No Grand Slam, but so what?

To Jennifer Capriati, off-court comeback makes future bright

WIMBLEDON, England - Jennifer Capriati exited Wimbledon without a curtsy or a crown yesterday.

She left with her baseball cap tugged low and her head down, her Grand Slam dream buried by a Belgian on a patch of English grass.

Capriati lost to Justine Henin in Wimbledon's women's semifinals, 2-6, 6-4, 6-2, running straight into the Belgian's beautiful backhand in a big match on a gorgeous summer day on a stage called Centre Court.

But the outcome and setting were all almost beside the point when measured against Capriati's career, her comeback that might be the greatest in modern sports history and her season of redemption.

She didn't get the Grand Slam. It's one of the rare prizes in sports, winning four major tournaments on three continents and three surfaces - clay, grass and hard courts. The last player to do it was Steffi Graf in 1988.

Capriati won the Australian and French Opens and came close at Wimbledon, the tennis crown jewel where players bow and curtsy before royalty. And there's still the U.S. Open to go in late summer in New York, where the tennis is played to the beat of rumbling subways.

But Capriati, 25, still has a career, and still has a future that is as bright now as it was a decade ago, when she was 15 and fresh, before burnout and teen rebellion took her out of the game, before she was cited for shoplifting, arrested on a charge of marijuana possession and sent to drug rehabilitation.

"I just put it all in perspective, that it's really not a big deal to lose a tennis match," she said. "There's a lot worse things that could happen. ... You know, I've had a lot more losses in different ways than this tennis match."

So, in tomorrow's final it won't be Capriati and the Grand Slam, but Henin against reigning champion Venus Williams, who advanced by beating Lindsay Davenport, 6-2, 6-7 (1), 6-1.

Still, Capriati noted how proud she is of her achievements. Yet the loss had to hurt. There were times as she talked that her eyes glistened like the sequins on her shirt, but she held at bay whatever disappointment she might have felt.

"I came out playing great," Capriati said. "Maybe I thought it was going to be too easy. Maybe I just lost my concentration there. I just let up."

For a set she rolled, serving hard, smashing winners from the baseline, running Henin all over and nearly out of Wimbledon.

With women's tennis, though, there are no guarantees anymore that the favorites will just cruise to the finals. The game has more depth, and the lower-ranked players have fewer fears.

And Henin, 19, is gutsy and brassy, a mite in a game now dubbed "Big Babe Tennis" by television commentator Mary Carillo. Henin stands a shade under 5-foot-6 and waves a backhand like a sword. She is a survivor of life's hard knocks. She was 14 when her mother, Francoise, died of cancer. Last year, she broke from her apparently overbearing father, who oversaw her career. She lives with her boyfriend in a town in the Belgian countryside, far from the tennis tumult.

Against Capriati, Henin was hobbled with a blister, her right foot taped. Down a set and 1-2 in the second, she called for a trainer and considered withdrawing.

"It's really painful," Henin said. "It's horrible."

But amid the horror was beauty as Henin uncoiled her backhand, stretching low and unloading cross-court winners, moving Capriati deeper and deeper as the crowd gasped in wonder, something that just is not done at Wimbledon.

"Yeah, I heard the crowd," Henin said, adding that in the last two sets, she "played with passion."

In the third set, Capriati was flustered and rushing, losing her serve twice, falling behind 1-4 before rain delayed play for 22 minutes to give her a second and last chance.

But when the sun came out and the court covers came off, Capriati kept spraying her shots and Henin kept hammering her backhands. The Grand Slam quest ended with a forehand pushed wide, Henin hurling her racket in the air and Capriati doing a little jog to the net before leaving the arena in a hurry.

She came so close to keeping alive the Grand Slam, but Capriati said she wasn't disappointed when it was finished.

"Everyone was making a big deal out of the Grand Slam but me," she said. "I'm pretty happy with the way the year has gone so far. I mean, it's hard to win one Grand Slam. So, I'm pretty happy. It's not a disappointment at all. It would have been nice, but ... oh, well."

Capriati is savoring the career she has, the one where she came back from nowhere and fulfilled the only expectations that mattered - her own.

"It's funny," she said. "I was such an early starter, early prodigy, whatever, but really I feel like a late-bloomer."