'I'm here to play'
Jan-Michael Gambill:
Big cat on court
By Porter Anderson
CNN.com/career Editor
(CNN) -- "It's a joint thing. I've had it before."
If it's back trouble, it must be Stuttgart.
"Every time in Stuttgart for the last three years."
Jan-Michael Gambill's back was giving him trouble early this month at the Stuttgart Masters. He lost, in the first round, to Roger Federer of Switzerland. So Gambill pulled out of the Lyon tournament that followed Stuttgart on the ATP Tour and flew home to the States for two weeks of recuperation.
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The Gambill brothers Jan-Michael, left, at age 13, and Torrey at 8
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"I needed to be home," he says.
Sounds simple enough. But talk with Gambill for a while and you may find yourself listening for what this modest man doesn't say.
As the country was going into electoral gridlock, computerized medical analysis revealed that Gambill's right leg is about 1.7 centimeters (a bit under one inch) shorter than his left. This may well be what's causing his back pain and injuries under the stress of hardcourt, clay and grass play.
Last week at the Paris Masters, armed with this new knowledge, Gambill tried using a makeshift lift in his right shoe. Adidas is working to build in the correct lift permanently. But on Tuesday, the Stockholm Open meant a new match with pain -- Gambill won his first-round bout in straight sets only by pushing past the injury that threatened to sideline him.
What's more, his trip home to Washington state coincided with the funeral of his grandmother. He was close to her. It's Gambill's mother, Diane -- she named him for actor Jan-Michael Vincent -- who speaks of this. Only when condolences are offered does Gambill himself acknowledge it: A gracious thanks, no belaboring the point.
Gambill and Chuck, his father and coach, are focused on the recovery time. Did the trip provide enough? Chuck says it may not have been the best plan to go for seven wearing weeks of tournament play in the ATP's stations-of-the-cross tour. Gambill decided not to make himself available for the Sydney Olympics, in order to go through with this string of tournaments. Chuck Gambill marvels aloud at Yevgeny Kafelnikov, the fifth-ranked Russian who "just keeps playing, he never stops."
"He keeps playing, yeah," says Jan-Michael with a laugh, "but he doesn't always win. He loses early in some tournaments and then plays golf for the rest of the week." Golf is something Gambill says he's looking forward to, too, in the family's annual trip in December to Maui, "the one place in the world I love the most."
But isn't it tricky to be a formidably eligible bachelor, a star in world tennis, the target of "show us your abs!" catcalls from girls -- visiting the City of Light with your dad? "Not at all. When we travel we have a lot of fun, but there's no late nights. I've been to Paris before, done all those extracurricular tourist things that some of the players need to do. I'm here to play."
Play he does. It's all moving about as fast as one of those two-fisted ground strokes he's known to deploy on the court -- a holdover, he has said, from the need in boyhood to use both hands on the racket.
Advantage points
At 23, Jan-Michael Gambill has won more than $1.3 million in tennis. Six feet, three inches, 195 pounds, he has a modeling contract with Ford, one of the country's heaviest agencies. Branden Crutcher, his girlfriend since the summer, is a model, herself, and is scheduled to make the Maui safari next month with Gambill. And the tennis player has immersed himself with typical, hands-on zeal in his charity work with Cat Tales, a zoological park near his home that takes in and protects exotic cats.
"Pumas are my favorites, my favorite cats."
Gambill has a mother who doubles as a loving and effective press agent and photographer. He has the concentrated and expert guidance of his coach-father Chuck. And he has the outspoken admiration and support of one 18-year-old brother, Torrey. The guy who could have been the jealous second son turns out to be an unabashed fan -- "I look up to Jan-Michael, I think it's great for me to have him."
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Gambill's showroom-garage houses his six Jaguars. An XKR Silverstone is on the way
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This is not a rags-to-riches story. Gambill recently finished putting together a showroom-garage at home near Spokane, Washington, to house his six Jaguars. Don't stop counting -- the auto maker is sending him a seventh.
"It's the XKR Silverstone," he says. "It marks the return of Jaguar to the F1 (Formula1) racing circuit. They made 500. Two-fifty for Europe and 250 for the States." He sounds almost shy about his own enthusiasm. "Only 25 are coupes and I'm getting one of those, so I'm pretty excited."
