In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Andrea Jaeger [USA]Born: 4 June 1965
Career: 1980-84
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1981)
Peak Elo rating: 2,305 (3rd place, 1981)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 11
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Andrea Jaeger might have set more records per season in her four-plus-year tennis career than anyone else in tennis history. Virtually everything she did in her debut season of 1980 was a first for someone her age. Every age-based mark set by Tracy Austin in 1978 and 1979–and there were many–fell by the wayside when Jaeger appeared, playing a similar game, one year younger than when Austin did it.
Back when the women’s professional tour was less than a decade old, when Jennifer Capriati was just an athletically-gifted toddler, Jaeger redefined what was possible for teenagers. She was the top-ranked American among under-18s when she was 13. She turned pro and beat a slew of established veterans when she was 14. Three weeks after her 15th birthday, she was seeded at Wimbledon–where she beat Virginia Wade and reached the quarter-finals.
By the end of her debut pro season in 1980, she had reached the US Open semifinal, won three titles, and racked up wins over Austin, Wade, Martina Navratilova, Hana Mandlikova, Evonne Goolagong, and Pam Shriver. In three years, she’d be the tour’s youngest millionaire.
Jaeger and Austin came along at an opportune moment, when Chris Evert was suddenly vulnerable and Martina had yet to evolve into a superhuman destroyer of tennis players. They established a new sporting archetype–the teenage girl tennis prodigy–that would play an outsized role in the sport for another two decades. They also gave sportswriters a vocabulary to use for the next several generations of teen queens–bratty, arrogant, spoiled–that suggested the journalists were always encountering their first teenagers.
In another decade and a half, the experiences of Austin and Jaeger, coupled with the injuries and early retirements of Capriati and a host of others, were responsible for a new set of rules governing teens on tour. Now, 14-year-olds are limited to no more than eight pro events, and 15-year-olds can only play ten.
Andrea Jaeger would’ve benefited from those rules, but boy, would she have hated them.
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Mary Carillo said of Jaeger: “She plays tennis like she’s double-parked.” Tour officials constantly reminded her to wait out the full length of changeovers, since that time was sold to advertisers. She wrote in her autobiography* that she had an “inexhaustible storehouse of energy,” switching sides “as if I was racing to catch up with a soccer ball.”
* Entitled First Service, proof that there truly is a tennis pun for any situation.
Jaeger first tested the professional waters when she was 14 years old, in January 1980, at the Avon Futures of Las Vegas. She had a wild card waiting for her hometown Virginia Slims event in Chicago later that month, but her father insisted that she wait to turn pro until she had proven herself at the lower level. Winners of Futures events earned two free passes into top-level Slims tournaments.
Events on the Futures circuit were free-for-alls. As the likes of Navratilova, Goolagong, and Billie Jean King played for $125,000 on the main tour in Kansas City, 199 women signed up to fight for a $25,000 pot in Vegas.
Each Avon main draw was a standard 32-player, five-round bracket, and four of those places were open to the winners of a three-round, 32-player qualifying draw. The level of competition was uneven, but every good player of the late 1970s and early 1980s made an appearance on the Avon circuit en route to bigger things. In the Las Vegas qualifying draw were future Wimbledon doubles champion JoAnne Russell and Rita Agassi, Andre’s sister.
Jaeger’s only experience was in junior tournaments, so she didn’t even merit a spot in the qualifying field. Andrea–like anyone who owned a racket–could sign up for the pre-qualifying draw, and with great hopes for the new year, 143 women did. Andrea drew a first-round bye, so to earn one of the four coveted spots in the qualifying draw, she needed to win a mere five matches.
