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Novotna, Capriati: The goodbye girls
Posted: Monday September 06, 1999 10:06 PM By Richard Deitsch, Sports Illustrated NEW YORK -- One left with a wail, the other without a whimper. Jana Novotna and Jennifer Capriati both exited the U.S. Open Monday. Form held with their departures. Novotna, who turns 31 on Oct. 2, has been an anachronistic presence in women's tennis for reasons beyond her obvious senior-citizen status. In a world of baseline bashers she continued to play a delicate serve-and-volley game, a style more suited for the days of Forest Hills than the high-speed zeitgeist that Anna Kournikova and Martina Hingis currently reside in. But Novotna looked old and infirmed in her loss to Anke Huber in the third round and there had been speculation for months that this could be her last year in tennis. She made it official Monday, formally announcing her retirement after 13 years on the WTA Tour. Novotna, currently ranked 10th in the world, will finish out the schedule for the rest of the year but won't play at all in 2000. She said the game she was leaving behind -- with Martina Hingis, Lindsay Davenport and the Williams sisters at the vanguard -- is in good hands.
Defying popular tennis wisdom, Novotna got better as she got older, ending 1997 as the world's No. 2 player and finishing 1998 just one spot lower. The biggest triumph of her career came, fittingly, at the site of her greatest tragedy. She fulfilled a childhood goal last year by winning Wimbledon, the oldest first-time Grand Slam singles winner in the Open era at 29 years, nine months. Her straight-set win over Nathalie Tauziat, at least in her mind, exorcised all the pesky ghosts that remained from her famed collapse during the 1993 Wimbledon final, when she committed one of the game's more famed chokes against Steffi Graf, her longtime Sisyphus. The scene of her sobbing uncontrollably on the Duchess of York's shoulder at the awards ceremony remains one of Wimbledon's more indelible moments. "Winning Wimbledon last year made this decision much easier," she said. "Let's put it this way: I said throughout my career that winning one Grand Slam tournament would be fulfilling and it would be a dream come true for me. It finally happened." Novotna was bright, introspective, sometimes stern and often funny in a droll way. Asked if she called the Duchess of York to inform her of her decision, she deadpanned: "Yes, of course, I called her last night." With her deft touch at the net she was one of the best doubles players of her generation. She won 74 doubles titles during her career, including 10 Grand Slam titles (at least one at each major). A reporter asked her to name the best doubles player she had ever played with. "Besides me, right?" she said, laughing. Novotna won 24 singles titles -- one fewer than Hingis -- and ranks No. 12 alltime on the victory list. She reached the semifinals at every Grand Slam, and was a finalist twice at Wimbledon (1993 and `97) and once at the Australian (1991). Undoubtedly, she should have won more. She had a bad habit of tightening in big matches, and she gagged away her best chance of winning here last year against Hingis after playing near-flawless tennis in the first set (Hingis won 3-6, 6-1, 6-4). But in a game filled with players who rarely venture away from the baseline or the safety of strictly by-the-book interviews, Novotna's individualism will be missed. She always had a sense of timing and her announcement Monday seems like the right move. She leaves on her own terms and with class. Bravo. Capriati's travails In the same interview room a couple of hours earlier, the lions who were like lambs with Novotna began to circle around Capriati following her 6-4, 6-3 loss to Monica Seles, a match that bore little resemblance to their famous 1991 semifinal except that the result remained the same. Nervously rubbing her thumb against her chin, her hands shaking, Capriati began her press conference by reading a 10-paragraph prepared statement. "It's a little long," she said. "Bear with me." It was difficult to watch, a public catharsis by someone who has rarely offered a smidgen of introspection and depth when meeting the press. It was both brave and sad. Despite her travails, many self-inflicted, Capriati comes off more victim than villain. Her childhood was played out on a tennis court for everyone to see, her lack of schooling painfully on display during every press conference. The only peace she seemed to find was when she was on the court. That's sad. "I write this letter using my own words and my own thoughts," Capriati began. "I've been wanting to share it with you for a long time. I wasn't ready until this moment. By giving this to you all, I wish to close the envelope of the past. "I know there is much mystery, much question to what happened and, I must say, many lies. Yes, I made mistakes rebelling, by acting out in confused ways. But it was all due to the fact that I was very young and I was experiencing my adolescence. Most of you know how hard that can be. In front of the world it's even harder. "Let me say that the path I did take for a brief period of my life was not of reckless drug use, hurting others, but was a path of quiet rebellion, of a little experimentation of a darker side of my confusing world, lost in the midst of finding my identity. I made mistakes, and, yes, I am to blame and no one else. ... But I've put a great deal behind me, moving forward in the right direction, the direction I feel is right. I feel like I started a new chapter in my life and I need to leave the past behind. So this will be the final time that I speak about the past here at the U.S. Open." That pledge lasted for a whole 10 minutes. A number of questions about her tennis came first, along with the particulars about writing the letter, and what she thought the new ground rules regarding questions about her past should be. When a question about her future came up, she had trouble dealing with that subject as well. "I can't answer that now," she said, when asked whether she would stay with tennis if she never reached her former heights. "I'm just taking it day by day. The future, I mean, ask me in two years and then I'll know. I mean, I change every day, you know. So I don't know." It all headed south after that. Capriati said she wrote the statement on her own, though she showed it to her father, Stefano. Later in the press conference she was asked about those "mysteries" she alluded to and why she never came out and talked about it. "Right now, I don't think that's appropriate to write about," she said. "I mean, you're just going to kind of write it down on a paper for people to read. That's not something I want. You know, I want when they hear it to hear it from my own words." "But that's what people write down on paper, what your words are," a reporter responded. "Really?" she said. "That's not been true in the past, not every time." The final act played out as it always seems to with Capriati. Tragic. She was asked if she still sees the media as her adversary. "I'm going to start crying," she said. "It's nothing bad, it's just ... it's just a little overwhelming, that's all." She was asked if she wanted to stop by a WTA official. She shook her head. "It needs to be done," she said. It was a courageous attempt that failed. She continued to break down. "We can stop if you want," repeated the WTA official. "I just wish I didn't have to talk about this stuff all the time," she said. Capriati put her head on the interview table. She looked about 100 years old. Then she walked out in tears. She turned 23 in March. Richard Deitsch is a Sports Illustrated reporter.
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