[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 92 (Monday, July 17, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7010-S7012]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           A SMASHING SUCCESS

  Mr. HELMS. Madam President, a noted sports figure in American sports 
history once commented that ``Bragging ain't bragging if you can prove 
it.''
  On that basis, I want to brag a little bit about North Carolina which 
has had its share of top sports figures--perhaps more than our share 
when you consider such outstanding sports figures, past and present, as 
Arnold Palmer, Catfish Hunter, Charlie ``Choo-Choo'' Justice, Michael 
Jordan, Richard Petty, David Thompson, Sonny Jurgensen, Dean Smith, 
Everett Case, Joe Gibbs, Enos Slaughter, and Wallace Wade, who by the 
way took two teams from Duke University to the Rose Bowl. But he didn't 
have to go very far for the second one because it was held in Durham, 
NC, right after Pearl Harbor. It was feared that the Japanese might try 
to bomb the stadium out in California, so they moved the whole thing 
across the country to North Carolina--the only time the Rose Bowl was 
not played in Pasadena.
  But I don't recall any previous teenager--from anywhere--who has been 
described as a ``tennis phenomenon who walks in Chris Evert's 
footsteps''. But that's the accolade handed 14-year-old Alli Baker of 
Raleigh my hometown--in the May edition of Metromagazine in a sparkling 
and detailed piece by Patrik Jonsson, writing from Boca Raton, Florida.
  As I read the tribute to Alli Baker, I was reminded that this young 
lady is a great granddaughter of the late Lenox Dial Baker, one of 
America's leading orthopedic surgeons. Dr. Baker almost single-handedly 
founded a children's hospital, later named for him, at Duke University 
Medical Center in Durham, where hundreds of crippled children's lives 
have brightened and their lives improved because of Dr. Baker's 
selfless and loving interest in them.
  I am going to let the article about Alli Baker speak for itself. 
Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that the tribute to the amazing 14-
year-old Alli Baker by Patrik Jonsson be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

       Teenage Tennis Phenomenon Walks in Chris Evert's Footsteps

                    [From Metro Magazine, May 2000]

       Boca Raton, Fla.--Alli Baker is fuming. Frustrated during a 
     drill at the Evert Tennis Academy, the 14-year-old tennis 
     phenomenon from Raleigh huffs and puffs as if she's about to 
     blow somebody's house down. Then a few easy ground strokes go 
     into the net. That's it. Baker's Volkl racket goes flying 
     into a patch of grass. Conversations hush. Eyes glance 
     sideways at the lithe, freckled Southern girl whom everybody 
     knows as the number one ranked 14-year-old in the country, 
     and the highest-ranked female player yet to come out of North 
     Carolina. The court mood tenses the way it used to when John 
     McEnroe yelled at refs, or when the young German Boris Becker 
     pumped his fists in defiance. This is just practice. Still, 
     being Alli Baker's rival right now seems like a very, very 
     bad idea.
       ``It's true, I get very competitive,'' says Baker, who is 
     also the seventh-ranked 16-and-under player in the country, 
     an hour before the brief blow-up on the court. ``I love to 
     win. It's my greatest strength.''
       Tennis my not be a gritty contact sport, but it is, above 
     all, a game of mind over body. Anger and other unchecked 
     emotions are widely known top scatter the concentrations of 
     even the most experienced players in clutch situations. But 
     the coaches here already know that North Carolina's newest 
     sports star hones her on-court emotions, polishes them like 
     treasure, and beams them into that fuzzy yellow ball, 
     straight back at her opponents on the other side of the net 
     at center court. Indeed, she's beaten some of the world's 
     best tennis players in her age group by funneling her 
     competitive angst into devastating trickery.
       ``She's a very mature player,'' says her coach, John Evert, 
     the brother of Wimbledon champ Chris Evert, and a 17-year 
     coach in his own right. ``Her strength is that she figures 
     out how to play exactly to her opponents' weaknesses, and she 
     doesn't let herself get into the dumps.''
       Last year, Baker won five tournament tie breakers in a row, 
     an almost unheard of feat that epitomizes her unwillingness 
     to lose. ``I've yet to see her play in a tournament,'' one of 
     the other Evert Academy coaches confides. ``But they say she 
     is very, very hungry.''
       Don't get the wrong idea, though. Off the court, Alli Baker 
     is about as sweet as strawberry pie, as humble as corn pone. 
     Freckled, tan and every bit the exuberant teenager, she talks 
     about fashion, missing home, seeing the world (Paris is her 
     favorite city), bonding with tennis stars Monica Seles and 
     Martina Hingis, how she loves her mentor, Chris Evert, and 
     the life-affirming step she's getting ready to take into 
     professional tennis. She's making ``a million new friends'' 
     while coaxing her Raleigh confidantes to hurry down to where 
     it's nice and warm and where the beaches stretch on and on.
       So far, it's been a whirlwind tour from the halls of 
     Raleigh's Daniels Middle School to the star-studded tennis 
     courts of SoFla.


