Hearing the shrieks of worshipful women every time you change shirts could go  to a guy's head.  But under the watchful eye of Australian tennis legends  like John Newcombe and Tony Roche, charismatic two-time U.S. Open champion
Patrick Rafter has hung on to his humility while giving the men's game the  spark it so desperately needs.

By Sally Jenkins

        The Aussie in him wins out every time, thank God.  Otherwise, Patrick Rafter would be just an insufferable overtanned tennis jerk, as if the world needed another one, needed one more sweaty, sullen little $100 million sissy boy who whines that the courtside Evian isn't chilled and supposes that throwing a wristband to the crowd is giving back to the game.  Just look at
him, at the swingy rock-star hair and the chin stubble, and you think, Uh-oh, a killable bimbo with a racket.

     But then he speaks.  Just to let you know who he is.  "I'm an idiot.  I'm an asshole," Rafter declares.  Next he reveals that his nickname is Skunky and suggests, accusingly, that what you need is a rum drink.  Your draw drops in pure, dumb amazement, because it's finally happened, the miraculous and long-wished-for event, the arrival of a tennis player who manages to be both charismatic and a regular decent guy.  Hallelujah.

    The additional miracle is that Rafter, 26, has remained a regular, decent guy given that women shriek every time he changes shirts.  "Patrick Rafter, we'll see you after," they chant during his matches.  There was the famous incident at the Australian Open when a cadre of lovesick females stood up in the bleachers with those timeless words of amour written on their shirts: RAFTER YOU ARE MY SEX GOD.  In the mail the other day, Rafter got a letter from a besotted soul, asking for a job.  She offered to be his physiotherapist, his psychologist, his masseuse or his wife.  Whichever he preferred.

    Enclosed was a solid-gold wedding band.

    All accounts of Rafter begin with his looks, which really are impossible to ignore.  First of all, the hair.  It belongs on a Sarah
Lawrence girl.  It is the hair of an heiress, a fine chestnut mane with just the right amount of coppery sun tint and curl in the ponytail.  The eyes are cola brown, the skin so satiny that when he sweats, he looks caramelized.  To the utter, howling derision of his mates, Rafter has made the lists of the Most Beautiful People in the World.  "Nothing wrong with that," Rafter says,
grinning beatifically.  "But I've noticed you get better looking the more U.S. Opens you win and money you make."

    Rafter is that they call a dinkum Aussie.  It means honest, genuine, no airs.  He doesn't have an agent or a coach, even though he is the two-time defending champion of the U.S. Open.  He doesn't even own a car.  He has earned more than $7 million in prize money, and yet his most expensive possession is a two-bedroom condo in Bermuda, which he chose as his tax haven because he feels anonymous among the David Bowies and Ross Perots.  For transportation he rents a moped.  His condo is perpetually overoccupied by various brothers and loyal mates, most of whom are players ranked in th sub-hundreds, which is what Rafter was until five years ago, a digger on the satellite tour.  His best mate is Paul Kilderry, whose nickname is "the  $41,000 man," because that's how much he earned last year.  It was Kilderry  who dubbed Rafter "Skunky."

    That Rafter is a sex god is a source of bafflement and high hilarity among his mates and his brothers and sisters, all eight of them, the sons and daughters of a coffee-shop owner and hardscrabble strawberry farmer from Eumundi, Queensland.  "Bloody ridiculous," scoffs his brother Peter, 29.  "He's not even the best-looking man in the family."  They say brother Geoff, a 32-year-old unregenerate surfer, is the real looker, if you care about that sort of nonsense, which frankly they don't back in egalitarian Australia.

    Rafter's mates loyally avow that he is as pretty on the inside as he is on the outside--but that may be because what Rafter really likes to do with his money is spend it on his mates.  "Mates are important," he swears.  "Very Australian.  True-blue."  He is a legendary check grabber, and he throws several massive parties a year, tossing down $15,000 for a band and unlimited slabs of tinnies (Australian for "cases of beer").  A believer in karma and reincarnation, he is also known for giving away huge chunks of his winnings, such as the $425,000 of U.S. Open prize money he has donated to children's charities.  "All I know is it's a big learning experience, life is, and you've got to try to be a good person, and be a better one tomorrow," he says.  "Just because I don't kill people doesn't make me a good person."

