IN A cold, cheerless afternoon last February, as she was speeding past the asparagus farms that dot the countryside outside her home town of Bruhl, in southwest Germany, Steffi Graf slammed on the brakes of her black BMW and swung to a stop on the shoulder of the road. In the surreal nightmare that her life had become, she had reached the end of her tether what she would later describe as the worst moment of her life.

Sitting in her car and hearing that voice on the radio, she wanted no less than to vanish like her own breath in the winter air. Aged 26, she was widely regarded as the most accomplished female player in the history of tennis. Yet nothing that she had done over her extraordinary past seemed to matter now.

There she was, on the road from Heidelberg to Bruhl, caught in a maelstrom. The old, safe structure of her world had collapsed. This was the structure that her father, Peter, had built to isolate her and shield her from the darker realities of life: the distractions of big money, the probing media, the power playing on the tennis tour, whatever threatened the monomaniacal focus that she had brought to bear in raising and sustaining, year by year, the rarefied level of her game. Since turning pro in 1982, she had flourished within that structure, winning 18 Grand Slam singles events, more than $17 million in purses and roughly $70 million off the court. But now the sentry at the gate of her world was gone.

Peter, 58, had been arrested six months earlier on charges that he had evaded approximately $13 million in taxes on the income his daughter had earned from 1989 to 93, and he was in prison in Mannheim awaiting trial. While prosecutors had offered no evidence linking Steffi to the alleged evasions - Peter insisted that his daughter knew nothing of her own tax matters - she knew that she, too, was a suspect. The prospect of being investigated for criminal wrong doing left her feeling exposed and terrified.

Chronic back problems and a recent operation to remove a bone spur from her left foot had cast uncertainty over her tennis future. Then, too, there was the circus that the media had made of her life, with humiliating invasions of family privacy. The German press had reported the substance of letters that Steffi's mother, Heidi, had sent to Peter in prison and of conversations that Steffi had had with him during her supervised visits.

All of this had been weighing upon Steffi as she flipped on the car radio that February afternoon and heard a commentator express disbelief that she had not known what her father had been doing with her money. The implication was that Steffi was as guilty as Peter. She had to Miow She had to know ... She had to know . . . That was it. Steffi pulled over to the side of the road and sat for several minutes hunched over the wheel, the loner more alone than ever before in her life. "At that moment, really, I felt I wanted to disappear," she says. "I pulled the car over, and I was crying like crazy. I couldn't drive anymore. That was the lowest point. I felt I couldn't take it anymore. I was thinking of quitting everything. Leaving Germany, tennis. Everything."

IT IS eight months later, an iron grey October morning in Bruhl, and Steffi Graf has just materialised, with a toss of her golden hair, in a doorway of her new office. What is now the office building was the Graf home for 10 years, after Peter moved the family - Heidi, Steffi and Michael, who is three years younger than Steffi - from Mannheim in 1980, when Steffi was 11.

Six years ago he bought a parcel of adjoining land, where he built an indoor and an outdoor tennis court and a three bedroom, two storey brick house flanked by firs and a lawn that sweeps down to a forbidding, nine foot high brick wall that surrounds the house. The estate has a fortress like quality. A buzzer in the main house opens the front gate. The top of the winding brick wall lined with three rows of large metal teeth suggests a medieval battlement.

The object of all this security, the young woman inside the black and silver sweat suit, has just come down from the house, tracing a path through the firs. "I'm sorry," she says. "I don't feel too good." She wears roughly the same expression as her companion, Maxi, a shy German shepherd dog who looks as if he has just lost his best friend.

In fact, he has. So has Graf. Looking wan and weary, her face rounded by lost sleep, she is grieving over the loss of her favourite dog, Darrow, a shepherd who died only a few days before. She thought at first that he had been poisoned by one of the lunatics who have periodically haunted her life, but when the vets opened Darrow up, they found rampant cancer. "An incredible dog," Graf says. "So alert, watching me constantly, full of joy always watching. He was very protective.

Just as her father had always been. Just as she has been of her most delicate feelings, the ones that might betray her. "I've been protecting and suppressing them," she says. "Very carefully."

