"THE RISE OF THE TERMINATOR"...CHAPTER ONE
by David Jones

Down in St. Tropez, spiritual home of topless sun-worshipers and faded Seventies film stars, they love a genuine eccentric, and this morning, Amelie Mauresmo...the resort's most talked-about new arrival since Brigitte Bardot retired there...is certainly enhancing her reputation.

Beneath a pale late-winter sun, at the normally tranquil municipal tennis club, the sport's new "enfant terrible" is working out with Christophe Fournerie, the latest in a long procession of exasperated male coaches who have vainly tried to tame her. But this is no ordinary practice session.

It began bizarrely enough with Amelie effortlessly juggling a football, Beckham-style, between the tramlines. Now the wooden rest-bench is visibly vibrating as a huge ghetto-blaster pumps out Beach Boys music at maximum volume, and she attempts to rally in rhythm.

"Play something more aggressive...it'll help you to hit the ball harder," the trainer suggests as they take a brief breather, but Amelie hardly appears to need any outside assistance. The muscles in her bronzed, angular shoulders look as strong as a shotputter's, and her calves like those of a top-class sprinter, when she suddenly uncoils to slam a fizzing forehand winner.
Casual tennis watchers may not yet have heard of Mauresmo, but come the opening serves of Wimbledon this summer, her name is sure to be on everyone's lips. Still only 19 years old, her seemingly superhuman strength gives her the potential to become the most powerful player in the history of women's tennis. Yet it is not only her explosive matchplay that is causing such a stir.

In January of this year, during the Australian Open...where she battered her way to the final..she took the plunge and did what it took Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova the best part of their careers to do: She came out and declared herself a lesbian. The announcement...which instantly transformed her into front-page news...was made, very deliberately, during a routine interview with an embarrasssed French sportswriter.
Innocuously asked why she had recently moved her base from Paris to St Tropez, she replied that she wanted to be near her new "amie", adding pointedly: "That's amie with an "e" on the end." In other words, she was talking about a girlfriend, not a boy friend.

The tremors caused near hysteria on the close-knit women's tennis circuit...where the many gay women are accepted on the tacit understanding that they avoid discussing their sexuality...and reverberated all the way back home.
In Melbourne, the girlish world number two Martina Hingis, who beat Mauresmo in the Australian Open final in straight sets, denounced her as 'half a man', sneering contemptuously: "She's here with her girlfriend." The American star Lindsay Davenport...no fragile flower herself...weighed in. "The shoulders looked huge to me," she said after Mauresmo had upset the form book by beating her in the semi-final. "I think they must have grown."

(Mauresmo was to have her revenge when she beat Hingis in the quarterfinals of the Paris Indoor Open last month.)
Meanwhile, in France, the reaction was mixed. Older members of her family were so traumatized that they immediately severed all ties. "I don't know if I can ever see her or speak to her again," her bewildered grandmother, Andree Mauresmo, told me at her chalet-style house in the hamlet of Abancourt, two hours north of Paris. "I like people to follow the straight path." French satirists depicted Mauresmo as having the body of "Terminator" star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The French establishment evidently adopts a more enlightened view. Barely a week after her bombshell announcement, she was invited by Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to a high-profile International Women's day reception at the Hotel Matignon, the equivalent of 10 Downing Street. Her amie, Sylvie Bourdon, who runs a long-established bar on the port-side at St Tropez, was by her side.

Three days earlier, she and Sylvie, 31, had made the cover of Paris Match magazine, reputedly earning a five-figure sum to discuss their burgeoning romance in breathless detail. But that is only the beginning. Mauresmo already has lucrative contracts with Nike, Dunlop, Babolat, and Gaz de France, and is now being pursued by major names in cosmetics, perfumes, and communications.

Only a catastrophic dip in form, or some belated and unforseeable backlash to her homosexuality can, it seems, prevent her from earning a million dollars this year, and many, many millions more as her career unfolds. "She has very clear marketable attractions," enthuses Jorge Salkeld, the Paris director of her agent, Advantage International. "First, she is physically powerful and people love to see that. Second, her personality. She comes across as secure, decent and, of course, now, very honest. When she spoke out, it was never a marketing ploy...but it has certainly done her no harm so far." Evidently not.

The question is, how did Mighty Mauresmo rise...virtually without a trace...to a position where she now stands poised to eclipse Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, and even the youthful Hingis in the column inches stakes(press coverage).
Intriguingly, Amelie's story differs from those old, played-out tennis tales of poverty-stricken young girls being driven to succeed by unscrupulous, money-grabbing parents. It is spiced, too, by dark allegations of plotting and chicanery. She was born into an almost stereotypically bourgeois French family, in the smart Paris dormer town of St Germain-en-Laye, on July 5, 1979.
When she was two, however, her father Francis, landed a plum post at the Levis paint factory in Bornel, an unattractive town with around 3,000 residents some 30 miles north of the city. So he, his wife Francoise, Amelie, and her brother Fabien, then four, moved there.

