Twelve-year-old Senaie Mehari of Oakland, California, is four and a half feet tall, just below average for his age. His brown eyes, though, are exceptionally large, and when Mehari talks they reveal a friendly curiosity. They also get bigger when he lines up a mid-court forehand, a shot preference you'd expect from someone whose favorite player is Pete Sampras. This affection surfaces in many ways, Mehari cocks his elbow up on his forehand a la Pete and favors a one-handed backhand. He even hits with the Wilson Pro Staff Classic 6.1, a beefier upgrade of Sampras' stick.
Today, Mehari is playing a boys' 14s tournament. There's no need for Sampras-like weaponry.
Though nearly a foot taller than Mehari, his opponent, Albert Chang, is handing him the match. Mehari goes up a set and 4-love. But momentum swings rapidly. Feasting on Mehari's weak second serve,the bigger boy starts converting on his volleys.
Chang's now serving at 4-all. Mehari is flustered, but recovers, calmly hitting a forehand return winner dawn the line to break serve. He then serves out the match.
Senaie's father, Tsegai Mehari, 55, spent the first 30 years of his life in Eritrea, an independent nation previously part of Ethiopia. Mehari played soccer, but found himself smitten with tennis when he watched it being played by a group of Italians (the nation was an Italian colony between 1890 and 1941). He got into the game by hand carving a racquet out of wood. An electrician by trade, Mehari worked at nearby Alameda Naval Base for 16 years. When the base closed, he was on his own. Currently, he's drawing a $900 monthly unemployment check, $700 of which covers the mortgage on the Mehari's two-story house located just off of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. He's never earned more than $20,000 a year.
Tennis isn't too manageable on these wages. Junior tournament entry fees in Northern California range from S15 to $25, spanning a section that covers hundreds of miles. Mr. Mehari once drove his son three hours to play a tournament in Carmel. Senaie won his first match, but there was no way the family could afford a hotel and stay for his next day's match. When talking about this in his family's dining room, Senaie announces with a smile, "I was mad I had to default."
There will be no default at this tournament. The venue is Laney College, a community college located adjacent to semi-bustling downtown Oakland, just ten minutes from the Mehari's home. Following his first-round victory, Senaie chats with friends, watches the action on a few courts and wanders why one fellow who plays so well in practice seems to lose confidence in tournaments.
It's tempting at this point to speculate about Senaie Mehari's dream to play Wimbledon. But while others seek to annex the ambitions of Mehari, projecting their desires onto his, he knows exactly what he wants. Mehari likes tennis. He admits he could use more speed can his second serve, a liability that hurts him the next day when he loses his second-round match. Bur like the majority of affluent teenagers who play tennis, Mehari sees tennis as a part of his life, a passionate avocation rather than a tunnel-driven mission. Hours after that loss, Mehari is talking about doing his schoolwork on a Macintosh computer his older brother recently purchased for him. Though Wimbledon is a place Mehari wouldn't mind visiting, he'd just as soon talk about his ambition to earn good grades, get into a good college and attend medical school. "I just like to play, to win, for sure, but mostly for fun," he says. "We need better medicine where I live. That's why I want to be a doctor."
Mehari particularly enjoyed competing at Laney College because it's where he plays virtually all of his tennis. Laney is the site of the Piper Jaffray Inner City Youth Tennis Program. "The objective of this program," says its founder, Dr. Ron Grant (a member of the USTA's Minority Participation Committee), "is to fund excellence-level coaching. Our mission at Piper Jaffray is to provide a bridge between entry-level players and players who go on to attain sectional rankings, play college tennis and even move on to the pros."
Grant believes Oakland represents a new direction in the history of inner-city tennis programs. According to Carleton Jones, Piper Jaffray's tennis director, many of these programs have suffered from the "photo-op" approach.
As Jones explains, "Arthur Ashe would come to town, spread the good word of tennis, hit some with the kids and get it oil the news. But there was no follow-through, no continuity. It's the other 364 days that make or break a kid's tennis life."
The Piper Jaffray program is the descendant atone white man's perplexing vision. The dreamer was Oakland resident Warren Brown, a retired Army man and affluent liquor distributor who'd mixed extensive USTA volunteer work with heavy-handed involvement in the tennis career of his daughter Suzie, who became a nationally ranked junior and dipped her feet into the pros. Once her playing days were over in the early '80s, Brawn turned his energies to Oakland, a city whose image has often suffered due to its proximity to the beloved metropolis of San Francisco.
Brown's premise was noble, albeit wed to a disturbing assumption. According to Carl Mendoza, one of the program's early instructors and its director in the early '90s, "Hall of Fame athletes like basketball's Bill Russell and baseball's Joe Morgan came from Oakland. Warren figured that since Oakland had produced such great athletes in these sports that with the right approach it could produce tennis champions. He felt Oakland had the raw material to make players."
