The 6th Floor Blog: Past Forward: What Happens to Prodigies When They Grow Up?

In February 1986, The Times Magazine ran an article by Karen Stabiner about a tennis prodigy named Debbie Spence. Hers was a "grueling, solitary life" dominated by practice, travel, matches and missed Christmases. Spence dropped out of high school and turned pro at 17, even though, in Stabiner's view, she was "not quite young enough, or gorgeous enough, to qualify as a sure thing, commercially."

Stabiner interpreted the Spence family dynamic this way:

A teenager who thinks she has a particular talent can be a potent force in a family; if she thinks she has a timetable as well, she can become an emotional blackmailer, accusing anyone who questions her pace of trying to trip her up. . . . If anything, the misgivings that accompanied adolescence, the awkwardness of suddenly being neither child nor adult, only hardened [Debbie's] desire to move into the pro ranks, to pursue the one thing she did reassuringly well.

After Andrew Solomon's article about parents and prodigies appeared in last weekend's magazine, I was curious to know how Spence's experience compared. So I reached out to both Spence and Stabiner.

Spence told me that although her ambition was innate (her siblings did not have the same drive), she felt additional pressure from her father. "I wanted to win not only for me," she said, "but for my father, for my parents, because they wanted it." Spence did pose (and answer) a rhetorical question: "Why was he so concerned about my tennis? It's a sport." But she also admitted that, when it came to her tennis, she has "all good memories."

Stabiner, whose latest book is "Family Table," e-mailed me to say: "I always imagined that Debbie Spence would be O.K., afterward, because her parents were so levelheaded about what was a pretty crazy life." In her article, Stabiner described Spence's father as having "raised his daughter to be competitive," but apparently it didn't rise to the level of little-league parenting that many prodigies experience.

Contrast that with what the pianist Lang Lang, a prodigy, endured. His father's "brutal methods," Solomon points out, were a form of child abuse — they included "telling him to commit suicide, refusing any praise, browbeating him into abject submission." But whereas Spence gave up professional tennis at 20, Lang Lang went on to achieve greatness. As a result, he has no complaints about his father, he told Solomon:

If my father had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized. . . . But we had the same goal. So since all the pressure helped me become a world-famous star musician, which I love being, I would say that, for me, it was in the end a wonderful way to grow up.

Debbie Spence, at least, seems to have avoided that fate — the dilemma of letting her "success" determine retroactively whether she had a good or bad childhood. Now Debbie Spence Nasim, she didn't become "the next Tracy Austin," as her coach hoped she would. But failing to do so didn't destroy her, either. She seems at peace in current life as the mother of two and a real estate agent in Carlsbad, Calif. The ethics of practice and determination, she says, are still a part of her. Now 45, she even took up tennis recreationally not too long ago. This year, she won in the categories of "women's doubles" and "mixed" at the ITF Seniors World Championship.