They also serve
Years ago at Wimbledon, when Pete Sampras was losing in the second round to an obscure Swiss called George
Bastl, his actress wife, Bridgette Wilson, handed him a letter addressed to "My husband, seven times Wimbledon champion, Pete”. Sampras read it in the next break, wiped away a tear, and by the time he returned to the fray his game had improved miraculously (although, sadly, not enough to save the match).
Everyone thought Pete was too boring to land an interesting wife, but he'd caught a glimpse of Bridgette, 28, starring in a low-budget film called Love Stinks, pursued her for a year and finally married her in his back garden. After the match he spoke movingly of how, thanks to her presence in the stands, he had become a better player.
Lucy Rusedski has a taste for the high life. The former drama student turned wannabe pop singer, met Greg Rusedski while working as a ball girl. A popular figure on the circuit, she is remembered for jumping on to a table at a Davis Cup dinner in Birmingham and giving a karaoke rendition of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive.
Skilled in the arts of crisis management, Lucy took charge last year when her husband was accused , and later cleared, of taking a performance-enhancing drug. She warned her friend Victoria Beckham to beware of Rebecca Loos, who later claimed to have had an affair with David Beckham.
A couple of sports
Andre Agassi in his innocent long-haired days had a mercifully brief liaison with Barbra Streisand, who
turned up at one of Andre Agassi's US Open matches and likened her Iranian-American beau and cultural protégé to a "Zen master”. Shortly afterwards, Agassi ditched the Eastern aura for a starter marriage with former child star Brooke Shields in 1997. Sadly, life on the circuit turned out to be less than enthralling for Brooke and their marriage collapsed after just two years. Later he saw sense, and took up with Steffi Graf, the formidable tennis machine with 22 Grand Slam titles.
Today, in retirement, the mother of a two-year-old daughter, Graf is the ultimate tennis wife. "I have everything I ever wanted,” she says. "I have all the tennis I want, and a good husband, too.”
Anna Kournikova dated Pavel Bure and Sergei Federov, both ice hockey players in the American National Hockey League. Federov said that her flirting with Bure and singer Enrique Iglesias doomed their relationship. "This love was worse than a bout of flu,” he said. "It lasted longer and hit me harder.”
The Russian tennis star, whose good looks have long eclipsed her court skills, has been with Latin crooner, Enrique Iglesias, since she appeared playing his girlfriend in the 2002 music video for his hit
Escape.
Nasty figures
In his autobiography, Ilie Nastase, the Romanian racket-swinger of the 1970s, claims to have slept with 2,500 women during his years at the top. His current wife, Amalia, a former cigarette girl from Bucharest whom he met at a rock concert, flatly refuses to believe them. Significantly Nastase's first wife, Dominique, was one of those who preferred staying at home to trailing around after her man. Serious tennis
wives don't just follow the circuit, they patrol it.
Ace
Martina Navratilova, the 47-year-old Czech-born legend, is entangled with a girlfriend, Toni Layton, who is married to a computer salesman called Jeffrey Lambert and all three share a house in Florida. Does that make Toni Jeffrey's wife or Martina's husband?
Bille Jean Moffitt was a tennis star and Larry King was a sports promoter. They married in 1965. In 1971 she came out of the locker and started a relationship with her secretary.
The relationship became public a decade later when the secretary sued Billy Jean for support payments. She
divorced her husband in 1987 and began an affair with Illana Kloss, another former professional tennis
player.
Playboy
The perennial playboy has served himself yet another model opponent in his insatiable game for gorgeous girls after splitting from fiancée Alexis Barbara. Never straying far from the slim brunette stereotype, this time Mark Philippoussis's model trophy is Siobhan Parekh. This tennis hunk and the super hot Anna Kournikova were also an item for a while. It didn't last too long. Philippoussis has had a colourful
public love life, from singer Delta Goodrem in 2004 to a fling with Paris Hilton and reality TV relationship with Age of Love winner Amanda Salinas.
GAME, SET AND MATCH
Henri Leconte
The nutty French tennis player married Europe's top female bullfighter Marie Sara in 1995. "It's the greatest bullfight of my life,” she said. Four years later, however, she saw red and they divorced. Martina Hingis
Golfer Garcia and tennis star Martina Hingis dated in 2002. He was 22 and she was 21. It didn't last long.
Just as we thought Hingis would leave her "Swiss Miss” tag behind after getting engaged to Czech star
Radek Stepanek, they parted ways last year leaving her single again.
Kim Clijsters and Lleyton Hewitt
It was a case of love all for these two tennis stars (above) when they became engaged in 2003. They looked
as if they were made for each other. Less than a year later, the engagement was mysteriously called off.
Double fault
British tennis star John Lloyd and American tennis beauty Chris Evert seemed happily married. In 1980 they played a charity match against Bjorn Borg and his fiancée, Mariana Simionescu, a Romanian player. And won.
But in 1987 they swapped tennis courts for the divorce courts. Earlier she was engaged to Jimmy Connors in 1974, the year they both won the Wimbledon singles title. "It was the happiest time of my life,” Evert said then. They split a few months later.
BOOM TO BUST
Boris Becker was just 17 when in 1985 he became the first unseeded player, and the youngest contestant, ever to win the men's singles title at Wimbledon. Christened "Boom-Boom” because of his powerful serve, he entranced men and women alike with his talent. But life began falling apart early in July 1999.
Beaten by Australian rival Pat Rafter in the quarter finals at Wimbledon, an event in which he had made the final
six times, the German announced his retirement at the age of 31. That night, at a restaurant, he had a liaison with a young Russian model called Angela Ermakova. While she gushed that he made her feel like "Cinderella in a wonderful dream”, he famously described it as "the most expensive five seconds of my life”.
He initially denied fathering the blonde, blue-eyed daughter who looks so much like him, but after a court settlement agreed to give a lump sum and maintenance.
That indiscretion wrecked his seven-year marriage to Barbara Felthus, the mother of their sons Noah and
Elias. They endured an acrimonious split in 2000, amid rumours of other infidelities involving him, and
divorced in 2001.
Tennis stars courting film actresses are nothing new and Leander Paes's playboy image and colourful life story has been an open book. But Bollywood actress Mahima Chaudhary raised the hackles of tennis watchers when she accused Paes of "two-timing” her. She said she was in the dark about Leander's "affair” with model-turned-Art of Living preacher Rhea Pillai (ex-wife of Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt). He later married Pillai and now has two-year-old daughter.
DID YOU KNOW?
Top Argentine player Guillermo Vilas was nicknamed "Young Bull of Pampas".
Brooke Shields's grandfather once played at the US Open.
At the 1999 Australian Open, Venus Williams was docked a point in a match against Lindsay Davenport because, as she served, one of the braids in her hair snapped and a cluster of multi-coloured beads scattered on to the court.
Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario was the first Spanish professional tennis player to hold a world number–one ranking.
Ivan Lendl was nicknamed "the Iceman" for his wooden expressions.
Andre Agassi was the oldest male tennis player to ranked number one by ATP at 33 years and 13 days on May
11, 2003, and held the ranking for 14 weeks.