                          hanging in west boca

       It's here--to the Evert Tennis Academy, near some of the 
     world's largest country clubs, where the average annual 
     income is $65,000 and where the warm prevailing winds collect 
     tall afternoon thunder clouds over the coast--that Alli 
     decided to come this spring after it became clear that to 
     follow her dream, she had to follow it right out of North 
     Carolina.
       Although the family will stay in Raleigh, where dad Bill 
     Baker is a vice president for a major construction firm, the 
     family just bought a house across Glades Avenue in west

[[Page S7011]]

     Boca as a permanent base here. Baker and her family made the 
     decision after acknowledging the lack of a steady stream of 
     crack practice partners and full-time coaches in Raleigh. 
     While Bill works and helps shuttle their second daughter, 11-
     year-old Lenox, to her soccer games, mom Leigh Baker has 
     found a permanent seat on the red-eye to Boca.
       Of course, there were some questions among family friends: 
     How could the Bakers send a 13-year-old (her birthday is in 
     April) off to fend for herself in such a competitive, 
     cutthroat world? Bill Baker has an easy answer: ``She called 
     yesterday from a hotel room overlooking Key Biscayne. She 
     said, `Dad, I'm here looking our over the bay and the blue 
     water. It's so beautiful here.' I think she's going to be all 
     right.''
       If Baker has what it takes to be an international tennis 
     star, Evert Academy is where the transformation from 
     sharpshooting local kid to Grand Slam winning hardball player 
     will likely take place. It's a place where the phrase, 
     ``Yeah, Agassi decided not to come down today,'' seems rote. 
     Don't be surprised to see top-ranked players such as France's 
     Sebastian Grosjean and Vince Spadea sweating through a four-
     hour practice. Tiny, but fiery Amanda Coetzer shows up here 
     from time to time to practice--and to show the reverent young 
     ones how it's done.
       On these finely groomed courts nestled amidst swaying 
     coconut palms is also where Chris Evert practices with 
     students three times a week, and where there's a 
     lyrical constant of English, French, Spanish and even 
     Czech spoken over the grunts of determined players 
     returning smashes. Bordered by dozens of clay and hard 
     courts, flanked by a beige dormitory hall, this tucked-
     away facility is what the doorstep to the big time now 
     looks like for Alli Baker.
       ``Her dream is to be the top-ranked tennis player in the 
     world,'' says Bill Baker at his Raleigh office overlooking 
     Falls of the Neuse Road. ``We knew that wouldn't happen if 
     she stayed here. She's doing all this herself. All that we're 
     doing is making the sacrifices to provide her with the 
     opportunities to pursue this dream. Sometimes it's hard as a 
     parent to not get emotionally involved. But in the end, the 
     fire to do it has to come from within her.''