This is a man who has defeated Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras and Lleyton Hewitt to take the March 1999 Scottsdale singles title. He's on the 50 most-beautiful list this year at People, a sister Time Warner medium to CNN.com.
And Sampras, 30 -- after succeeding in an arduous quarterfinals struggle against Gambill at Wimbledon in July -- referred to the player in a now famously enigmatic compliment: "He's got a big game and a big future. I never really felt I was in control of his service games. You're looking at the future of American tennis. He's a standout. He's got a big serve and grass is a surface he's going to get better on."
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GAMBILL GALLERY
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This week, Gambill is on the last leg of his ATP points pilgrimage. His next big bouts come in January with the Hopman Cup in Perth (he'll partner with Monica Selas, Chuck says), then the Australian Open in Sydney with the Heineken Open in Auckland squeezed between.
And yet Gambill appears to be at a difficult moment in the development of his many talents and intelligence.
Placement
"I think I'd like to be a little higher," he says in the soft, matter-of-fact, friendly tones he brings to a conversation. He wears that understatement of ambition as comfortably as the clothes Adidas makes for him. His laugh is quick, unforced. You can tell there's still some surprise for him in all that he is, and has, and is becoming. It adds up to being not spoiled. Gambill is a very nice guy.
In Paris, he tells you, "I got to see Elton John's concert last night" at the Olympia. What he leaves unsaid is that he also met Sir Elton, who was at some pains backstage after the show to proclaim his own love of tennis to Gambill. Sweet.
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QUICK VOTE
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And there's a blush in his voice when he talks about his workouts. "I do about an hour every day," he says, "two body parts. Plus abs -- crunches, weights, Torso Track. " Instantly, he's cracking up. "This sounds like an infomercial, but it works really well, it's unbelievable. As long as you keep adding other stuff in with it." Suzanne Somers and Mitch Gaylord might want to start worrying about now. "It's a pretty heavy workout. That's fun for me."
But so volatile are the rankings at Gambill's rarified level of tennis competition that although he's been rated as high this year as 25, he entered the $775,000 Stockholm Open ranked at 33. He's not satisfied. The rest of us might remind him that it's a handsome gain over his 1999 year-ending rank of 58.
The draw gave him a first-round singles match with 39th-ranked Belarusian Max Mirnyi. On Tuesday, Gambill defeated Mirnyi, 7-5, 6-3. But a new flare-up of the back trouble during that match has resulted in Gambill's withdrawal from the tournament on Thursday, handing top-seeded Swede Magnus Norman the second-round match on a walkover. (The Stockholm Open site has live scoring and "Tennis TV" available, see the link under Related Sites.)
"I think I have a shot at being in the Top 20," Gambill says in his Paris hotel room. Again, the understatement. Phil Jones, writing from Wimbledon for CNN Sports Illustrated, raved this way: "Gambill has served like a demon and behaved like an angel. He has punished opponents with deep and penetrating double-fisted backhands, while all the time endearing himself to the British crowd with his warm and pleasant nature. Not being the ugliest man ever to walk the planet doesn't hurt him either. "
But when Gambill speaks, particularly after losses, you hear the perfectionist at work -- "stupid mistake," "there's really no excuse for me not to win," "I didn't really serve great when it counted," "I didn't want to come here and lose."
Some say Gambill is headed for the Top 10. But not yet. And getting there, he says, is mostly a set of mental challenges.
"I have to be sure I don't lose focus," he says, "don't make stupid errors. They happen when I'm thinking about winning, not about playing the right shot on a big point."
Kick serve
Paris didn't go his way. On Thursday, Gambill lost his third-round match to Spain's Juan Carlos Ferrero, 4-6, 7-5, 6-4. Russia's Marat Safin won Paris on Sunday. And as Gambill's coach and father Chuck puts it, one of the peculiar truths of the tennis ranking system is that the higher a player's rank, the easier it gets to stay there. There's less flux, not more, as you volley your way up the chart.
With apologies to those big cats he loves, Gambill is in the dogfight stage of his career. There's no longline shot to be made when you're in the upper 20s and lower 30s of the field. You scrap from match to match.
