The Doctor's Daughter

By Karl Taro Greenfeld

Sport at its best is a microcosm of our species' nobility. But if we revel in watching the grace, skill and determination of men and women, we also can't help noticing when this prism of our society also refracts us in all our prurience.

For a few days last week, Alexandra Stevenson, an 18-year-old from San Diego, reminded us of the great things in sport. Before she was defeated by Lindsay Davenport in the semifinals at Wimbledon, she had become the first woman ever to advance to that point from the qualifying rounds. The "quallies," as they are known, are Grand Slam tennis' low-rent district, in which players uninvited to the world's most prestigious tournament slog through sparsely attended matches in the hope of winning their way onto Centre Court. The talent and moxie it takes to advance through the quallies and into the semifinals were enough to make Stevenson a sensation. Then the question of her paternity arose and overshadowed even her powerful tennis game. And she became a symbol for a virtual grab bag of contemporary social issues, ranging from overbearing mothers to absentee fathers, from racial tolerance to sexual intolerance.

Rumors that Stevenson's birth father was a famous athlete had swirled for years in California, where she played junior tennis and attended La Jolla Country Day School. Dark-complexioned Alexandra, 6 ft. 1 in and powerfully built, had shrugged off the talk, commenting only that her Caucasian mother had played both parental roles. That pat answer might once have been enough, but her run at Wimbledon renewed the speculation. Last week a Florida newspaper published a birth certificate listing her father as Julius Winfield Erving II. That's basketball legend Dr. J, the dignified, eloquent superstar whose spectacular play, and class off the court, helped lift the NBA back to pre-eminence in the late '70s and early '80s. Married since 1972, Erving had always been portrayed as a dedicated family man. After first denying the reports, on Friday he admitted to the Associated Press that he was Alexandra's father. She is the result of an affair Erving had with Samantha Stevenson in 1980, when he was playing for the Philadelphia 76ers and she was a sportswriter covering the team. "All matters concerning Alexandra since her birth have been handled privately through counsel," Erving declared. He said he hadn't seen his daughter since she was three, and that it was "her call" to begin a relationship with him.

As soon as most of us became aware of her, Alexandra was answering a flood of questions with "No comment." In addition to those about her father, there is the matter of her mother, a prominent sportswriter who had worked for the New York Times, Playboy and other publications and was a reminder that tennis moms can be a bit overzealous. She has been a dedicated single mother, driving her daughter in an old Volvo station wagon to junior tennis tournaments throughout the U.S. and paying for expensive lessons. She has also publicly acknowledged, since Alexandra was four, that she intended her daughter to play at Wimbledon. "When Alexandra was born, I realized that she was going to be my future," Samantha told reporters. "The bottom line is: I'm her mother, I want her to be happy."

Yet it was Samantha who first launched Alexandra onto the sports pages for reasons other than her powerful serve-and-volley game, claiming earlier at Wimbledon that her daughter had been the victim of racial slurs at a tournament, and then undoing whatever sympathy she won with that charge by accusing the women's tour of rampant lesbianism: "You want your daughter to grow up like a woman. But the biggest threats to girls of her age are the other girls on the tour."

The result is Alexandra has been forced to publicly confront issues the rest of us deal with very privately. And with her amazing run over, she may now have time to resolve matters other than sport. Then the rest of us can get back to watching this precocious young athlete doing what she does best--play tennis.