By Matthew DeBord

August 24, 2003 | 8:00 p.m

Head-swivelingly handsome, Harvard-educated, Top 50 professional tennis player James Blake has vowed to do something about his self-confidence problem.

You're surprised that the 6-foot-1 Donna Karan model with the impeccably smooth cocoa-powder skin, the dramatic two-tone dreadlocks, the wry smile and the crackerjack forehand-not to mention more than a million bucks in winnings in the bank-has a self-confidence problem? That People magazine's 2002 "Sexiest Male Athlete" is, as Kevin Costner memorably phrased it in Tin Cup , "chock full of inner demons?" Well, consider the complex world of James Riley Blake, 23 years old, son of Yonkers, veteran of Harlem tennis programs, possessed of perhaps the most interesting tennis talent to come along since, well, since that other kid from around these parts-you know, the one with the brashserve-and-volley game and the potty mouth and a touch with the old wooden Dunlop that made people compare him to a poet or painter or some other artistic New York type. Blake isn't as jittery as John McEnroe. His main problem, as he put it on Monday, Aug. 18, a week before the start of the U.S. Open, is that "I have a bad habit of getting down on myself." James, you cannot be serious. Serious, however, he certainly was as he sat talking in the clubhouse of the Hamlet Golf and Country Club in Commack, Long Island, host of the 2003 T.D. WaterhouseCup.That morning, he'd rung the opening bell at the AmericanStockExchangein lower Manhattan-seven times, he said, once for each of the matches he would have to win to capture the Open. This is the year he is determined to conquer his famous demons. "I know I'm not going to fall apart," he said. Glory on the tennis court isn't achieved without psychological cost. McEnroe spiraled into a semi-retirement in 1986 at age 27 (he officially leftt the tour in 1992), wrung out by his own captivating neuroses. Will James Blake-a guy who seems every bit as intelligent as Johnny Mac-endure a similar fate? You can't help thinking that the roots of his confidence problem are intertwined with that intelligence. He has more on his mind than being a pro tennis player. He also has more shots, a more complicated game, than the other bangers on the tour. All of that is why the fans groove on him-but it's also why his mental game is more precarious. It can't help Blake's cause that the other big American, Andy Roddick, is the notoriously unconflicted one. Roddick is also a technically better player than Blake. Sure, Roddick and Blake are pretty good pals; the 2003 A.T.P. official guide has a shot of the two of them visiting the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Roddick is blond, he's younger and he's got a first serve that causes otherwise-defiant male professionals to weep. But for all his talent and good fortune, Andy Roddick, in the end, is no James Blake. Roddick lacks Blake's gravitas . Roddick is boy band; Blake is Miles Davis. Roddick thumps his chest; Blake suffers his moods. Then there's the fact that Roddick is dating dewy kinder-diva Mandy Moore. Roddick has, that is, entered actress-schtupping_Andre-Pete territory (Brooke! Bridgette!). But Roddick is Andre-Pete lite. Blake on the other hand, is a far more grown-up flavor, and the true tennis fans love him for it. Confronted with a dullsville smashmouth game populated by lanky Europeans and worldly postcolonials with warp-speed serves, nuclear groundstrokes and an overall dispiriting anonymity -at least as far as American fans are concerned-followers of pro tennis of a certain generation, brought up on the beautiful game of the 70's and early 80's (lob volleys, massé cross-court passing shots, serves you could see, the continental grip and all that it implied), have been craving a guy like James Blake. No, they ravenously hunger for a player this mellifluously poised, this skilled, harboring this kind of potential and offering an antidote to the sorry, grinding state that pro tennis has arrived at, now 11 years since John Patrick McEnroe and his frizzy hair and headband and tight shorts and flagrant New York–ness and paradoxically feathery in-your-face way made his mark on the hard courts at Flushing Meadow. "He's almost too good to be true,"saidCliff Drysdale, ESPN commentator and onetime world-class player, after an early Blake TV interview a few years back, when Blake was testing the pro waters after finishing up his Harvard career (he left a degreeless sophomore) as the No. 1 collegiate player in the nation. It would be one thing if Blake, in addition to the Cambridge connection, were merely a flamboyant