    Australia, founded by convicts, is one of the few places on earth  where tennis is a populist sport rather than an elitist one.  Anyone looking for an answer as how to grow the game at the grass roots might start there.  In Australia, unlike in most other countries, it's a game of beer drinkers,  not Champagne sippers, and in every closet, in every home, is a racket.
"Kids play it in the street," Rafter says.
        Rafter is a proud direct throwback to Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson, Fred Stolle, Lew Hoad, John Newcombe and Tony Roche, men who rose from working classes and acted faintly embarrassed to be great players.  None of them dared behave like an idiot for fear of reprisal from their peers and their nation.  They were a laconic yet beloved crew who always complimented the opponent and never made an excuse for a loss.  After a match, they'd all drink a slab of tinnies together.  "Back in those years, you had a dozen Aussies who took turns in the top three in the world," says Newcombe, Australia's Davis Cup co-captain with Roche, and the closest thing Rafter has to a coach.  "If anyone got bigheaded or out of hand and started thinking he was a little better than the other guys, he got ostracized.  We wouldn't talk to him or drink with him.  It was a strict code."

    So if Rafter has not become an overpaid and undergroomed narcissist, you can thank them.  When he shows the first sign of ego, a horde of braying Aussies descends on him, starting with Kilderry.  "It would be unthinkable for a young Australian player to act like a jerk," Kilderry says.

        Rafter is standing on a bluff in Bermuda with a set of golf clubs slung over his back.  He is playing a round of golf with his mates, who wander on and off the course at will.  When Rafter plays golf, he doesn't ride; he walks--carrying his own clubs and drinking a dark and stormy, a local concoction of rum and ginger beer.  The iron in his hand is emblazoned with SKUNKY.  Ask him the source of the name and he pulls the elastic out of his hair, shaking it loose.  Running down the back of his mane is a skein of white hair, a quirk of pigmentation in his scalp.  A flaw.  "The other reason we call him Skunky," Kilderry explains, "is that he's legendary for his farts."

    As if in agreement, Rafter belches.  It takes a moment to grasp that such a noise has come from this ethereal boy.  On the whole, Rafter is  soft-spoken and self-deprecating.  His voice is a near whisper, with an Aussie inflection at the end of a sentence like a soft shoe landing at the foot of a staircase.  But as the rum and beer kick in, he lets forth with
bursts of cheerful Aussie profanity: "Here's another bloody prick of a hole," he sighs, staring at a dogleg into the wind.

    The talk turns to women and his effect on them.  Rafter's current companion is Lara Feltham, an Australian swimwear model who lives in London.  They have been together a little more than a year, which is an age on a tour where coaching relationships outlast romances.  "I'll probably marry an Australian girl," Rafter says earnestly.  "We have more to talk about.  We
understand each other."  Exactly what is it that Australian women know about Australian men that the rest of us don't, pray tell?  Something absolutely essential.  "They understand how rude we are," Peter Rafter says.

    When Rafter insists he is largely unconscious of the sex-god thing, one is tempted to believe him.  There is something sweetly dense about him.  Kilderry tells of an incident in Los Angeles last year involving an aggressive barmaid who did everything but rub up against Rafter, eliciting zero response for her efforts.  "I mean, she was all over him, very flirtatious," Kilderry says.  "But he was oblivious."  Rafter is unused to such attentions; his looks are a relatively new development.  Until he hit 19, he was a meek, gangly, pimply boy with the body of an adolescent.  "When I was 18, I looked 14," he says.  "I was very insecure about my body.  If I cut my hair and shaved this shit off, I'd look much younger."

    So there it is.  The secret is out: Rafter is an innocent.