Though uninterested in sport, Francis Mauresmo is a tall, burly man from whom his daughter has inherited his physique. Unfortunately for her, she also has her father's prominent lantern jaw. Together with eyes that are fractionally too close together...and curiously similar to Bjorn Borg's...this gives her a strikingly masculine look.

M. Mauresmo's bearish appearance disguises a scientific and mathematical mind. A graduate of one of France's foremost engineering colleges, he is now a senior executive with the same paint company. In his spare time, he is a leading figure in the Rotary Club and serves on the Bornel town council, where he is renowned for his sharp financial acumen.
By all accounts he is a man who holds family life dear. Therefore, knowing he would be working long hours, he bought a house on a country lane just opposite the factory gates, allowing him to eat breakfast with his children, drop them at school, and still stroll to work on time.

Today, like many local businesses, the paint plant has shut down, and M. Mauresmo's job has been re-located. But the Mauresmos still live in the same slightly shabby three-story mini-chateau, with its crumbling, mossy walls, shuttered windows, and dilapidated out-buildings.

On our visit, the once-bustling family home carried an abandoned air. Fabien, now 21, attends his father's old alma mater in Paris, and is rarely around these days; and even before the scandal broke, Amelie's visits had grown increasingly rare.
Francis and Amelie's mother, Francoise, were enjoying a skiing holiday at their chalet in the Jure mountains. Therefore, it was left to acquaintances and friends to recall Amelie's formative years. Listening to their anecdotes, the recurring theme is her remarkably premature sense of her own destiny. Aged four, having shown not the slightest previous interest in tennis, she watched the then national hero, Yannick Noah, win the French Open, and promptly requested a racquet. Her parents obliged and, to their astonishment, she was soon mimicking his strokes with authenticity, rebounding the ball off the high garden wall.

They enrolled her in the thriving local tennis club, where president Andre Mallet still marvels at her natural talent. "She was so good that a Finnish professional who played with us, Inger Delamar, recognized her as a future champion even then," he said. "The local council did not normally give sports coaching grants to anyone under seven, but for Amelie, they made an exception.
"It wasn't just her tennis ability that stood out, though. It was her determination."

Talented and iron-willed she may have been, but the young Amelie did not appear especially strong. Indeed, photos taken at the Pablo Picasso infant school reveal her to have been rather small, almost frail for her age. Her teacher, Dominique Margery, says the pictures are deceptive. "She wasn't very big, but she was already able to compete with the boys. She would play football or race with them and she hated to lose. She would go into a big sulk. She had a lot of friends in class, but they tended to be boys rather than girls." She paused, and added: "But she was very young. I don't think you can read anything into that."
Amelie first ruffled feathers when, aged eight, she defected to the bigger and more established tennis club in Meru, a ten-minute car ride away. The Bournel hierarchy, who had, after all, secured her funding, were mortified at losing their prodigy...a sentiment that persists among some older members. But she wanted the best, and her parents facilitated her wishes.
Upon entering Meru, she was given the standard children's strength test, which involves throwing a ball from the back of the court in an effort to reach the net. Amelie's first effort sailed over, and cannoned against the far perimeter fence, a feat never achieved before, or since.

Already marked out as a phenomenon, she was taken under the wing of club coach Yves N'Goran. The former Ivory Coast Davis Cup player remembers how she would practice for a minimum of two hours, three times a week, with her mother always watching silently from the courtside.

"She was encouraging, but she never said anything," he recalled. "Well, perhaps if Amelie hit a very good shot she would give a faint little smile. Her father NEVER came. I can't remember ever seeing him watch her play."

It was apparently Amelie's own decision to move away from home and live at the national tennis training school at Blois, central France, when she was just eleven years old. No one recalls her being pushed by her parents. They were, according to friends, devastated to lose their daughter. Equally, they were united in the belief that they must not inhibit her progress.
At Blois, the hours were long and the regime tough, and it was here that she first suffered the loneliness and confusion that was to follow her through adolescence. "I know that she missed her parents very badly, but she was very good at hiding her feelings," said her coach, Thierry Couralet.

"Amelie was mentally very strong. She rose very early and had to attend a normal mixed boys' and girls' school until 3 pm. Then she would return to us and train and play tennis until 6:30 pm. It's not an easy life, but she stuck with it because she knew where she was going: to the top. The one thing that spoiled her was that when she played a lesser opponent, she wouldn't bother to try. It was as if she didn't think it worth beating them," says Couralet.

