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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Jennifer Capriati [USA]Born: 29 March 1976
Career: 1990-2004
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2001)
Peak Elo rating: 2,317 (4th place, 1993)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 14
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When Jennifer Capriati was 14 years old, she dreamed that someday, she’d be walking down the street, and she’d hear people say, “There’s Jennifer Capriati, the greatest tennis player who ever lived.”
She was surely not the first 14-year-old to imagine such things. But her aspiration might have been the most realistic. In the month before her birthday that year, she reached the finals of her first pro tournament, beating top-tenner Helena Suková and two more players ranked in the top 21. A few weeks later, she dropped just two games to 5th-ranked Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and made another final.
Rick Macci, one of her early coaches, said, “I’m telling you. She’s scary.”
Tracy Austin, once a teen sensation herself, considered her the best prospect in American tennis since, well, Tracy Austin.
In her first season as a pro, Capriati became the youngest player ever to reach the semi-finals at the French Open. She lasted until the second week of all three majors she played; had she not drawn Steffi Graf in the fourth round at Wimbledon and the US Open, she may have done even better. She even took a set from Graf at the season-ending Slims Championships.
Billie Jean King rated her “the most powerful person of her age I have ever seen, without any question.” King thought that Graf was the only woman on tour who hit harder. Capriati might even be her equal.
On the other hand, Billie Jean had seen prospects come and go for three decades. “Sophomore year is the dangerous one,” she told Sports Illustrated. “The first year, everything is new, and nobody really has the book on you. But it gets tougher after that.”
Yep, it got tougher after that.
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Skip forward eleven years–eleven messy, often painful years. Now 25 years old in June of 2001, Capriati was halfway to a Grand Slam.
She showed up for the injury-decimated 2001 Australian Open in the best shape of her life. After escaping a tricky quarter-final against Monica Seles, she straight-setted Lindsay Davenport in the semis and did the same to a listless Martina Hingis in the final.
Capriati with the 2001 Australian Open trophy
At the French, she defeated Serena Williams in the quarters. She once again left Hingis looking like a spent force with an easy win in the semis. The championship match against Kim Clijsters turned into an epic battle. Clijsters came within two points of the title on four different occasions, before the American finally gutted it out, 1-6, 6-4, 12-10.
Writing for Sports Illustrated, S.L. Price concluded:
For what no one knew about Capriati then–what no one really would know until 4:58 p.m., Paris time, last Saturday–was that at her core, she needs a fight. Capriati responds best to adversity, not ease.
Indeed, back in 1990 at her first pro event, the teenager starlet told the assembled media, “I like to fight.”
But Price got things backwards. Tennis, and life, offered Capriati plenty of adversity in the early 1990s, and she couldn’t cope with a lot of it. That isn’t a criticism: No one her age could’ve met the expectations that were set for her. She was 14, 15 years old with mounting pressure to reach number one and become the next Chris Evert.
(Just how far did the hype go? Journalist Dave Scheiber, writing in 1990, made clear that Jennifer might be better than Chrissie: “Capriati’s baseline game seems as potent as Evert’s was. But Capriati attacks more and packs more punch with her serve.”)
The young star never lacked for a challenge. What changed in the decade between her coming-out party and the double-major season of 2001 was that she slowly adopted the right attitude about the adversity that is inevitable on the pro tour. Still bludgeoning breathtaking groundstrokes, Capriati 2.0 finally had what it took to reach some of Capriati 1.0’s enormous potential.
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In 1985, the nine-year-old Capriati went to tennis camp. She took home the following evaluation:
She has potential and should be developed wisely. Keep her tennis ‘career’ in perspective. Keep it fun! Be careful not to push her progress too quickly.
Roger that.
Within a few years, there was no stopping the Jennifer juggernaut. She won the national 18-and-under event at age 12. She added the French Open and US Open junior titles at 13. IMG, the management company, signed her and lined up several million dollars’ worth of endorsements before she played a single pro tournament.
After the injuries and burnout that ended the careers of Austin and Andrea Jaeger in the early 1980s, the women’s tour put some age restrictions on the pro circuit. They had to tweak the rules for Capriati, then bent them even further to get her into the season-ending Slims Championships. She ended up playing 12 events–48 singles matches–in the nine-plus months following her pro debut.
Capriati at her first pro event at Boca Raton, in 1990
In 1990s, memories of Austin and Jaeger–and Kathy Rinaldi, and Andrea Temesvári, and more–were fresh. Jennifer’s father, Stefano, preferred to ignore them. “They belong to the past. I believe in the future. There is nothing to be learned from their stories. They were completely different.”
Austin cautioned that Capriati “learn three things: patience, patience and patience.”