The reigning junior champion did that and more:
PQ1: Andrea Jaeger - bye PQ2: Jaeger d. Tracy Tanner 6-0 6-0 PQ3: Jaeger d. Debbie Brink 6-0 6-0 PQ4: Jaeger d. Betsy Blaney 6-2 4-6 6-3 PQ5: Jaeger d. Kate Brasher 6-1 6-1 PQ6: Jaeger d. Yvonna Brzakova 6-3 2-6 6-3 Q1: [Q] Jaeger d. Candy Reynolds 6-1 6-0 Q2: [Q] Jaeger d. Nancy Yeargin 6-3 6-1 Q3: [Q] Jaeger d. Renee Blount 6-2 6-4 1R: [Q] Jaeger d. [7] Rosalyn Fairbank 6-3 5-7 6-4 2R: [Q] Jaeger d. Anne Hobbs 6-2 6-4 QF: [Q] Jaeger d. Iva Budarova 6-2 6-4 SF: [Q] Jaeger d. Barbara Jordan 6-4 6-2 FI: [Q] Andrea Jaeger d. [5] Barbara Potter 7-6 4-6 6-1
Her 13 matches to win a single tournament constitute a record that still stands. She went home, turned pro, and won her first match on the big tour, beating the veteran Kathy May Teacher*, 6-3, 6-3. After a second-round loss to Kathy Jordan, she went straight to Seattle, where she reached the semi-finals on the back of victories against Rosie Casals, Wendy Turnbull, and Sue Barker. She’d never play a Futures tournament again.
* These days, Kathy is more focused on the men’s tour. Her son is the second-ranked American man, Taylor Fritz.
When Coco Gauff made her famous run through qualifying to the Wimbledon third round in 2019, she was the same age that Jaeger was in her rookie season. Gauff was able to play only four more events before the end of the year, and her entire pro campaign that year amounted to 25 matches. In 1980, Jaeger played 93.
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No one questioned that Andrea Jaeger, as the record-breaking wunderkind of the tour, had a compelling story. Her game was more difficult to appreciate.
She described herself as “a defensive player,” which is a fancy way of saying she hit a lot of moonballs. My friend Jeff McFarland remembers watching Jaeger-Austin lobfests that, he says, “made curling look like F1.” In the fourth round of the 1983 US Open, she and Bonnie Gadusek subjected the crowd to a 180-shot rally.
Put the young lady on slow clay, and it’s miracle the matches ever ended. The Match Charting Project has a shot-by-shot log of the 1982 French Open semi-final, where Jaeger lost to Chris Evert. The pair averaged a whopping nine strokes per point. The nature of their play almost broke the Aggression Score metric, which rates players by how often their shots end points, for good or bad, via winner or unforced error. The usual range is from -100 for extremely passive play to +100 for nonstop aggression. Zero is average. Against Evert that day, Jaeger’s score in rallies was -142.
A rare move forward at the 1983 French Open
It was an odd choice of game style for the teenager who refused to slow down. Beating an elite defender like Evert, Jaeger, or Austin required steady concentration, and most women on tour couldn’t sustain it. Often, Andrea couldn’t either. She struggled with unpredictable conditions like gusty wind, and sometimes, internal distractions were enough on their own.
After Zina Garrison beat her early in 1983 in Houston, she said that Jaeger “always started off as if she didn’t care.” (I don’t doubt Zina, though I do wonder how Andrea pulled off a 6-2, 6-1 victory in their first meeting with that sort of attitude.) That summer, Jaeger reached her sole Wimbledon final, crushing Billie Jean King to get there. How did she do it? “I decided to concentrate on every point. I usually don’t do that, but I was determined.”
By then, Jaeger’s wavering motivation was clear to anyone who was paying attention. A 1984 Sports Illustrated profile begins with a list of seven matches that she lost easily. For most of them, she had an excuse ready, ranging from a cold to menstrual cramps. The press wasn’t convinced. One WTA official was backed so far into a corner as to say, “tanking is subjective.”
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Jaeger’s run lasted a little more than four years. When we tally up all the ailments that might have knocked her off the tour between ages 14 and 18–even discounting many of them as the usual post-match gripes–it’s amazing she lasted as long as she did.
She told reporters in 1983, “I get hurt a lot because when you’re young you don’t know how to take care of yourself,” she said. “It’s like you have to get hit by a truck before you learn to look both ways.” It was an odd thing to come out of her mouth, since she was still pushing herself to the limit, playing almost 80 singles matches that season alone and complaining about nagging injuries after many of them.
At the French Open the following year, she was finally hit by that truck. Her right shoulder popped midway through her first round match, and she couldn’t continue through the pain–only the fourth mid-match retirement of her career. She would come back for the Los Angeles Olympics later that year, but her shoulder would never be the same. A few days short of her 19th birthday, her career was essentially over.