Language is revealing. While a city may provide the facilities and even the social context for competition, to say it "produced" a world-class athlete is rather insulting to the individual. Aside from offering warm weather and ample facilities, how can Las Vegas say it "produced" Andre Agassi? Throw in the racial attitudes surrounding "raw material" (according to 1990 census figures, more than 67 percent of Oakland's 372,000 residents arc non-Caucasian) arid one imagines that Brown figured all he needed was a proper breeding stable and an Oakland generated Wimbledon contender would be sired.
The upside of Brown's missionary superiority complex and civic pride was that he was taking personal responsibility for bringing tennis to children who'd never held a racquet and lived in a city often perceived as a mecca of drugs and crime. "If kids don't have a chance, if they can't afford lessons, they won't be able to play the game," Brown said in 1990. "But in 1983, Oakland with its population base of 350,000 produced just four ranked players while Atherton, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills, with a population of 47,000, produced 38 ranked players . . .I felt tennis was operating on just tour of its eight cylinders."
Oakland's mayor at the time, Lionel Wilson, was a tennis player. He loved Brown's idea, and provided political support for what Brown dubbed the Oakland Mayor's Youth Tennis Excellence Program. Brown ran it from his home, with Suzie serving as one of the first instructors. Fifth-grade students were chosen by school principals who used athletic ability; good grades and financial need as the main criteria.
Brown's instructors were voracious, putting candidates through seven basic drills to evaluate court agility, hand-eye coordination, speed, quickness and even throwing skills (what better way to spat a potentially great service motion?). Brown often walked right on the court to make sure students were properly holding the racquet and mastering all playing styles. He also exposed them to guest appearances from the likes of such African-American role models as Zina Garrison. "Warren was a benevolent dictator," says Grant. "He ruled with an iron hand but his heart was in die right place. He wanted to build an infrastructure, no different than existed for baseball, football or basketball."
Off the court, Brown lobbied the city of Oakland to build a new tennis center, where ground was broken on a ten-court facility at Laney in 1990. He also helped create the USTA's first Minority Advisory Committee.
But Brown's death from cancer at age 76 in 1991 derailed much of the program's momentum. Wilson was no longer mayor. According to Grant, the program was dead by 1992-only to be resurrected in 1994 when the USTA awarded Oakland a grant of $140,000 for three years of activities. Oakland was one of just tear inner-city pilot programs (the others were in New York, Miami and Washington, D.C.) designed to create top-flight players. In 1996, investment firm Piper Jaffray assumed title sponsorship for the Oakland program with a $105,000 donation spread aver three years. These funds cover the cost of balls, racquets, instructors and tournament entry fees. Better vet, the corporate sponsorship and increased availability of courts (ten at Laney in contrast to the four public courts of Brown's era) have expanded the program's scope. No longer is it necessary to try out. Anyone can attend. The first Couple of sessions are free, at which point parents who can afford to, pay $15 a session. Those less-affluent, such as Senaie Mehari, pay nothing.
"We figured if we broadened the base, we'd still attract the cream," says Grant. "This wasn't intended as a social rehab program. The ultimate goal is to produce tennis champions."
But Grant's desire has created a conflict that is at the rant of inner-city tennis programs: the presumption that only through rankings, scholarships and other extrinsic achievements can they be considered a success. As Piper Jaffray program's on-court tennis director, Jones is disturbed that the sport's emphasis on results discourages participation. "The whole tennis system is set up to make these kids feel like failures," he says. "Tennis is a lonely and cruel sport. Half the people who enter the tournament lose in the first round. All the energy that goes into tournaments, into nationals, into the idea of player development, it's not fair. A lot of these kids can't afford the entry tee, so it's good that the program subsidizes a lot of that. But getting to the tournaments, and buying the equipment, no matter how much help you get, it's not cheap. And maybe a lot of them don't want to be treated like cattle raised to be champions. Maybe they just want to play and enjoy themselves."
Well-intentioned members of the tennis community often came to Laney with hopes of bringing Jones' students to other, allegedly better, private tennis clubs. It's a form of yellow-balled colonialism that makes Jones bristle. "There's an elitist atmosphere I despise in this sport; this belief that if you take these kids to clubs in more affluent areas that they'll be made better players and better people," he says. "Getting them into tennis isn't just a matter of them seeing fancy clubs or ball-boying at tournaments or posing for nice pictures. What matters most of all to me is what they do once they're on the court right here. What makes people think that having more money makes you a better person?"
