WOMEN HAVE OPTIONS.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

A tournament billed as the season-capping championship of women's professional tennis opened Wednesday evening at Staples Center with a match between Svetlana Kuznetsova and Vera Zvonareva, whose surnames are Russian for ``what happened to'' and ``all the Americans?''

The eight-woman field includes five Russian-born players and two U.S. products, Lindsay Davenport and Serena Williams. Americans missing after injury-wrecked years are Venus Williams and Jennifer Capriati. That's the complete list of Americans good enough to be conspicuous by their absence.

And a glance at younger prospects suggests American women's tennis is a little thin, the obvious Serena jokes aside.

Hand-wringing, anyone?

``It doesn't look great,'' said Davenport, who has regained the No. 1 ranking after a bounce-back season but at age 28 is nearing retirement. ``We had Venus and Serena come up, but they're in a class of their own and kind of a different story. There hasn't been anyone coming up into the (international) top 30, even, or showing that potential. Hopefully it's cyclical and it changes.''

I beg to differ.

For a U.S. tennis player like Davenport, it must be unsettling to see so few countrywomen following you onto the scene.

But for anybody with a broader interest in women's sports, it might be a good sign that America is producing fewer great tennis players than it used to.

Think about why so many of the best female athletes of decades gone by were tennis players.

One big reason is that the best female athletes didn't have a whole lot of alternatives.

As Donna de Varona, the gold-medal swimmer and co-founder of the Women's Sports Foundation, put it: ``In Billie Jean (King)'s day, basketball wasn't an option.''

It has all changed for women, for the better.

Today, while American women's tennis battles Russia and Belgium and France for supremacy, it's also battling American women's basketball, volleyball, soccer, softball, golf and running for the top talent.

Quite possibly, tomorrow's Billie Jean Moffitt is playing softball, and today's Chris Evert and Tracy Austin are booting soccer balls and running marathons.

And if Mia Hamm had been born 20 years earlier, she'd have been practicing backhands instead of corner kicks.

This summer, when I went for morning runs on the Pierce College grass in Woodland Hills, a field-hockey clinic for girls was holding down one corner of the soccer fields.

The tennis courts usually were empty.

Meanwhile, in countries where opportunities haven't broadened as quickly as here, young women such as Kuznetsova, Zvonareva, Maria Sharapova, Anastasia Myskina and Elena Dementieva - the Russians at Staples this week - are hungry for tennis riches.

De Varona, born in San Diego and raised in the Bay Area, notes that had she not grown up in sunny California she wouldn't have discovered swimming and could have been denied an athletic outlet.

``Thank God. I was dangerous on land,'' de Varona said with a laugh on the phone from New York City. ``I played baseball as a kid. But I couldn't play Little League baseball. I was the batboy for my brother's Little League team.''

At the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, where a 17-year-old de Varona swam to two gold medals, she remembers volleyball being the only team sport for women.

There was no Title IX to create opportunities for women in collegiate sports. There was a women's pro golf tour but no pro basketball or pro soccer.

The Women's Tennis Association, whose WTA Championships are being contested at Staples through Monday, was founded in 1973 by Billie Jean and others. Tennis' movement helped to open the door. Other sports pushed their way in behind it.

In the 1970s, Pam Shriver grew up in Maryland playing tennis, basketball, lacrosse and field hockey. Soccer wasn't on her radar.

Shriver became a tennis pro, not that there were many choices for an athletic career back then.

``Far and away, the best professional sport for women is tennis, as far as prize money and everything is concerned, unless you're a gold-medal skater,'' Shriver said. ''But there certainly are more opportunities than 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.''

We shouldn't expect the tennis nation to appreciate the big picture this week at Staples. American women's tennis is down, with only two players in the ``championship'' tournament. And prospects for the future are being rated as dim.

But what if the reason is that tennis is no longer the only thing out there for athletic young women?

Then maybe tennis' loss is women's gain.

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Photo:

(color) Serena Williams hits a return during her WTA match at Staples Center.

Gus Ruelas/Staff Photographer