shotmaker, a throwback of sorts in an era when most male pros prefer to grind a trench in the baseline than to venture netward toward that more graceful realm of- eek! -sharply carved approach shots and attacking volleys. But because Blake is the son of an African-American father and an English mother-and thus that rarest of beings, the triumphant black professional tennis player-and also because he owns careful manners and values sportsmanship and has given himself over fully to that anachronistic institution known as the Davis Cup, the worthy, prize-money-free international team competition, the specter of Arthur Ashe is also evoked. It's worth pointing out that the vast majority of American tennis fans, even those who have come around on the Williams sisters, are white. Nevertheless, drop James Blake down in front of them …. Well, it's something like an answered prayer. That's some major baggage to carry for a player who never really expected to rise to his current rank, 41st in the world. It's a lot to deal with when, after winning your first professional tournament in Washington last year and ascending to a career-high 24th, you've spent 2003 sliding from the very heights you never thought you would acend. But once you've been 24th, being 41st-as Blake is going into the Open-sucks. Seated in the Hamlet Golf and Country Club clubhouse Monday, Blake dealt with it all by being, for a professional athlete, refreshingly self-critical. He looked fresh, crisp and potent-and, yes, as serious as a man can look in a synthetic practice T-shirt, shorts and plastic sandals. "I remember what it was like to be 200 in the world and still having fun," he said. But he is nonetheless quite determined to make a run at the Top 10. His agressiveness is not on the surface, but no one would doubt it's there. You don't quite believe his well-bred shyness, the obvious result of having been brought up right by upstanding parents in the cultivated environs of Fairfield, Conn. Blake would no doubt be the first to admit that the media has made a tad too much of his Harlem mean-streets youth, which consisted mainly of visits to participate in a tennis camp organized by his father. Watching Blake surrounded by other male touring pros, their entourages and their gear-Head, Wilson, Prince, Nike, Adidas (Blake himself is a Nike man, with an endorsement deal for Dunlop's 300G 98 racquet)-you can't miss the fact that even though he's never cracked the Top 10, whole swaths of extravagant advertising have been constructed around him. The T.D. Waterhouse organizers have placed his image smack-dab in the middle of their tournament P.R.: French Open champ Juan Carlos Ferrero hovers distantly off Blake's right shoulder on the tournament poster. But the T.D. Waterhouse Cup is an easygoing event, a last-chance tune-up for the big throwdown that gets going on Aug. 25. By all accounts, the pros who put it on their schedule enjoy the low-key atmosphere. Blake himself was a picture of relaxation, chatting with another player about hitting some golf balls later in the afternoon. Just one of the boys in this globe-trotting athletic hootenanny. After this warm-up tournament is over, though, the pressure will be on-and Blake seems to know that, careerwise, he is on the edge of something. This is the year that counts, after two straight early-round U.S. Open losses to the wiry Aussie, Lleyton Hewitt. Blake's record since turning pro in 1999 is impressive enough: Within four years, he cracked the Top 50. Currently, he is the only former collegiate All-American to reside in the Top 50. And this after putting in two years at Harvard, not exactly a colossus of NCAA tennis. Most people in tennis have a tough time remembering the last time the Crimson turned out a player of Blake's caliber. "I never had any specific timetable," he said. "But I think I've done better than most people thought I would do." In fact, a lot of tennis pundits might argue that Blake's stint in Cambridge, while a boon for his image, could easily have hurt his chances for success on the A.T.P. Tour. These days, taking a year to grow up and maybe add an NCAA singles title to your résumé, as McEnroe did at Stanford in the 70's, just means you're at least a year behind the tennis-academy prodigies and the state-funded Europeans. Just for comparison, Blake turned pro at 20; this year's Wimbledon winner, Rodger Federer, made the leap at 17. "It can take a guy with a one-hander who plays the way I do a little longer to mature," Blake pointed out, and he's right. Blake may remind people of McEnroe and Arthur Ashe, but the modern game of men's professional tennis has