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Taylor Townsend competing at Wimbledon in July.
PLANTATION, Fla. — The tennis coach Kathy Rinaldi settled into her folding beach chair near the court, out of the sun’s range but close enough for her encouragement to be heard by her teenage pupil, Taylor Townsend. A few feet away, an African-American woman, dressed from visor to sneakers in tennis whites, was speaking on her phone: “I’m getting ready to watch Taylor Townsend. She’s the girl who looks like Serena.”
The setting was a December junior tournament, the Orange Bowl International Championship, sanctioned by the United States Tennis Association and the International Tennis Federation, here at Veltri Tennis Center outside Fort Lauderdale. The 16-year-old Townsend was competing in the girls 18s for the final time after declaring her intention to play for pay starting in January.
Townsend enters the professional ranks with credentials that unfurl like a red carpet: the 2012 Australian Open junior singles and doubles titles and the junior doubles title at this year’s Wimbledon and United States Open. She is the first American to hold the No. 1 year-end world ranking for junior girls since Gretchen Rush in 1982.
Because she is black and has a sturdy 5-foot-6 physique and strong ground strokes, Townsend often draws comparisons to Serena Williams, a 15-time major singles champion. Townsend said she was flattered to be mentioned in the same breath as one of the greatest players in the game’s history. But occasionally, the surface comparisons cut deep.
In the Orange Bowl doubles final, Townsend and her partner, Gabrielle Andrews, powered to victory despite the heckling of an elderly man who zeroed in on her race and her baby fat. For all Townsend’s success this year, her appearance was what thrust her into the spotlight at the United States Open, the year’s final major. The U.S.T.A., which oversees her training, tried to discourage her from playing in the Open, declining to pick up her expenses because she was not in peak shape.
Her mother paid her way, and when Townsend’s plight became public, several prominent women in the sport rushed to her defense, including Williams and Lindsay Davenport, another sturdily built former world No. 1 whose fitness was questioned early in her career.
Describing the controversy as unnecessary, Williams said, “Women athletes come in all different sizes and shapes and colors and everything.”
Rush, a mother of three teenagers who is now Gretchen Rush Magers, has watched opponents and the daughters of friends starve themselves to reach a body ideal personified by supermodels starting with Twiggy. She said she was disheartened that the focus was on Townsend’s appearance and not on her results.
“I’ve known women who have battled anorexia who are no longer with us, so I’m very sensitive to body issues,” Rush Magers, the women’s tennis coach for the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps team in California, said in a telephone interview. Her feelings about the subject are so strong that she said she has encouraged her team to attend a February campus lecture by the mother of a young woman who died of complications from anorexia.
Townsend eventually received an apology from the U.S.T.A. The emphasis on her appearance has made Townsend stronger in ways that cannot be measured by any body composition test, said her mother, Shelia, who played tennis at Division II Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo.
“I love the game of tennis so much because it mirrors the game of life so much,” said Shelia Townsend, who continued: “At the end of the day, you have to stand on what you’ve learned and fall back on what you know and everything you’ve been taught. Over all, what Taylor’s been through this year has helped her to become more self-assured and even stronger in who she is and not have to look for the approval of somebody else. At the end of the day, her results speak for themselves.”
The days when the United States feasted on the success of its female tennis prodigies are long gone, as evidenced by the 30-year gap between the reigns of Rush and Townsend, whose coach, Rinaldi, was a teenage prodigy who drew comparisons to Chris Evert.
In 1981, at 14, Rinaldi became the youngest player to win a match at Wimbledon. A subsequent profile in Sports Illustrated introduced Rinaldi as someone who “gives promise of being the best ever.”
During a pro career that spanned two decades, Rinaldi won three Women’s Tennis Association singles titles and rose as high as No. 7 in the world. Not the best ever, but a commendable career nonetheless.
Taylor Townsend, America’s Latest Tennis Prodigy, Prepares to Turn Pro http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/12/23/sports/tennis/23townsend_1/23townsend_1-articleLarge.jpg
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