    "Ask me how old I was when I first got laid," Rafter says.  He pauses.
     "I was 20, OK?"

He says it so gently, so sincerely, it sounds like Keats.

        Rafter's earliest memory is of running down a hot black road in his tennis whites.  The Queensland he was reared in was hardly the romantic emerald paradise of guidebooks.  For his first eight years, he lived in Mount Isa, a hard-bitten mining town in the desert outback, known for the bleakness of its industrial steel towers.  Rafter was the seventh of nine children, and
Jocelyn Rafter had seven kids within nine and a half years.  Jim Rafter worked as an accountant for the copper and zinc mines.  With each child, he took on extra jobs, but he fell ever behind financially, while always managing to stuff a bill in the collection plate at Mass.  "I don't think he's ever been out of debt," Peter Rafter says.

    No one can remember which older brother put the cheap wooden racket in Patrick's hand.  There were siblings and rackets and cricket bats all over the house.  "Lots of family figures," Patrick Rafter says dryly.  He would jog a few hundred yards down the street to a set of tarmac public courts, where he would hit with local Aboriginal children.

    In 1980 Jim bought 300 acres in Eumundi, north of Brisbane, and put the family to work growing strawberries.  Jocelyn and the kids took shifts picking fruit, but when strawberries didn't generate enough cash, the family turned to macadamia nuts, tomatoes, anything.  Jim tried selling real estate and opened some coffee shops.  "It was very hard to make a living," Rafter says.  "You need, like, 10,000 acres to make money at it.  We had 300.  It was just another thing he did to make end meet.  It was never easy."

    All the Rafter boys played tennis, but when Pat was 8 or 10, he started winning enough matches that Jocelyn took him on the elite junior tournament circuit.  To save money, they slept in camper parks.  Peter showed an aptitude, too, but when both qualified for a tournament, the Rafters had to make a decision: They couldn't afford for both boys to go, and someone had to stay home and get the strawberries in.  Peter bowed out.  "You go," he said to his brother.  "You're better."

    At an event in Sydney, Rafter met a hot junior named Paul Kilderry, a stocky kid who already had muscles.  Rafter, a hollow-chested boy with a serve-and-volley game that seemed too big for him, lost early, making little
impression on Kilderry or the field.  "I was playing a style of game I wasn't really ready for," Rafter says.  He got thrashed by the steadier, more mature crowd.  Over the next few years, Kilderry played Rafter eight or ten times and won every match.  "If I had lost to Patrick Rafter back then, it would have been the end of the world," Kilderry says.

    The goal of any Australian junior was to be among the top eight players in the country.  The eight were invited to summer training camps, given free gear and sent abroad to play.  Kilderry got all the trips--to America, to the junior French Open, to junior Wimbledon.  Rafter never made the eight.  Even so, his family kept backing him, certain he would make something of himself, maybe as a teaching pro.  "I came into the game thinking if I could make enough money to buy a house, I'd be lucky," Rafter says.

    But then Rafter turned 19 and his body finally emerged from its bony adolescence.  "It seemed like he grew four inches in one year," Kilderry  says.  Suddenly Rafter was six feet one with sinew in his arms and legs.  Still, he remained on the outskirts of the game, clawing for recognition.  "I hit a few balls over," he says, "but nothing exciting."

    He struck out on the satellites, playing small events on far-flung continents.  Tennis has a caste system: At the top is the world-class ATP Tour, below us a series of lesser tournaments called challengers, and below that is the satellite tour.  It's the grungy bottom rung of the sport, populated by fringe players and stoners.  Most top players, having already made their names as teenagers, never see a single satellite event.  Rafter spent three years of his life playing them.

    He tramped all over the world, living on nickels and dimes, with Geoff as his chaperon and doubles partner.  If he won five matches, he might clear $1000.  Housing was youth hostels, and dinner might be a handful of croissants.  In Barcelona they stayed in a tent in the backyard of an acquaintance.  In France they lived on bread and cheese.  "I didn't know if I was ever going to make it," Rafter says.  "It was in doubt.  I thought, howmuch longer am I going to do this?  Do I keep this up, or do I try to make a living some other way?  But there weren't too many other options.  I lived the hard yards over there."