                              style points

       Naturally athletic, Baker picked tennis over other sports 
     for reasons perhaps girls can best understand. First, it's 
     not so--she searches for the word--``tomboy-ish.'' The 
     outfits, in other words, look great. Plus, there's no 
     physical contact, only the physicality of pressurized felt 
     ball against tight catgut, the action crashing back and forth 
     across the net in an elaborate joust. It is a game you can 
     win by using your mind to imbue the body with the power of 
     wit, intensity and strategy.
       ``I think it's the best game out there for girls,'' she 
     says. ``You can play hard and be super-competitive--and you 
     can look good doing it.''
       Indeed, Baker already has the fresh, jaunty look that has 
     potential sponsors swooning. With the exception of Adidas 
     (clothes) and Volkl (racket), Baker has so far turned down 
     major sponsorships. In April, she unofficially entered the 
     pro circuit at a minor qualifying event. This spring, she 
     will play pro tourneys in Little Rock and Hilton Head. But 
     she's still an amateur, meaning she can't take any winnings 
     home yet. Still, it's at those tournaments, as well as at her 
     new home base here in Boca, where she's getting the first 
     real taste of her new life and where she is, as Bill Baker 
     says, ``meeting a lot of people who have been where she wants 
     to go--including some who made it and some who didn't.''
       Impressed with Baker's natural talent, intense 
     competitiveness and impressive number of wins against tough 
     players, the United States Tennis Association and John Evert, 
     now Baker's development coach, ``recruited'' her into the 
     program.
       ``She has shown great skill and promise, but this is the 
     time for her to get on the court and work hard, because this 
     is where it's going to get tougher now,'' says Ricardo Acuna, 
     USTA's Southeast region coach, who oversees Baker's overall 
     training program.
       For coaches like Evert and Acuna, right now is when the 
     ball meets the clay for the great-granddaughter of the late 
     Sports Hall of Famer Lenox Baker, the famed Duke orthopedic 
     surgeon and sports medicine pioneer, and the granddaughter of 
     single-handicappers Robert F. Baker and Robert M. Hines of 
     Raleigh, the five-time Carolina Country Club Senior 
     Championship winner. Wedged between childhood and the 
     muscular 16- and 17-year-olds playing above her, this is when 
     this next generation Baker has to concentrate more on 
     fundamentals than winning--a difficult task for someone who 
     has gotten used to eating victories for lunch. She says she 
     still lags behind some of her key competitors as far as 
     skills go. ``Ground strokes are about the only part of my 
     game I'm really good at,'' she admits.
       ``She's had a pretty easy time with practices up to this 
     point, where she's been able to turn it up and win matches,'' 
     says Evert. ``But now I'm trying to figure out how she can 
     match that intensity during practice. At this point, I'm even 
     ready to cut back on her practice time to foster that 
     intensity. For Alli right now, quality is more important than 
     quantity.''


                          The Chrissie Factor

       Although other tennis academies offer similarly competitive 
     programs, here Baker is becoming a member of the Famed Evert 
     family tennis tradition, which began with legendary tennis 
     coach Jim Evert's long-time directorship of Fort Lauderdale's 
     public Holiday Park tennis program from which Chris Evert 
     emanated. Indeed, it may have been the ``Chrissie presence'' 
     that finally convinced the Bakers to make the move.
       Having a role model like Chris Evert, who won 18 grand 
     slams and 159 tournaments before retiring in 1989, rifling 
     balls at you from the other side of the net is unbelievable, 
     Baker says. ``I just love her. She comes out here to 
     practice, and she still plays really hard. My mom says she 
     would love to have her body.''
       But Baker and Evert are not two peas in a pod as far as 
     playing style. Evert was known for staring her opponents down 
     from the baseline, playing a cool-headed volley game. Fans 
     recall her ``icy stare'' that unnerved some opponents enough 
     to immobilize them. On the other hand, Baker loves to explode 
     to the net with a tenacity that dad Bill Baker says has also 
     yielded success in her doubles game.
       Indeed, as Baker has served, sliced and backhanded her way 
     to the top of the rankings, from playing in tourneys from Rio 
     de Janeiro to Paris, comparisons run more to former teenage 
     phenomenon Monica Seles than to Evert or today's young 
     superstars like Serena and Venus Williams. ``She has to play 
     smarter because she's not as big as some of the other 
     players.'' says her dad.
       Still, Baker's skinny frame is mentioned as a potential 
     liability, especially when matched against the new breed of 
     power players such as the Williams sisters, who tower above 
     their competitors.
       But don't dismiss a growth spurt yet, says, Acuno, the USTA 
     coach. ``I've seen her increase in size by a lot just this 
     year,'' he adds confidently, While Baker sometimes has 
     trouble getting fired up for practice, she loves the weight 
     room and working out. As part of her routine at Evert Tennis 
     Academy, she endures a strenuous regimen along with nearly 
     four hours of court time a day against some of the best young 
     players in the world.
       Despite her early success, it's still not advantage Baker. 
     Most of her competitors were already enrolled in tennis 
     academies when then 8-year-old Alli Baker started playing 
     with her mom at Carolina Country Club, drawn more to the 
     sport for the ``cute outfits'' than the competition. Other 
     tennis kids get started way before that, as evidenced by a 
     muffin-sized front-court player, perhaps 5 years old, who 
     spent two hours cranking backhands at her dad-slash-coach on 
     a recent day at the academy. The girl rode her pink Barbie 
     bike with training wheels off the court after the practice. 
     In Baker's case, however, her natural talents shone through 
     right away, and she quickly made up for lost time. She 
     started beating her mom as a 9-year-old--showing right off 
     the bat a natural inclination toward not just good tennis, 
     but winning tennis.
       ``It was a little bit later when I started to really like 
     the feeling of winning,'' she says. ``Before that, it was 
     just about the outfits and having fun with my friends.''
       That love for the game and the big win is now starting to 
     pay off.

