A Mother's Touch: How Three Tennis Moms Have Changed the Open

NEW YORK -- We're talking mothers here. Consider it Mother's Day at the U.S. Open, because mothers are in the news here, in the buzz, in the snickering gossip, and also in the results of the women's draw.

One of them, Kim Clijsters, is still in the tournament. A mother hasn't won a major championship since Evonne Goolagong won Wimbledon in 1980. Clijsters will play Serena Williams on Saturday night, weather permitting, in the semifinals. It is a de facto final.

Another mother, Yanina Wickmayer's, died of cancer 10 years ago in Belgium, and Wickmayer took up tennis back then as a means of thinking of things other than her pain. Yanina is in the semis, too, to play Caroline Wozniacki.

And Melanie Oudin lost in the quarterfinals Wednesday. But the third mother, Leslie Oudin, made the news in the most uncomfortable of ways. After Oudin had been portrayed as apple pie, from Mayberry, reports came late Wednesday night that her father had filed for divorce from her mother, claiming the mother had had an affair with Oudin's coach.

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Motherhood, then, was prescription for Clijsters, inspiration for Wickmayer, potential humiliation for Oudin.

Let's start with Clijsters.

The first time around in her career, she was a choker. Yes, she got to No. 1, but in majors, she usually folded. Now, after 2 1/2 years off to freshen her mind and to have a baby, she returned. This is her first major.

And she has shown stunning guts, in contrast to so many other women in this tournament.

Clijsters drops off her daughter, Jada, at some sort of daycare, and then just keeps fighting to the end without distraction. If other mothers haven't been able to win, why has Clijsters come back seemingly stronger?

"In the past, I wanted to win a lot, sometimes maybe too much even," she said. "But I think a part of that is there's also that other life that I have that keeps me away from tennis. Whereas in the past, it was 24/7 tennis.

"When I go home after I've been training here during a day off, it doesn't matter to our daughter or my husband whether I won the day before or not. It doesn't matter to them. That's a nice feeling to have, is knowing, OK, I'm mommy, and she doesn't care too much about anything else."


So her world doesn't spin tennis anymore. There is bigger purpose.

And that has freed Clijsters in the big moments.

But what about the physical end, getting back in shape? That was a challenge, she said, especially in trying to rebuild strength in her stomach and lower back. Playing tennis since she was 5, she said, those areas had always been strong.

"But after the pregnancy, yeah, it all goes," she said. "So you have to reteach all those muscles to contract when they're supposed to, you know, especially with each shot that you hit. I mean, everything just kind of has to get reminded of, OK this muscle has to move at that time.

"They're the most boring exercises ever, but it was something I really felt like I had to, because I went out there in January, February, hitting, and it was terrible. It was awful. Yeah, so that's not when the idea of coming back was in my mind."

They keep talking about Roger Federer trying to win a major after becoming a father, and how difficult that is. After hearing Clijsters talk about her difficulty, my thought on Federer's difficulty is this:

So what.

Wickmayer told her story on Wednesday, thanking her father passionately and at great length while he sat right in front of her.

A few days after Wickmayer's mother died, Yanina told her father to stay home from work.

She wanted to talk.

So Wickmayer, the 9-year-old, had been reading up on the Web about tennis academies in Florida, and also about how moving companies can take things from Belgium to the U.S.

Wickmayer told her father that day that she wanted to move to Florida. Within a week, they had moved. The father sold his swimming pool construction business, left his cars, house and friends behind.

They arrived in Florida without any plans or contacts, and without any English. They knocked on the door of Saddlebrook Tennis Academy and said that Yanina wanted to play tennis.

"I just decided as a little girl to get away from home and put my memories and thoughts to something else," Wickmayer said. "To focus ourselves on other things in life and try to move on."

Rather than having her mother's death ruin her life, she allowed something to grow from it.

Oudin's mother? Well, it's hard to say if that bothered Oudin, or if she even knew about it. SI.com broke the story, checking out the divorce papers from last year, a few hours after her match.

The timing was interesting, as the Web site surely didn't get those papers around midnight, when the story broke.

Oudin surely already knew about the accusation and the pending divorce. In fact, her father said that she suspected the alleged affair. To her, that was old news.

What's new is the way our thirst for celebrity might have affected her. All the attention and hype blew up too much for a 17-year-old girl no one had heard of 10 days earlier.

Suddenly, she was the great American teen, built up as the picture of perfection.

Well, so much for the Great American Story, I guess.

Part of the burden of becoming a pop culture icon is that people start digging into your personal life. Oudin said after her loss in the quarters that the attention was more than she had expected, but that it comes with playing good tennis. She'll get used to it.

But back to the celebrity culture: We see something we like, and then blow it up to ridiculous proportions.

Oudin was perfect. That's how it was painted. And inevitably we found out later that she actually bleeds, too.

So disappointment comes from failing to live up to a false picture.

I'm not sure why these celebrities have to be turned into fiction, why they have to be perfect. God knows what kind of dynamic went into Oudin sticking with her coach and saying the other day that he was like a second father to her.

Her mother denies the affair, but agreed to a court order saying she couldn't interact with Oudin's coach unless it related specifically to Melanie's tennis.

Well, maybe she really is the American story. A real story.

Mother's Day at the Open isn't all flowers and candy. It was three very distinct realities.

Email me at gregcouch09@aol.com