    The sojourn took them everywhere from Taipei to Brazil.  Along theway, Geoff tossed him books on acupuncture, Buddhism, Hinduism andreincarnation.  "I've done them all," Rafter says.  "Everything except formcults."  For a short while, he flirted with born-again Christianity.  But always the good Aussie, he never stopped carousing.  One night in Barcelona,Pat and Geoff stayed out until 5 a.m. drinking, and when they returned totheir youth hostel, they were locked out,  They used an ATM card to gain
entry to a bank vestibule and curled up on the floor, using footrests as pillows.

    "Would I do it again?"  No," Rafter says.  "Would I encourage otherpeople to do it?  Yeah.  You sort of take away from it a view of how peoplelive.  Realism, I think.  I hate to sound philosophical, but that's what it  is.  People go on this [ATP] tour and think this is what they're supposed to have.  They think this is how life should treat them.  Then they get a big kick in the ass all of a sudden."

    The breakthrough came in 1993, when he qualified for Wimbledon and won two rounds.  He lost on Centre Court against Andre Agassi, but Newcombe was watching from the stands.  "It was pretty obvious he was a good athlete," Newcombe says.  "There were a lot of raw weaknesses.  But he was keen.  He had charisma."

    From then on, Rafter worked under the tutelage of Newcombe and Roche,who began to refine his game.  They gave him the full thrust-and-parry style that has been the signature of the great Australians.  Rafter endured  relentless Aussie net drills, standing alone at the net while two practice partners lashed shots of every description at him--forehands to the corners, backhands down the line, drop shots, lobs.  These drills shaped how he plays today--like a desperate all-court retriever.

        In one respect, Rafter's journey on the satellites was a boon.  He avoided the enormous pressure to be the new Aussie champion that had undone more prominent juniors, such as Kilderry.  There was that moment commentator Bud Collins called "A post-empire gasp," when Pat Cash won Wimbledon in 1987, but otherwise Australian tennis in the '80's was made up of doubles
specialists and career quarterfinalists.  "There was a real desperation to find someone, an outcry," Kilderry says.  Rafter's game was rough, but he was fresh and unburdened by expectations.  He had flown beneath the radar.

    By the end of 1993, Rafter was ranked fifty-seventh.  But then he stalled out.  He slaved away for three more years on the ATP Tour, hovering in the sixties.  He hired an agent, then dropped him when endorsements didn't come, appointing his family as his managers.  He had surgery on his wrist and pounded his body in tournament after tournament, wondering  if he had peaked.
 For a while, he tried staying on the baseline.  "Then I said 'Stuff that' and went back to what  I did best," he says.

    Rafter was gaining a reputation as the hardest-working man in tennis,a coal shoveler who spent three or four hours on the practice court, who wasin the gym at 7 a.m. even on vacation and who hammered his way through tough draws in tough tournaments.  In 1997 he won a grueling sixty-five matches, and you could smell the sweat on every ball he hit.

    That summer he reached five finals--and lost all five.  He trudgedthrough the unpleasant heat of the season, when many players were tanking and bailing out with so-called injuries.  But then he reached a sixth final, at a smelting furnace of an event in New York City called the US Open.  Rafter was fitter than anyone else in the field, and he had more heart, too, and he won
it, knocking out Agassi and Michael Chang before defeating Greg Rusedski in a four-set final.  It was only his second tournament victory ever.  That night he threw a huge party, inviting all comers.  The next day, he gave $225,000 to the Brisbane Mater Hospital.  At the end of the year, he was the first Australian in a quarter century to rise to number two in the world, reprising
Newcombe's feat in 1974.