Amelie's see-saw temperment worsened when, at age 13, she moved to the French national sports training center..a multi-discipline camp for the nation's elite athletes in Vincennes, near Paris. Capable of intense concentration and self-discipline...she once practiced her weaker stroke, her backhand, over and over for two months without complaint...she was also prone to laziness and prolonged sulks.

No wonder, perhaps, when she was so confused about her emerging sexual orientation. "Emotionally, she was up and down and we didn't know why," said her coach, the veteran Australian Gail Lovera. "She had boyfriends at that stage, and I know that later, in the summer of 1996, she had a serious relationship with a male coach that lasted for six months." "Amelie certainly loved to look feminine. She always wore a short denim skirt that showed off her lovely legs, and she had her hair in a little French bob cut. She used perfume and loved nice jewelry, and on the court, she looked beautiful.

She wore a dress, not the shorts as she does now. You would have never guessed at the way she would turn out." "Looking back, though, there must have been different feelings underneath. I remember while we were playing a series of tournaments in the UK, I happened to talk to an Australian player who was a lesbian. Amelie gave me this disgusted look and said: 'Ugh, how can you even talk to her? Everyone knows she is gay.' It shocked me.

I told her she shouldn't judge people, that the woman was a friend of mine." While the entire staff vainly attempted to handle this hormonal maelstrom, Gail says the attitude of Amelie's mother did not help. "She was always fussing around her. She would pamper her, take her laundry home while the other girls did their own. We were trying to teach them independence, maturity, and it certainly didn't help." To make matters worse, Amelie's fast-growing body was causing serious problems. Herculean of shoulder and upper thigh, she had incongruously weak stomach and ankle muscles and was forever suffering injuries. To compensate, she began serious weight training. Thus, the incredible figure she now has, began to develop.

Her rippling biceps, coupled with that big, square jaw, have inevitably sparked speculation that she may have taken body-building drugs. Such speculation is universally dismissed by those who know her. "She is too forgetful," laughed one former trainer. "I tried to give her vitamins and she would never remember to take them." In any case, he added, the players are routinely tested. "Believe me, it's all natural." Amelie grew so depressed by her psychological and physical problems, that at 14, she seriously considered quitting tennis.

It is a mark of her changeable nature, however, that by 16, she was giving up her school A-level course(without bothering to tell her parents first) to concentrate on becoming a champion. The junior French and Wimbledon titles, won in 1996, were her reward, and she turned heads at the Champions' Ball in a stunning black, ankle-length gown. By this time, the coaches were coming...and going...thick and fast. After Gail, she worked with Eric Champion. He lasted three months. She was then taken under the wing of French Tennis Federation guru Patrick Simon, but 18 months later, they also parted acrimoniously.

Enter perhaps the unluckiest, and certainly the most aggrieved of her mentors, Warwick Bashford. When he started to work with her, in the summer of 1997, it was widely agreed that her moodiness, coupled with a love of nightclubs, would permanently prevent her from fulfilling her potential. The blunt South African was determined to steer her back on course. To allow her the freedom she craved, he found her an apartment in the Bagnolet district of Paris, tolerating her intense relationship with an older French woman player on condition that she arrived on time for training, worked harder than ever before, and kept her social life separate. Believing her to be over-muscled, he also modified her training methods and introduced a more "fun" approach.

"The ghetto-blaster technique was my idea," he says caustically. The result was phenomenal. Ranked 145th in the world when he arrived on the scene, the following year she was 29th. By common consensus, though, loyalty is NOT Amelie's strong point. On December 10th last year, on the eve of her finest hour in Melbourne, Bashford was dumped..fired.

The way he sees it...and his view may be jaundiced...his removal was part of a plot by a powerful group of women who aim to dominate French, then world women's tennis. While he was away in America, he says, the leading coach Isabelle Demongeot, arranged a dinner party at her home outside Paris. Sylvie Bourdon...a friend of Demongeot's since childhood...and Amelie, were placed opposite one another. Romance duly kindled and within days, his protegee told him she was leaving to join the Demongeot camp. She would work with Fournerie in St Tropez, she said.

That way she could stay in Porsche-driving, playgirl Sylvie's beachfront villa. "For me, she has been brainwashed by these people," says Bashford sourly. "I think it was all a plan to get her to play tennis for Demongeot's team.

I believe it was Sylvie's idea for her to come out and say she is gay, too." "It was certainly a courageous decision, but she should have waited until her career was more established. It'll be interesting now to see how it pans out. Is she strong enough to cope with all the extra attention and pressure this will bring."

A fascinating question, and one that can only be answered fully when Amelie and Sylvie stroll together through the hallowed gates of the All England club in London SW19 in June of 99. Wimbledon's strawberries-and-cream set have always been the ultimate arbiters of tennis etiquette. The fate of Mighty Mauresmo...and her "petite amie"...depend on how loudly they cheer.