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TORREY STORY
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Don't cry for Gambill. The man is plenty scrappy. "He was playing just unbelievable tennis, just wonderful." That's the debonair eighth-ranked Spaniard Alex Corretja talking to the Times after he'd worked like a dog to defeat Gambill on the Spanish clay of Satander in the Davis Cup this summer. "I can tell you," Corretja said, "that I don't know if Sampras or Agassi would play better than Gambill."
Lots of people can tell you that. The promise is there. But so are those many sets and matches and tournaments between him and the Top 10.
What's more, although he and Torrey have visited in photographer Bruce Weber's home and talked of shutters and shoots, Gambill can't put his modeling career into gear as easily as he can those Jaguars. There's no brotherly Abercrombie & Fitch layout in the works, as has been widely reported, Gambill says. Some potential big clients prefer anonymous faces to those of tennis celebrities. And the rigorous ATP Tour calendar so far has made it impossible for Gambill to do a major shoot.
Jan-Michael Gambill couldn't be more gracious under pressure.
But there is pressure.
Wildcard
Gambill started playing tennis at age 5, went pro at 17 and immediately reversed a plan to go to the University of Washington. "It was the right decision," he says. It just wasn't going to make sense for someone of his caliber on the court to spend four years in college tennis.
But near the Gambills' home in Colbert, Washington, lies another form of education, one he'd known as a kid, a zoological park and training center. It's never been more than a mile or so from Gambill's boyhood haunts -- or from his mind, to hear him talk about it.
"Yeah, it's always been there. And I've always loved animals, especially cats. I always wanted to some day help endangered species. I'm big on the environment, it concerns me a lot. So this was a logical step for me."
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CAT TALES
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That logical step was to make Cat Tales his official charity. Some $80,000 in contributions later, Gambill isn't just a donor, he's a player here as well. When not on tour, he helps the staff work with the cats, feeding 400-pound young tigers with bottles and interacting with his favorite cats, the pumas.
"We have cheetahs, lions, tigers, jaguars, pumas -- mountain lions -- leopards, bobcats, servals, caracals, the list goes on."
And so does he. No longer friendly-but-restrained as he is when talking about his game and cars, Gambill is suddenly freer, his speech quickening, his fondness for these animals bouncing in his talk about them.
"That's the personality switch," says Mike Wyche, Cat Tales' executive director and curator. "Jan-Michael is the same person on-camera and off. But he comes here and lets his hair down. He knows that here he won't be bombarded" by fans, press, photographers.
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"He adapts well from the tennis court to the tiger's lair."
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— Mike Wyche, executive director, Cat Tales
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He's a welcome sight here, though, when spotted by fans who couldn't care less what went down in Paris or Stockholm. "These cats have good memories," Gambill says. "They recognize me immediately when I come in."
Gambill has covered the training texts for Cat Tales' zookeeper-training program. "He probably knows the material better than a lot of our trainees do," Wyche says.
And as he goes onto the court in Sweden, you can bet Gambill has cats on his mind -- some with wheels, some with paws.
He's earnest when he says it was "unfortunate" that a bite from a feline named Venus healed without a trace. "I mean, how cool is a scar from a baby tiger?"
This year, Gambill's coolest moments at the net have included finals play in Los Angeles, semifinals in Nottingham, those Sampras quarterfinals at Wimbledon, a bravura defeat of Philippoussis at Flushing Meadow in September. But even then, at the U.S. Open, Gambill was saying he might need some rest. And he has yet to shake a lifelong fear of flying. "It's strange because I'm such a 'Star Trek' fan. I wish I could just beam from place to place. Nobody else on the plane looks worried and I'm like, 'God, this is not fun.'"
"You can see this is his sanctuary," Wyche says, almost as proud, it seems, of this cat named Gambill as he is of the ones named Xena and Atlas, Thor and Tatonka.
A tiger scar here, the aches of the hardcourt there. The big cats who survive are always the fittest. "He adapts well," Mike Wyche says of Jan-Michael Gambill, "from the tennis court to the tiger's lair."
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You'd think sibling rivalry was a figment of somebody's imagination. 
Jan-Michael Gambill's off-court neighbors near Spokane, Washington, include this puma -- whose name is TumTum -- and the many other