    But in 1998, Rafter went back to coal shoveling.  He flailed out ofthe Australian Open in the third round, out of the French in the second, outof Wimbledon in the fourth.  He was miserable, tossing his racket and complaining of pressure.  Newcombe sat down and wrote him a fax to remind him of the Aussie code.  "Quit throwing your racket," Newcombe instructed.  "Stop feeling sorry for yourself.  And get on with the job."

    Rafter did just that.  The summer of '98 was another long forced march.  He made five more finals--and this time he won them all.  In Cincinnati he beat top-ranked Pete Sampras after trailing him by a set.  It was both a hard-fought match and a microcosm of Rafter's career.  He dropped the first set 6-1, playing so ineffectually that he handed his racket to a ball boy.  He clawed out a tie-break second set.  And he prevailed in the third, winning 1-6, 7-6 (7-2), 6-4.  Afterward, when a reported asked Sampras the difference between them, the normally unflappable Sampras snapped, "Ten grand slams."

    A few weeks later, it was nine.  Rafter beat Sampras again, this time in the semifinals of the US Open, coming from behind to win a five-setter, 6-7 (10-12), 6-4, 2-6, 6-4, 6-3.  Then he defeated countryman Mark Philippoussis, a 21-year-old with a heat-seeking serve so heavy his nickname is "Scud," in a four-set final.  Rafter threw another party to end all
parties for his mates, 200-plus of  them, taking over a back room at the Park Avenue Country Club in Manhattan.  Every member of the Aussie contingent showed, including Philippoussis, who drank with him.  A few days later, he gave $200,000 to his own foundation to help terminally ill children.

        Rafter's transformation from satellite digger to champion was complete.  He was a finished player, a low, ground-hugging beast who seemed to sweep up balls in the maw of his racket.  But the aspect of his game forwhich he was becoming best known, and even feared, was his tenacity.  Rafter is the sport's Rasputin, the dreaded adversary against whom no match is ever
safe, no matter what the score.  His career record in five-set matches is an iron-assed 11-2, and in every single one of those, Rafter has come frombehind.  In other words, if you've got him down two sets to one, you'd better win the fourth.

    "He's just so dogged," says Mary Carillo, CBS's lead analyst for the US Open.  "You  cannot assume you've got him beat.  You have to step on his neck and jump up and down on it.  Then you'd better hold a mirror under his nostrils to be sure he's dead."

        Ask Rafter what's the worst thing he's ever done and he says, "I think I do the right thing most of the time.  But I've egged people's cars and thrown rocks at their roofs."

    He's such an unrelentingly decent, regular guy that he's one of the few players who will reverse a line call in his opponent's favor.  There was a notable incident in the Australian Hardcourt Championship in 1997, when he gave a match away to Andrei Cherkasov.  They were locked in a protracted tie-break, one of those Rafter specials, at 13-13, when Rafter chummed a
forehand volley deep.  The linesman called it good.  Rafter wheeled around and said "No."  He gave Cherkasov his sixth match point, which the Russian promptly converted to win.  An incredulous Cherkasov met Rafter at the net and pumped his hand, saying "Thank you, thank you.  I can't believe it."  Not many players would give away an important point, one that really mattered.
"Let's put it this way," Kilderry says.  "I wouldn't do it.  And I think I'm a pretty nice guy."

    But the clincher, the occasion that established Rafter as a truly good fellow, came during a Davis Cup tie in Adelaide later in 1997, when he cheerfully admitted to being drunk during a match.  Rafter and Philippoussis had clinched Australia's 3-0 victory over the Czech Republic and decided to celebrate with a nightclub outing.  The next morning, they had to show up for
the "dead rubbers," matches that are irrelevant but must be played anyway. Rafter won his, but afterward, at a packed press conference, he confessed to still being loaded.  Newcombe, sitting beside Rafter at the microphone, was aghast.  "I had this great instinct to throttle him or to put my hand over his mouth," Newcombe says.  For a week, Rafter was pilloried in the press,
but when the uproar died down, he emerged a national hero.  "The people of Australia loved him for it," Newcombe says.  "The average man in the street said, 'He's one of us.'"  Rafter contends the incident taught him discretion, but ask him if he was indeed pissed and he owns up all over again.  "Yeah.Definitely."

