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Just over seven months ago, Lindsay Davenport announced that she was stepping away from the game of professional tennis to pursue another career: motherhood. But now, just weeks after giving birth to her first baby, the three-time Grand Slam champion is considering a return to the tour, baby and all.
"It's a small goal I'm working toward," Davenport said in a conference call from her Southern California home on Tuesday.
The new mom has made commitments to World Team Tennis for this month and to doubles at the Pilot Pen event in August.
When she announced her pregnancy last year, Davenport chose her language carefully when talking about stepping away from the game. She shied away from using the word ‘retirement’ then, simply telling reporters that she ‘had no plans to return.’
But sometimes, plans change.
After all, comebacks happen in tennis as often as newborn babies need attention from their parents. Martina Hingis is the most prominent recent example, retiring in 2002 and returning to the tour in early 2006 with reasonable success.
But unlike Hingis, who had struggled from 2000 to 2002 with the growing power in the women’s game, Davenport went out almost on top when she walked away last fall.
After winning her first three Slam finals at the 1998 U.S. Open, 1999 Wimbledon and 2000 Australian Open, Davenport fell in four straight Grand Slam finals from 2000 to 2005. All those losses would come to women with the last name of Williams: three to Venus, and one to Serena.
The last two were particularly memorable. Following a letdown in the 2005 Australian Open final in which Davenport led Serena Williams 6-2, 3-3 before losing the next nine games and the title, Davenport bounced back by marching to the finals of Wimbledon later that year.
There, on Centre Court, she and Serena’s sister, Venus, would put on one of the most incredible demonstrations of baseline grasscourt tennis. After saving a match point in the third set, Venus would win the match 9-7, again leaving Davenport just short of winning another major title.
Injuries limited her schedule for most of 2006 and her last event was at Beijing in September.
But after Davenport gave birth to her son Jagger on June 10, the American started feeling better physically than she thought she would, and has committed to a season of World Team Tennis with the Sacramento Capitals along with playing doubles at the Pilot Pen. Minus the childbirth, the routine sounds much like Hingis’ return, which was sparked by playing WTT in the summer of 2005. Davenport, however, is being more direct about her goals.
"The thing that intrigues me is the Olympics and trying to go back as a mother," Davenport said. "I'm feeling great. It's been so much fun preparing. I've been hitting with my husband."
The former world no. 1 (and current no. 68) will return to the doubles court alongside Lisa Raymond at the Pilot Pen in New Haven, Conn., though a return to the singles tour is still unclear. Her play in WTT and at New Haven will surely be the benchmark. Long known for her driving groundstrokes, booming serve and often moody persona on court, Davenport will look to pick up where she left off on the women’s tour, where she lost to just one player outside of the top ten last year.
And as Davenport ponders a return to the court that brought her 53 career singles titles and $21 million in career prize money, she knows she’ll have to juggle more roles than before.
“I feel like I want to be able to try to do it all, and that's obviously being a good mother and a good wife and having some kind of career again hopefully,” she said.