Daddy, Mommy's on Fire!

Boy, the parents out there – except the ones who have issues with how much energy and time their children absorb, are going to eat this up. Sybille Bammer, the 26-year old Austrian who is in the semifinals of the Pacific Life Open, is playing the best tennis of her life this week, while towing around and playing Candyland with her five-year old daughter, Tina.

Yesterday, she cold-cocked Tatiana Golovin, a girl who’s been known to dive under the bed when she hears opportunity knocking, playing tennis that demonstrated how slow these courts at the Pacific Life Open  have been playing. “It's advantage for me, I think, because I play with spin and then the ball bounces higher, and then they are sometimes late and they cannot play as good, their games.”

Bammer has been showing up for her pressers with Tina, and the two of them sit side-by-side on the dias behind the microphone. Sybille, who's surprising timid, struggles mightily to express herself in the English language (hold those Comments, we already  know that not too Amurican players speak German, either!), while Tina plays with her mommy’s credential, her clear blue eyes peeking out from beneath the brim of a pink kiddie baseball cap.

“Geez, she’s the cutest thing since Shirley Temple,” said veteran scribe Jerry Magee, of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Jerry’s got a gruff, gravelly bass voice; rumor has it that he was the model for the lead character in Grumpy Old Men. Who knew “cute” was even in his vocabulary, unless it was to describe a statue-of-liberty play?

Anyway, Golovin did not take the game to Bammer, so Bammer took it away from her. Using her lefty topspin and serve, she made the ball hop up and out of Golovin’s comfort zone, although the way Golovin told it, she just had a bad day. In fact, Jerry asked her point blank if she was “prepared” to play.

Aw, Tati, that’s okay, the last thing we want is for you to beat yourself up over this, a chance to make a big semifinal by roughing up a working mom. Forget the fact that no mofo (that’s short for mother-with-forehand) has been ranked as high as Bammer (no. 46, heading toward 30) since Laura Arraya set the ceiling at No. 14 a mere 17 years ago. There’s a tournament next week so it’s all good, girlfriend, now go out and get yourself a nice new belly ring or something!

And isn’t this Bammer the girl who beat Serena Williams in Hobart, in January? Look at the hellfire that brought raining down on your fellow fashionistas. Besides, what’s this unwed mother and her five-year old doing in the WTA kitty shelter anyway?

I asked Golovin how the other women in the locker room are taking to a toddler running amok in their midst – is it a bother?

“Not really,” she said. “.We see the little one running around and screaming in the locker, so it's...”

“Anybody say, ‘Get that kid out of here?’”

“Some of us do (smile). No, I'm just kidding. No. She's cute. She's nice.”

Bammer now is two matches away from becoming the first mother to win an event of at least this magnitude since Evonne Goolagong Cawley won Wimbledon (yeah, that Wimbledon) in 1980. Clearly, Tina needs shoes or something.

Really, though, Bammer suggested that being a mofo isn’t particularly stressful or difficult. In fact, she clutches for the same straws as any other overburdened parent when she plops down, wore-out and wanting to do anything but read her kid a stupid book, to read her kid a stupid book. She says it’s a perspective builder. She says it softens the hard blows of life. She says it takes her out of herself. It gives her a great sense of, well, support.

All kidding aside (but feel free to continue reading), Bammer says the “baby break” worked for her. I don't know, because before Tina, my best ranking was around 200, 205. . . then I start again and I said, "Okay. It's my last chance and I really want to try and give my best."

Bammer is a more confident player now; before her break, she said, she was stuck at around no. 200 and spinning her wheels, losing handfuls of close three-set matches to people like Nadia Petrova (is that possible?). “Mentally,” she said, “I was a bit negative.” The time she took off to have Tina and nurse her through infancy enabled her to start fresh – with the blessing of Tina’s father, her boyfriend, Christoph Gschwendtner.

Okay, all you less supportive spouses, you can crawl out from under those tables now. Christoph, in case you are wondering, did have a job at the time, and no it wasn't as a mime (he's an engineer).

By this time in the presser, Bammer was getting tired and Tina was really tuckered out, doing that crawl all over mommy and try to jam that laminated credential in her mouth while she’s talking thing. Someone asked Bammer if she had allowed any of the other players to babysit Tina while she was practicing or playing. And did Tina have a favorite player?

Bammer was casting around for names when Tina grabbed her by the cheeks and whispered something in her ear.

It made Bammer smile, and she said, “She says, Martina Hingis.”

Now there's a wise child.