no room for nostalgia. It's a brutal slog: "People don't really realize how hard it is to stay out here," Blake said. "Most guys have hit enough balls. What you have to do now is weights, sprints. I've done tons of work to set up where I'm at now." Still, he said, he-and the rest of the men's tour-could probably use a shorter season, one with at least a few months off to allow battered knees, sore shoulders and (lest we forget) punished self-esteem a chance to bounce back. Not gonna happen. Men's pro tennis, formerly a sort of short-pants soap opera starring pugnacious Americans (Connors), louche Euros (Nastase), hell-bent Cold Warriors (Lendl), lager-swilling Aussies (a long and addled list) and dashing South Americans (Vilas), is now a remorseless 12-month game, an oxygen-deprived hump up the K2 of the Champions Race. It's technically fair, but at times it doesn't seem that way. For example, in an ideal world, there's no way a skateratty little Australian streetfighter like Hewitt-who looks as if his tightly wound competitive framework was established by being beaten up by the bigger kids until he discovered that he could thrive in tennis' relative standoff distances-takes down a budding American tennis aristocrat like Blake. Discussing those Open losses, Blake said simply, "My body let me down." Two years ago, that magnificent second-round match was marred by Hewitt's charge that a black linesman was hooking calls in Blake's favor. Blake, to his credit, went Arthurian and shrugged off the racist brouhaha. He could console himself with the knowledge that he gave the eventual champion a good fight. When the two met again in the third round of last year's Open, it was another classic, a grudge match that no one would admit was being played for high stakes. But once again, Hewitt emerged on top-mildly heartbreaking. For the New York fans, it was as if karma had taken a holiday. This year, Blake said, he really doesn't want to get booted the first week from a tournament he loves. "It's so exciting to play at the U.S. Open and have the fans behind you," he said. "They love the underdog in New York. I felt terrible losing to Hewitt in front of them. They helped me so much in those matches." What will he do about that little self-confidence issue? "The first step is to make my attitude better on court," he said. "I've always been hard on myself, but when I sat down and watched the tapes of my matches, I realized that you just can't do that." This time around, he said, "I'm in much better physical shape than I was two years ago, and there's not too many guys on tour that I'm scared of." It's regrettable that the odds against him are so long. It would be one thing if Blake were trying to lose his hangdog habit as a young player-as, say, a cocky punk fresh out of the Bollettieri lab. But he's heading fast toward pro-tennis middle age. Sure, there's room in the men's game to dither for a few years: Agassi did it. Federer did it. But the stress adds up. The damage doesn't begin to become obvious until a player hits his mid-20's. In professional men's tennis, if the goal is to break into the Top 10 and win Grand Slams, you almost have to make your mark and establish your ranking-or at least your record in Slams-before you hit 25. The pros have to treat their bodies like machines. Confronted by 1968 U.S. Open semifinalist Clark Graebner's training meal-a steak, baked potato and vodka martini-a modern player would run screaming to his stash of Balance Bars and Gatorade. Blake has already struggled with cramping. With a game better suited to hard courts than slow clay or slick grass, he doesn't have a choice but to jeopardize his bones on a surface notorious for the damage it does to even well-conditioned bodies. The best-of-five format of the Open doesn't seem to suit him as well as it does players who thrive in the grueling, two-week competitive environment that makes Grand Slams so hard to win. But back at the Hamlet Country Club on Monday, Blake had his mind on more practical matters. There are matches to play, a tournament to make a run at. As he spoke about the Open, an expectant smile crept across his face. His eyes flickered. Professional athletes-and particularly tennis pros, whose emotional struggles are so nakedly in front of fans-tend to transform self-confidence into a kind of glow. It can disappear. Sometimes it never returns. Blake pondered his left foot. "I've always dreamed of holding up the U.S. Open trophy," he said. "My problems are all in my mind. It's all mental, and I can control it." Does anyone have the heart to doubt him? The glow, for now at least, is holding strong.