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BACK ON HER GAME


IFBB figure competitor Amanda Savell, once a budding tennis prodigy, reinvented herself in a new sport.

By Mark Thorpe | Photos by Joaquin Palting

>> The following article originally ran in the December 2007 issue of M&F.











Fate and its torturous involutions often divide people into two categories: those who adapt to the unexpected detours and use what they've learned in one area as a springboard to the next, or those who spend their time on the couch dispensing stories of their glory days to neighborhood kids like sour lozenges. "And there's more where that came from!" tends to be their defining motto.

For Amanda Savell, that divide was introduced on a tennis court in 1994 when her foot went in one direction and her knee in another on a balmy summer day in Georgia. She was 16 and one of the top amateur players in the country. She had spent the previous six years at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida, where some of the game's greatest players trained: Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, Mary Pierce, Pete Sampras. Amanda hoped to be among their ranks one day.

Earlier that year she had moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to resume life with her family, which meant she was less than an eight-hour drive from the site of the Nationals in Atlanta. She drove herself. Her doctor would later say the trip had probably tightened her legs, especially her hamstrings. Or maybe it was just the fickle hand of fate meddling as it often does in the lives of talented young athletes. Whatever the case, while stretching for a deep backhand hit by a friend on a practice court only minutes after arriving, Amanda heard a pop that resounded — in more ways than one — like a gunshot.

"It wasn't until I was in my room calling my parents and icing my knee that I felt pain," Amanda says. "My knee was swollen down to my ankle." Her father drove that night from Tennessee to take her to the hospital. It was determined that an MRI would be needed, so they headed back to Nashville, where a doctor would tell her she had a torn ACL, a torn meniscus and a bruised bone, and that she was looking at up to a year of rehab.

"I saw my future as a professional tennis player flash before my eyes," she says. "Tennis was all I had known since I was 4 years old. My mom and dad just held me as I cried."

Yet Amanda did play tennis again, and she played well, in college. She alternately occupied the first or second spots on her team at Texas Tech University (Lubbock), where she attended on a full scholarship, and she was All-Big 12 in both singles and doubles. But fear and doubt always lingered in the back of Amanda's mind because her knee never felt the same after the tear. When college ended, so did her tennis career. And she walked off the court — right into Gold's Gym.

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