On Friday and over the weekend, Lindsay Davenport will drive north from her home in Laguna Beach, Calif., to a television studio in Culver City. There she’ll sit in front of a big screen and describe a tennis match that’s happening thousands of miles away, in Istanbul, Turkey.
“At first it was really weird,” says Davenport, who has been calling matches this way for the Tennis Channel since 2010. “It was a lot harder to do that than doing them live. You have no idea if there’s wind, or what the atmosphere is like. I felt like I was guessing what was going on. But I’ve gotten used to it. You kind of learn what you can describe and what you can’t.”
Thinking back on the crop of recently retired Hall of Famers, I wouldn't have predicted that Davenport would end up being a standout commentator. The chattier Andre Agassi and Martina Hingis seemed like they would revel in the extended, post-career spotlight that comes with a gig in the booth. Davenport, on the other hand, once said that she hated the idea of being the center of attention at her own wedding. But Lindsay says that even when she was a player she believed that she could do the job well, and maybe subvert a tennis stereotype in the process.
“I always thought I could explain the sport,” Davenport says. “I was a power player, and most people don’t think of them as using tactics, but I always liked figuring out what my opponents were trying to do against me.”
Still, Davenport says she never pictured herself in the booth so soon after she retired. But when she did try it out, after having her second child and putting her career on indefinite hold in 2009, she found that she had one “huge advantage” over many of her colleagues.
“There’s nothing like having actually played someone to help you analyze them,” she says. “You know what they’re doing, and what their opponent is going to do against them.”
But it also made for complications. “When I first started,” Davenport says, “I really tried to keep in mind that it’s not as easy as it looks out there. And I also didn’t want to be too critical of people I knew on tour.
“But as time has gone on,” she adds with a laugh, “I think I’ve forgotten that a little and started to be more critical.” There will also be fewer players whom she has faced. Davenport only played Victoria Azarenka once, in doubles, and faced Caroline Wozniacki just one time in singles, when Wozniacki was 17.
Even now, though, it’s hard to say that Lindsay is too harsh. It's an example of one of her best attributes as a commentator: She doesn’t overdo it, either with excess information or pedantic technical explanation or gushing praise. As a player, she could get down on herself—“I had my demons,” she says—but she’s a cheerful and level-headed presence at the Tennis Channel, and with the BBC at Wimbledon. The latter job, she says, has had a positive, restraining influence on her work.
“They have rules at the BBC,” she says. “You don’t talk over a point, you let the chair umpire say the score, and you try to stick to describing what you see.”
These are the old school virtues of tennis broadcasting, those of BBC legends like Dan Maskell, a Wimbledon fixture who might go three games without saying a word, rouse himself to mutter something about a “wonderful placement,” and then go silent for the rest of the set. Obviously, now that the BBC employs John McEnroe and Boris Becker, among other talky heads, the rules are a little different. But the ideal, at least, of keeping the chatter to a minimum and letting the match speak for itself, is still a sound one, and one not often embraced in America.
“We definitely talk more here, even the play by play people,” Davenport says. “I know a lot of fans wish we didn’t, but that’s how we are with all sports, I think.” That said, Lindsay’s own favorite commentators are fellow Americans Mary Carillo and Pam Shriver.
“I have so much respect for Mary and how smart and professional she is,” she says. “When I was a player, I couldn’t stand Pam Shriver, I thought she was so critical. People would come up to me and say, ‘Did you hear what Shriver said about you?’ Now we’re good friends and I really respect her style, she says what she thinks.”
There are limits to how much watching and chatting Davenport, who has three young children, can do. She took Wednesday and Thursday off this week to be fresh for the stretch run in Istanbul-Culver City. A week of calling three matches a day from the WTA Championships, she says, would have sapped her concentration and made coming up any new insights difficult.
As for the players she’ll be watching from Istanbul, Davenport believes they’ve taken a “big step forward” in 2012. “I think this has been the best WTA year in a long time,” she says. “You have the biggest stars doing the best, and that hasn’t always been the case. Serena, Maria, Vika have made it exciting.”
Davenport says that Serena continues to amaze her, and that she has changed a lot over the years. “When they were 17, 18,” she says of Serena and her sister, Venus, “they were on their own, isolated from the rest of the tour, and their father was always there. Now Serena isn’t like that. The fact that she’s still winning into her 30s is a great model for younger players. When I was playing, you figured you would be done by 28 or 29. Serena is talking about playing in 2016.”
Davenport has spent a lot of time in the last year analyzing Agnieszka Radwanska’s game, trying to understand how she stays on the same court with the bigger hitters. But her favorite right now is Victoria Azarenka.
“I like that she has a balance of power and speed and defense,” Davenport says of Vika, “and not just one dimension. I also respect that she’s tried to overcome her mental issues. A lot of players can conquer those for a while, but they fall back into them. So far Azarenka hasn’t done that. She’s kept improving.”
Will Lindsay get more involved again with tennis in the future? She’s not sure, but for the moment she says she has her hands full with the her kids and the amount of commentating she’s doing.
“It’s a harder job than I thought,” she says, “especially for a tennis player. We’re used to doing everything on own own time, and having everyone cater to us. Nothing revolves around you in the booth.”
As strange as describing matches from a room in Culver City may be, she’s happy to be there.