    Clearly, this is not a man blinded by ambition.  "Listen, you've gotto be realistic,"" Rafter says.  "I'm not going to be a ten- or
twelve-grand-slam winner.  It's not going to happen.  I'm not that good a player, and I'll be the first to admit that.  I might be a three- or four-grand-slam winner--I don't know.  But whatever I've got out of this game, I can always look back on  it and say I've accomplished more than my expectations.  Life's there to make the most of, and that's what I do."

    But there are those who feel Rafter's too much of a decent regular guy.  Newcombe worries that his protege's unassuming nature is costing his game, when he should be taking his place among the tennis aristocracy.  "It's great that Pat has that humility, and it's genuine, but it hurts him a bit," Newcombe says.  "There is that doubt in his mind: Am I really as good as
everyone says I am?  When he plays his best, he was that warrior mentality He throws himself into the battle and says, 'You can beat me, but you'll have to kill me first.'"

    Newcombe asserts that Rafter could be playing the best tennis of his life by the end of this season and in the process collecting a grand slam or two that he lacks.  His game seems perfectly suited for Wimbledon, but he has
never gotten past the fourth round there.  "Over the next two years, he should be in and out of the number one position," Newcombe says.  He bases his appraisal on the fact that Rafter has been the only really consistent challenger to Sampras, the number one player for the  last six years, who is tied with Laver at eleven grand-slam titles and one shy of Roy Emerson's all-time record of twelve.

    Rafter's consecutive US Open trophies have not only delayed Sampras in his historic victory march but also stolen recognition and adulation  that could have been his.  Once, Sampras had an 8-1 record against Rafter, but in
the last year the balance has shifted.  Rafter is 2-0 in their last two meetings, and Sampras is obviously irked.  "When I see him holding the Open trophy, it pisses me off," Sampras has said.  The result is some ill will. "Lately I've given up saying nice things about Pete," Rafter says with uncharacteristic bite.  "A few of his comments have come across as arrogant to me.  We won't have a beer together." But, typically, Rafter has trouble sustaining the animosity.  "We've got nothing against each other," he says, relenting.  "He's got the record; he's just caught me when I've been playing great."
 
    There he goes again.  So maybe Rafter lacks the ruthlessness to be number one.  That's not all bad.  He is the most likable player out there, a Mardi Gras of personality compared with the rest of the glowering characters in the top five.  A dearth of popular champions has been the curse of men's tennis in the 90's, and Rafter's swashbuckling play and tireless good nature
are welcome antidotes.  The sour Yevgeny Kafelnikov and the nasty Marcelo Rios, each of whom has taken brief and unconvincing turns at number one, are lousy ambassadors with grim, dirt-balling styles hardly worth watching. Sampras is inarguably the greatest player of his generation, but he is unsmiling and opaque to most of America, where racket sales have been flat since 1994.  But thanks to Rafter, the game is thriving Down Under, where events are attracting record crowds and racket sales are up 15 percent.
        Tennis fans sense the truth, that beneath Rafter's game is hard work, the kind people do every day, and that beneath the looks is a guy with a genuine ethic.  On court he has a shocking lack of vanity, rigging up a ridiculous ponytail with a topknot and smearing zinc oxide across the cuts of his cheekbones; he doesn't have an ounce of vanity off the court either.  He
can't afford it.  Rafter understands his tennis life span is limited, that his game is too punishing for pretension.  His shoulder and knees have a steady ache that suggests he won't last much beyond 2001.  "That should see me through," he says.
 
    Afterward he'll buy that house.  Settle down and marry that Aussie girl.  Maybe open a restaurant and live a life of tireless good nature. "He's genuinely concerned that he come out on the other side of this adventure as the same person who went in," Newcombe says.
 
    Shortly after Rafter won his first US Open title, someone asked him what his next ambition was.  He thought for a moment.  "To stay the same old sack of crap I've always been," he said sweetly.