I was checking out some YouTube tennis videos when I noticed the one for Jan Silva, then five years old, smacking balls from under his golden locks and Nike headband.
That video, first put on the Tube in March of 2007 now has nearly 165,000 views of it. Silva, now an ancient eight years old (he turns nine in November), is currently living in Elk Grove, California, and playing in the USTA's Northern California region.
In the three years since he was first flung into the national spotlight by
USA Today and others, little Jan has experienced the life that is often the bane of child prodigies. His parents moved the entire family to France so he could train at Patrick Mouratoglou's academy.
The live in Paris apparently didn't agree too much with the Silvas. They moved back to California in 2009, and Jan's parents are getting divorced, a painful experience for Jan, his older brother and younger sister.
Jan's father, Scott, insists that he's not now nor is he going to turn into a monstrous tennis parent
(see Capriati, Stefano), but when you go on the
Today Show and proclaim you're "going to be courtside at Wimbledon in 10 years."
Great job, Dad. He also told USA Today that Jan began playing tennis "just after the age of one."
Come again?
I'm pretty sure just after the age of one, my main priorities were 1) Where is my mom with my food? 2) How many more hours before
Bert and Ernie appear in the magic box in the living room again? and 3) How did my Dad get my nose, and when is he giving it back?
Children with interests or gifts in any field should be encouraged and when available, given the opportunity to nurture and grow those interests.
Silva appears to be a very good young player. He won the Gold River Junior Open B10s title in late June, his second final of the year. One encouraging thing that suggests that his parents have realized they were overexposing him is that his
web site appears to have been taken down.
In his year and a third of playing since returning to the United States, Silva is 26-32 overall, hardly the mark of the next
Agassi,
Sampras or
Roddick. For now, he's a eight-year-old boy who likes to play, and whatever ridiculous extremes his parents took in the past, or 10 years from now he upsets the No. 1 player in the world, that's all he should be for now.
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