That need to remain unexposed has affected how she reacts to everything. A world traveller since 13, Graf hears no voice whispering to come home. "Where I am has never been that important to me," she says. "I am not very connected to places." Home is anywhere she can move about unmolested. So when she wants to train, she wings off to her house in Boca Raton, Florida.

"Very quiet, very private - I like it like that," she says. Or to her favourite hideaway, her penthouse apartment in lower Manhattan, where she flits wisp like from her neighbourhood bakery and Chinese supermarket to this museum and that gallery. "People recognise you," she says of New Yorkers, "but they don't bother you."

Then there is Bruhl. "A quiet, sleepy town of 14,000 people," she says. She has been a familiar presence there for such a long time that she can walk the town's narrow, twisting streets, past its shops and markets, and go almost unnoticed, except for an occasional wave from a merchant or passerby. And she can dash out of her front gate and across the street for a lunchtime bowl of broccoli and corn, or perhaps pick up a wedge of quiche at the natural food place.

Since the conclusion of the US Open six weeks before, Graf has spent her time in Bruhl. A staff of therapists in Heidelberg, 20 kilometres away, has been working on her sore left knee, and she occasionally takes a few days out to join German race car driver Michael Bartels, her boyfriend of four years, on a getaway, such as their recent trip to Monaco. Bartels has been a calming buffer against the winds that have swirled around Graf's life. "He's been an extremely big help," Graf says, "He knows a lot about people, and he's been through this with me."

The death of Darrow is not the only thing troubling Graf this morning in Bruhl. It is the day after her most recent visit to her father. Once a week she heads north to the prison in Mannheim where Peter is held as his trials unfolds. Although used to her own court appearances, her father's, which began on September 5th, are ones Steffi would rather miss, not wanting to add yet another ring to the circus. Besides, it's painful enough to see him in prison where the prison guards and other visitors intrude on their time together. He has been in prison almost 15 months, an inordinately long stretch for someone on trial for tax evasion, and she senses that the ordeal is taking its toll on him.

Steffi is in the office that was once her parents' bedroom. She is sitting at the black desk of Hans Engert, a long time family friend whom she hired in May to take her father's place as her personal manager. As she speaks about her relationship with Peter, she stretches her arms forward on the desk and struggles to find words. "It's difficult situation," she says. "It's changed. If you had seen him yesterday morning you would probably have seen what has changed. Not physically, but mentally. I can't talk about it. It goes too deep.

Nevertheless, Peter's appearances and demeanour in court reveal nothing of the ordeal he has endured inside the prison walls. The day before one of Steffi's visits, as the court session ended and the lawyers piled documents in portmanteaus, Peter brightened when someone asked if he's had a visit from his daughter. "Steffi is coming to see me tomorrow," he said, beaming. Asked how he feels in general, he held out his right hand and rotated it slightly. "Sometimes bad, sometimes not so bad," he said. "But I run six miles a week in prison, and I feel well."

He must have felt even better earlier this month when the presiding judge finally ruled that he should be freed on bail of $3.3 million. But the trial continues and twice a week, as he has done since September 5th, Peter will trundle into the airless, fluorescent lit courtroom bearing in his hand a plastic cup of peppermint tea, the symbol of his prolonged drying out from alcohol and drug abuse, and take his place next to his lawyers.

Aside from Max Schmeling whose popularity owed as much to Nazi racial dogma and the drumbeat of the coming of war as it did to his athletic prowess Steffi has been the most celebrated athlete in German history. For years she has been the darling of Deutschland. Unlike Boris Becker, who fled to Monaco to escape German taxes, Steffi has remained loyal to her homeland. So Peter's trial has been covered as no courtroom drama in Germany in 50 years. "This is the first show trial here since Nuremberg," says Engert.

British tabloids have nothing on their German counterparts, and for the first couple of weeks the trial story did handsprings across front pages from Berlin to Munich to Bonn. Three reporters from Der Spiegel published a book called Reiche Steffi, Armes Kind (Rich Steffi, Poor Child), depicting her life as a tennis prodigy under Peter's Svengali like control. The tabloid Bild published excerpts from a confidential psychiatric profile of Peter written for the court by a Heidelberg psychiatrist.