The warning signs had been blaring at her for years. A 1983 Washington Post profile by Jane Leavy detailed a list of injuries from the previous 18 months: “a pulled groin muscle, a stress fracture in her pelvis and tendinitis in both feet.” She also coped with ankle, knee, and elbow problems. She had a response ready for those who considered her a malingerer: “I’ve been hurt more than I said. It’s not like every time I get a hangnail I call UPI.”
And then there was her relationship with her father. Roland Jaeger was nearly as competitive as Andrea herself, and he was relentlessly negative–he’d even explain to you why his constant carping was the only appropriate parenting style with a daughter like his. Andrea would sometimes complain that she never got a compliment from him, but just as often, she’d leap to his defense. Even decades later, she wrote, “[H]e was there to remind me of my place.”
Overbearing tennis fathers were nothing new–the type goes back at least as far as the 1910s and Suzanne Lenglen’s father, Charles. But many people on tour recognized that things weren’t quite right. Owen Davidson, an Australian doubles specialist who had served as a coach and hitting partner, said in 1983, “What she’s going through now doesn’t surprise me at all. There are real problems there. I got out when I realized the father wasn’t playing with a full deck.”
When Jaeger reached the 1983 Wimbledon final, she had a spat with Roland that–in her telling much later–led to her father locking her out of their room. Andrea has hinted that she tanked the final the next day. Martina Navratilova, who won the championship match, 6-0, 6-3, might take issue with that. She had won seven of their last eight meetings, and as she told reporters after winning the title, “I kept reminding myself that I was playing Andrea Jaeger and I should win.”
From this distance–and perhaps from any vantage point outside the family itself–it’s tough to know exactly what toll the father-daughter relationship took on the teenage star. At least she could take solace in the fact that her dad wasn’t the worst among them. Hungarian sensation Andrea Temesvari was the closest thing Europe had to their own Andrea Jaeger, and she had an overbearing father of her own. When one reporter wanted an insider’s take on whether Otto Temesvari took things took far, he flipped through his rolodex and called someone with a bit of perspective on the subject: Roland Jaeger.
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The women’s tour would’ve been better off with a healthy, happy Andrea Jaeger who stuck around for a decade or more. But Andrea’s physical and psychological struggles meant that a long career was never really an option.
It’s reassuring, then, that the story ends happily for all parties. The brief, sometimes soporific reign of Jaeger and Tracy Austin gave ammunition to critics of the women’s game, but by the time Andrea enrolled in community college in 1984, fans could point to an astonishing crop of rising stars, including Steffi Graf, Gabriela Sabatini, and a very young, promising, and oh-so-marketable Mary Joe Fernandez. Every mention of a new prospect pointed to Jaeger as a cautionary tale, and some parents and coaches took heed.
The game was in good hands. For her part, Jaeger was a 19-year-old millionaire who had spent her high school years on the road. She had plenty of time to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
Few former greats have done better. She finished school, earning her degree in theology. For a time, she became a nun. With her winnings–along with contributions from many familiar figures in the tennis world, such as John McEnroe–she launched the Silver Lining Foundation. Since then, her life has been focused on supporting children with cancer. Her autobiography makes clear that she found her calling.
While her teen years were a mere stepping stone for Andrea, we should be careful not to understate her importance in the evolution of the women’s game and its fan base. In 1983, a Virginia Slims executive named Anna Laird said of Jaeger:
She wouldn’t have existed before 1970. Chris [Evert] became a role model for a certain generation that liked ponytails, earrings and makeup. Andrea became a role model for kids who want to be able to play soccer and watch football and know all the stats about the best pass defense. Before they had to keep it all within. Now they can afford to have male attitudes about sports and be female and be feminine. Andrea helped make it acceptable for women to have a male attitude about sports.
It’s unusual to think of Jaeger as helping bring about Billie Jean King’s vision for women’s tennis, but she came along at the right time to play her part. She managed to do so while still making sense of her own life. In 1984, tour veteran Kathy Jordan expressed her sympathy for the teens competing full-time: “The circuit is a tough place to grow up.” That Jaeger emerged from the WTA grinder to contribute so much is as impressive as anything she accomplished on court.