to reach the semifinals.
Stevenson has struggled since, losing in the first round at Toronto and the second round of qualifying at New Haven. She then lost to 11th-seedeed Nathalie Tauziat in the first round of the U.S. Open.
She isn't so sure she wants to meet with her famous father, the absentee tennis dad.
"I don't like people saying 'The Dr.'s Daughter,' " she told Walters. "Because I'm not really the Dr.'s daughter, I'm my mother's daughter. And when you think about a father, the definition of a father is someone that takes care of you and is paternal and he wasn't really that.
"So I don't think of him as my father."
She's not the only tennis player to feel that way.
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