This is not to say Jones runs a hermetically sealed program. On a warm Saturday morning last May, Jones and his staff (which includes Open-level players from Jamaica and Spain, as well as lettermen from UC Berkeley) hosted a clinic. Steve Jamison, co-author of Brad Gilbert's book "Winning Ugly" gave a motivational talk. Gilbert's also spoken at Laney. UC Berkeley squad members dropped by to hit a few. As children whacked balls in well-orchestrated drills, Piper Jaffray experts brought their sponsorship to life by offering financial advice to parents in a lour-key seminar.
But the adage that history is written by the winners rings as loudly at Laney as much as it does in any other competitive environment. As committed as Jones is to providing every student with the best possible tennis education, a competitive endeavor like tennis invariably leads to a Darwinistic truth: The better kids get more attention. Like any other instructor, Jones beams with pride when he speaks of his highly ranked players.
"Let's see that new stroke," Jones says to 14-year-old Chris Mueller during the Saturday clinic. Mueller, the child of a Caucasian father and African -American mother, has been working with Jones for six years. Right now he's trying to change to a one-handed backhand. At 5'7", 125 pounds, he's lean, athletic and exceptionally tact. In 1998, he was ranked seventh in the Northern California 14s. If Mueller continues this rate of progress, he'll be right on track for Division I tennis, where he'd love to play for Duke University. He recently earned a scholarship to Branson, an exclusive private school in affluent Marin County that's a healthy 45minute bus ride from home.
Mueller's strokes are impressive. His forehand, built on a technique Jones calls "lock and load" is strikingly powerful, catching the eye of UC Berkeley coach Peter Wright. The backhand's making progress. So captivating is Mueller as a prospect that he's also been featured on the cover of a brochure for Nike Tennis Camps.
As much as Mueller loves tennis, he says keeping up in school is his first priority. Balancing academics with tennis and his other favorite sport, basketball, is critical to his happiness. "I've seen kids at Bollettieri and their parents put all kinds of money into tennis," he says, "and they burn out, and they don't become great, and then you see kids losing their talent because they have nothing else to do."
The conflict between process and results will remain part of this program forever. At its root, Lanes is a site where children from less-privileged backgrounds can be exposed to tennis. But in order to generate the revenue necessary far this widespread education to occur, the Chris Mueller and Senaie Mehari must continue to rack up the wins. Grant notes that when the program was part of the USTA's Northern California section it was frequently attacked by board members who failed to see how it provided a desirable revenue stream. This problem was alleviated in early 1998 when the Piper Jaffray program officially became part of the more-hospitable National Junior Tennis League, a wing of the USTA whose primary mission is to raise funds for such grassroots programs.
Fortunately, all that backroom conflict is meaningless to the kids of Laney College. It's 75 degrees on a Monday afternoon. Mehari and 15-year-old Michael Ross have just completed a drill that calls for an approach shot, first volley and drop shot. They're a little winded, and are now walking on the court to play a few- games. Mehari is razzing Ross.
"I'm going to kick your ass, Rossy,� he says, smiling every minute. "Yes I am."
"We'll see about that, now•, won't we?" inquires the older boy.
The good-natured Ross does not get intimidated easily. He's 5'5", 180 pounds and knows his way around the court. Like Mueller, he's the child of a mixed marriage, in this case a Caucasian mother, an employee at the Oakland Police Department; and an African-American father who works at the San Francisco Mint. Ross started playing in 1994, when after watching Martina Navratilova and Conchita Martinez play at Wimbledon, he picked up an old wood racquet and started hitting against the wall of a local Laundromat. He plays twice a week at Laney (for free), and was proud to go undefeated on his high school team last year, an activity he juggled while playing the saxophone for the pep band and serving as the president of the local youth chapter of the NAACP.
Though Ross admits to being "kind of a lazy slob when it comes to moving my feet," he brings a buoyant athleticism to his tennis. Mehari's strokes are more fluid, but he's up against a powerful opponent who's faster than he looks. Even if the three-year age difference is the most important distinction, Ross is exceptionally adroit at working the ball into corners.
His topspin forehand shows traces of Courier, bullying Mehari into compromising positions. Approach shots skid into corners anti reseal Mehari's Sampras-like backhand has a ways to go before it can rip passing shots. Ross' spin serves are also well placed. He throws in a couple of aces, and is leading 4-1 when Jones summons them back to the drill. Mehari is still smiling, utterly unfazed as he gets in line and starts caressing a sidespin forehand approach shot.
As far as tennis ambitions go, Ross admits to fantasizing about the pros, but also admits that the sport takes only 10 percent of his time. He's hoping most of all to become a pediatrician. This past summer, Ross worked for a local surgeon, helping out around the office and even watching a few operations. He's not sure when he's going to play his next tournament.