Jaeger offered a more detailed warning:
If she gets hurt, people will say she started too young. If she throws a racket or swears or loses a lot of first-round matches, they’ll say the pressure has gotten to her. Then she’ll start thinking about the pressure, and the game really won’t be fun anymore. After a few failures she’ll learn that the only people who really care are friends and family.
Within a few years, Jaeger would be proven correct on all counts. But once the 13-year-old Jennifer was beating established pros and appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, there was no turning back. Stefano said, “Where I come from the saying is: ‘If the apple is ripe you eat it.'”
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There’s no question that Capriati was physically ready to compete on tour in 1990. She won 37 of 48 matches that first year. She reeled off a 14-match win streak in the summer of 1991, culminating in a near-miss against Monica Seles at the US Open. She didn’t lose a first-rounder until 1992. She cracked the top ten at the end of her first season. She was number six a year after that.
But within two years of her debut, the mental strain began to tell. She was the future of American tennis, the face of Diadora’s North American marketing campaign, yet she was stuck outside the top five. She recorded wins over the likes of Seles, Sánchez Vicario, Gabriela Sabatini, and Conchita Martínez, but they beat her just as often. When they didn’t, Steffi Graf was waiting in the next round.
It was a tough time to break into the top tier of women’s tennis.
By the end of 1991, tennis wasn’t as much fun anymore. It certainly didn’t prove to be easy. Capriati took some time off in early 1992, before a training block with Manolo Santana seemed to get things back on track. His enthusiasm was infectious, and he sent her to the Barcelona Olympics with renewed energy.
Santana was just the voice she needed. She enjoyed her time at the Olympics, just another teenage sensation among many. She won three-setters over Sánchez Vicario and Graf in the semi-finals and final to claim the gold medal. It was her first victory against the German in five tries, and she didn’t show the slightest sign of nerves in closing out the biggest match of her life.
Back on tour, the Olympic triumph didn’t have much of an effect. She lost in the third round of the US Open. In 1993, she hung on to a place in the top ten, but she failed to make any progress at the majors, losing to Graf in the quarter-finals at the Australian, French, and Wimbledon. In Flushing, she fell in the first round to 37th-ranked Leila Meskhi.
She wouldn’t win a match at a slam for another five years.
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Capriati’s struggles off the court were publicized just as much as her successes on it. She was caught shoplifting and cited for marijuana possession, minor offenses for a typical teen but the stuff of tabloid headlines when the rebel in question was a celebrity.
It took years, and a few false starts, before Jennifer was again a factor on tour. By the time she was fully fit, she had internalized the comeback-kid narrative, and it showed. At the Australian Open in 2001, she won her fourth-round match in straight sets after losing five of the first six games. Monica Seles led her by a set and a break in the quarters before she came charging back for a three-set victory.
In the Roland Garros final that year, she lost the first set 6-1 and failed to serve out the match three times before finally securing the deciding set. She still liked to fight, and now she had the stamina to come out on the winning end of marathon matches.
After Capriati beat the number-one-ranked Hingis in the French Open semis, the Swiss player admitted that her opponent looked more like the best player in the world than she did. Even though Jennifer didn’t complete the Grand Slam–she lost to Justine Henin in the Wimbledon semis and Venus Williams in the final four at the US Open–she ascended to the number one ranking in October.
Before 2002 was out, Jennifer would lose the top spot on the ranking table–and a whole lot of matches–to the Williams sisters. First, though, she had one more comeback to add to her legacy.
She faced Hingis again in the 2002 Australian Open final, and the Swiss Miss quickly showed what had made her such a clinical champion a few years before. Hingis jumped to a 6-4, 4-0 lead, forcing Capriati to fend off four match points. Over the course of the second set, the American became more and more aggressive. Defying logic, she told reporters afterward, “I felt I was right there in the match.”
Capriati won the second-set tiebreak, 9-7. In the stifling Melbourne heat, she proved to be the fitter competitor, coasting to a 6-2 final set victory.
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There’s an irony in Capriati’s legacy. It’s impossible not to remember her as the defining teen prodigy of late 20th century tennis. Her story has it all: The ever-present father, the impossibly early success, the million-dollar endorsements, the apparent burnout. She took the Andrea Jaeger story and cranked it up to eleven.
But the resulting career–a gold medal, three majors, ten more slam semi-finals, 17 weeks at number one, victories over every notable player for a generation or more–is one that most teens (and their parents) would take in a heartbeat. It just didn’t unfold quite on schedule.
We’ll never know, of course, how things would’ve gone had Jennifer’s parents held her back. Maybe she would’ve burned out anyway, and we wouldn’t know her name at all. Alternatively, she might have waited until 16 or 17 to make her pro debut, and with added maturity and no mid-career burnout, she would’ve gone on to win twice as many majors.
Or, just maybe, she would’ve become the greatest tennis player who ever lived.