The profile purported to expose the roots of Peter's tragic undoing: how his deep love for his father, Alfons, had turned to loathing after Peter discovered that Alfons had taken a young lover while his wife - Peter's mother, Rosemarie - lay in hospital; how Rosemarie had committed suicide several months later by ingesting hydrochloric acid; and how Peter, an excitable, insecure high school drop out, had become addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs (mostly tranquilisers and sleeping pills) as he faced the mounting stresses brought on by Steffi's climb in the tennis world.

The story was a national soap opera. In his lone statement, delivered on the opening day of the trial before a rapt and crowded courtroom, Peter distanced Steffi from the mess he had made: "I hereby declare unambiguously that until 1995, our daughter was in no way conversant with tax matters." This was seconded by Joachim Eckardt, Peter's former tax consultant and his co defendant at the trial. While discussing Peter's role in the collection of tournament appearance fees, which are not allowed under the rules of the Women's Tennis Association (WTA), Eckardt said, "Graf's first rule was to shield Steffi."

Indeed, while the German state of Baden has laid out a case implicating Peter in a vast tax evasion scheme by which he sent millions of dollars of Steffi's earnings through front companies in Amsterdam, the Dutch Antilles and Liechtenstein, none of the paper in the chase has led to her. "We have seen all the files, and we know that she is out of it, in substance," says Franz Salditt, one of Peter's lawyers. "There is really nothing that would point in her direction.

Peter has been responsible for paying Steffi's taxes since she started earning money on the tour as a minor, in 1982, and he continued running interference when she became an adult. But no one filed tax returns for Steffi from 1989 to 93. "It was her money, but it was not her responsibility," Salditt says. "It was her father's wish that she concentrate on tennis. We have tax fraud only if you know what you were doing."

"That's the way they see it," says Hubert Job ski, a state prosecutor, who considers Steffi's culpability a matter of interpretation. "She is not the one who pulled the strings, but we believe she does have responsibility." In fact, under German law, ignorance is not a defence, although it may be considered a mitigating factor. An investigation into Steffi's role will begin at the conclusion of Peter's trial early next year.

In the two seasons since Peter's troubles began a period in which Steffi twice won the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open - she has steadfastly remained her father's daughter. Putting on her blinders, the ones Peter fitted on her years ago, she has played through myriad injuries and distract ions.

PAPA MERCILESS, as the German press has taken to calling Peter, has been a hovering, shaping presence in his daughter's life since she was four, when he started whacking balls at her over a string stretched across their Mannheim living room. When Steffi was 10, Peter took her to a state run programme near Bruhl, where she trained under Boris Breskvar, then a German Tennis Federation coach, until she turned pro three years later.

What Breskvar recalls most vividly is the discipline she brought to the court and the affection that existed between Steffi and Peter. "The father was a god for Steffi," Breskvar says, "and Steffi was for him also everything. She was crazy about tennis, but pleasing him was surely part of it."

Their bond was unbreakable and as Steffi became a force in tennis, Peter was right beside her controlling her life and business off the court while she controlled the rhythms on it. He picked and fired her coaches, mapped her schedule, travelled with her. Father and daughter are both devout Catholics and on the eve of an important match they often went to church and prayed together. By the time Steffi, at 17, won her first Grand Slam event, beating Martina Navratilova in the French Open final in 1987, she was well on her way to her first million dollar year in earnings. Together she and Peter were on an inexorable climb to the tennis summit.

A perfectionist driven by her father and by her own relentless will, Steffi would don her stoical mask and use her cannon of a forehand, the most powerful weapon in the women's game, to overwhelm her opponents. As true as the forehand was, the mask was no less a lie. Highly emotional and sensitive, with a temperament more suited to a poet than to a professional athlete, Steffi had a poignant sadness about her. There were days when defeat would plunge her into despair. "She never appreciated a win as much as she was devastated by a loss," says Jim Fulise, the WTA's publicity director and a long time friend of Steffi's. "She would at times go into a room and not come out for a day."

Peter had a far more malevolent stable of demons chasing him, not the least of which was named rum, and as Steffi stroked and hammered her way into the longest run as the number one ranked player in tennis history - 186 weeks in a row, from August 17th 1987 to March 10th, 1991 - Peter gradually spun out of control. Tour regulars characterised his behaviour in terms usually heard at AA meetings: erratic, overbearing and abusive. He argued with fans who cheered Steffi's opponents and he insulted journalists who criticised her play.