                           *   *   *   *   *

       Interest in Baker began to percolate two years ago, when 
     USTA began sniffing around Raleigh, following rumors of a 
     phenom-in-the-making. After attending a few national camps 
     and doing well in a number of regional tournaments, Baker 
     bloomed for real last year.
       Locally, North Hills Tennis Club coach Nancy Arndt, Raleigh 
     Racquet Club's Mike Leonard and Rali Bakita, and a handful of 
     other top-notch coaches worked on Baker's fundamentals, 
     knowing they had a potential star on their hands. But it was 
     at the Ace Tennis Academy in Atlanta, where Leigh Baker would 
     shuttle her daughter on weekends, that Baker culled those 
     extra pointers that propelled last year's successes.
       Before last summer, Baker had already won both singles and 
     doubles at the coveted Easter Bowl, a triumph that sent her 
     like a projectile to the top ranking in the USTA under-14 
     category. Against older girls up to age 16, Baker is still 
     ranked number seven. Impressed with the wily Raleigh 
     youngster, CBS included Baker in a segment called ``Top 
     Spin'' last summer, along with Pete Sampras and Serena 
     Williams.
       The Easter Bowl victory led to Baker's USTA National 
     Champion ribbon. She finished third in the World Cup held in 
     the Czech Republic last year. She was also a runner-up in the 
     Banana Bowl in Brazil, and a semi-finalist in the Acunsion 
     Bowl in Paraguay, and the Windmill Cup in the Netherlands. 
     This year she is again on the U.S. National Team and this 
     spring worked her way into the doubles finals tourneys in 
     London and France. Right now is when competitive circuits 
     around the world are really starting to heat up.
       On top of the thrill of competition another boon to her 
     meteoric rise into international tennis is the gang of cool 
     friends. Baker is building around her. Currently, she e-mails 
     a dozen friends in Russia and France, as well as her clan of 
     pals and fans in Raleigh.


                         CHALLENGER FROM QUEENS

       But Ally's best friend on the ground in Boca right now is a 
     gritty, 15-year-old power player from the blue-collar sky-
     line of Queens, Shadisha Robinson. The two squared off 
     against each other last year where Baker came back from a 
     deep deficit, unwound

[[Page S7012]]

     Robinson in a 7-6 second set and thrashed her 6-1 in the 
     third. They've been best friends ever since. Evert uses the 
     friendship to boost both players' performance on the court: 
     While Baker leans how to defend against pure power, Robinson 
     gets a lesson in wiliness from the freckle-cheeked 
     Southerner.
       ``John doesn't really play us together competitively,'' 
     Baker says. ``He knows we are good for each other as 
     training partners, but he doesn't want us to get too much 
     of a rivalry going.''
       A straight-A student through primary and middle school, 
     Baker is also managing to keep up with her academic work 
     through it all. While vacationing at the beach last year. 
     Retired Daniels Middle School teacher Lynn Reynolds heard 
     about Baker's decision to go to Florida. She immediately 
     called up the family and volunteered to come out of 
     retirement and ``sign up for the team'' as a home 
     schoolteacher. Reynolds and her young charge have since 
     become close friends, constantly in touch via e-mail and 
     fax--the methods they also use to exchange homework 
     assignments and tests. Daily, the teacher and student log 
     onto the College Boards web site to work out a daily test 
     question posted there--just to make sure Baker is ready for 
     the SAT's when that time comes.
       ``This high-tech teacher and student relationship has 
     really been fun for both of us,'' Reynolds say. ``She's a 
     quick study and a very smart girl. We've become great 
     friends. This is one of the best teaching assignments of my 
     whole career.''
       In two short years, Baker has traveled from Prague to 
     Paris, from Palm Springs to Rio. She says she's enamored with 
     this lifestyle that a simple game has already given her. She 
     misses her friends, but they'll come visit, they promise. 
     Everyone says they will.
       If the ``tennis thing'' doesn't work out, Baker says, 
     ``with all the agents I've already met, I've got a chance 
     with my singing''--country, that is, her backburner passion. 
     Already the world has opened its doors to a talented Raleigh 
     kid with enough sense to know that dreams are out there for 
     the getting. ``I mean, if this were to give me a leg up to go 
     to a school like Stanford or Duke, then it's already worth 
     it,'' she says. ``Plus, just look at this place,'' she adds, 
     holding out her hands as if to weigh the fresh, precious 
     Florida air. ``This is prefect.''

  Mr. HELMS. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.
  Mr. GORTON. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________