When TennisWorld last focused on Lindsay Davenport, she was in a funk in Australia, and Lindsay knows how to do funk. She knows how to do surly. She knows how to do “woe is me” and “nobody understands” and “I’ll make eye contact with you when I see you in hell, suckah!”
So it was gratifying to get the other face of Lindsay here in her beloved SoCal environment. It seemed to make all the difference in the world, although cleaning Natalie Dechy’s clock 6-and-0 may have had something to do with her high spirits as well. And when Lindsay is good, she can be very, very good.
Although she isn’t quite the veteran Mary Pierce is, Lindsay, now 28, is at that stage in her career where the smell of roses—every once in a while—wafts into her disciplined mind and works its way into even its more ascetic precincts. Pierce, who’s been off the radar for a few years, speaks wistfully these days of discovering how much she loves the game. Lindsay, more than I had imagined, always did. When I asked her if she was going through something comparable to what Pierce (and, incidentally, Andre Agassi) is feeling in her autumn romance with the game, she replied:
No. I’ve always loved it. I’ve always loved to play. My husband and I hit on my day off, just so we both can play. I loved watching tennis. When I was younger, my mom would take me to tournaments. I [still'> love watching it now. That’s absolutely never been a problem. That’s what keeps me actually still going, the actual hitting of the ball.