Anti-Big 4 Week continues at TENNIS.com, with Steve Tignor's look at five promising young women to follow this fall and into the new year.
**
Three years ago, when I was doing research for my book High Strung, I came across a scouting report that Tennis Magazine ran in the mid-1970s on the promising young American players of that moment. A teenage John McEnroe was among the prospects, but he wasn’t at the top of the list, or even near the the top. For all of his artistic skill, the slouchy lefty was never a dominant junior; in those days, he typically played second-fiddle to someone named Van Winitsky. But young Johnny Mac had something that caught people’s eye. His coach, Harry Hopman, often said he would be No. 1 in the world someday. Tennis wasn’t that prescient, but its scouts weren’t wrong about McEnroe, either. They said he was the most gifted of the new crop, and that he could be the best of them, if he used those gifts wisely. The implication was, he might not.
In hindsight, we know McEnroe made the most of his God-given game, and his greatness now looks as if it were a foregone conclusion. At the time, though, there was no way to know that this prep-school kid, who liked soccer as much as tennis, would go from diffidence to dominance. In 1976, McEnroe’s future No. 1 ranking and seven Grand Slam titles were still a matter of “if,” rather than “when.”
And that’s always the case when we try to take the measure of young tennis players. We’ve seen it again on the WTA side this year, as we try to predict who might be the next young player to compete for majors and crack the Top 5. The tour is due for some new blood—No. 1 Serena Williams turned 32 today, and even her younger challengers aren’t as young as they once were: Victoria Azarenka and Agnieszka Radwanska are 24 now. The 23-year-old Caroline Wozniacki, despite already appearing to be on the downslope of her career, is still the third-youngest player in the Top 20.
Who can make her the fourth, the fifth, the sixth youngest? Four players under 21 are currently bunched together in the 40s. It has looked, at various times this season, as if each of them could be be the proverbial "real deal." Eugenie Bouchard is the latest to throw her racquet into the ring—this week she reached the quarters in Tokyo and showed a lot of heart and game in losing to Venus Williams in three sets. Here’s a look the strengths and flaws—the “if”s—that Bouchard and her fellow WTA prospects bring to the court. Which of them is McEnroe, and which is Winitsky, is still anyone’s guess.