In 1988 and 89, he had a highly publicised dalliance with a 20 year old nude model, publicly humiliating his family and reenacting the betrayal for which he had so despised his father. It was also during this time that Peter reportedly collected cash appearance fees in plastic bags - which, unbelievable as it may seem, Steffi has denied knowing about - and allegedly played loose with the tax collectors, delaying payments and digging himself ever deeper.

His alleged evasions came to light in 1994 when promoter Ion Tiriac, seeking the return of $300,000 appearance fee for a 1992 tournament from which Steffi had withdrawn because of injury, filed a civil suit against Peter. That action, coming on the heels of the five years in which no tax returns had been filed for Steffi, spurred the authorities to delve further into the Grafs' financial empire.

For Steffi, the signal that her life would never be the same again came one day in August 1995 when she stepped off an airplane in Atlanta - where she had an appointment with a therapist who was to treat her back - and headed toward the baggage claim. Her brother, Michael, had flown down from New York to intercept her, and when she saw him standing there, nearly in tears, she thought that something had happened to his pregnant wife, Elaine. Earlier that year tax agents had swept through the Graf house and confiscated more than $150,000 in cash, but Peter had assured her that it was of no consequence. So she was hardly braced for the news Michael brought.

"Dad is in jail," he said.

Stunned, Steffi took off for New York and the US Open, driving first to Columbus, Georgia, before boarding a north bound flight. Although she and Michael went directly to her apartment when they arrived in Manhattan, there were nearly a dozen reporters already there and after one night they headed to Michael and Elaine's place. When that proved to be no safer a haven, they checked into a hotel, then decided that the best refuge was with friends who had a house in Connecticut.

"I had to flee," Steffi says. "I was pursued by everybody. We were always one hour ahead of them as we moved from place to place." Steffi could not even call her father because German tax officials did not want them to talk, fearing the Grafs would coordinate their tales. So Steffi simply did what Peter had always urged her to do: concentrate and focus on the tennis.

She needed all the concentration band focus she could bring to bear in the 1995 Open final, the most emotional match she has ever played. Across the net was Monica Seles, making a comeback some 29 months after a deranged partisan, fan of Graf's Gunter Parche, stuck a knife in her back at a tournament in Hamburg.

On the court Seles has a blackhole stare. "She has a presence that intimidates you," Graf says. "You feel the toughness in her, that focus, more than in any other person. Weighted down by the guilt she felt over Seles's stabbing and by events across the Atlantic, Graf still triumphed. But she bolted in tears from her post match press conference when questions turned to Peter.

THAT US Open represented Graf's first step in a new life - one in which Peter was the father protector no more. For more than 20 years he had governed her, and about that she had no complaint. "Tennis was my part," Steffi says, "and I felt, `OK, you do everything else'. I was fine with it. Maybe also because I didn't know any different."

If a year ago she was 20 going on 18, today she is 27 going on 40. For the first time in her life she is a survivor. She has steered herself from the shoulder of that road outside Bruhl and, in the vacuum that her father's absence created, has begun to take control of her affairs and make her own decisions. She had no choice. "I needed to do this," she says.

Graf thus found herself traversing a strange terrain inhabited by species unfamiliar to her lawyers, accountants, investment advisers. Lately she has seen as many bottom lines as baselines. She does not much fancy this new work. Yet she has hired a staff and set up an office, and although she has kept her American based representation with Advantage International, she has formed her own company, Steffi Graf Sport, Ltd, through which she intends to promote next year's Federation Cup and, eventually, events outside tennis, such as rock concerts.

The tennis court is still her refuge, the place where she is in control and her mind is free to create. Nowhere has this been clearer than in Paris, London and New York. How she pulled off a sweep of the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open this year (she did not enter the Australian Open because of her foot surgery) amid the turbulence of her life remains a mystery even to her.

"It is a question I've been asking myself for some time," she says. "My mind is not always on the court. No question. When it has been important, I have been able to shut everything out and concentrate. I wonder how I manage to survive all this. I am sometimes an enigma to myself."

Perhaps more puzzling was the government's determination - until earlier this month - to keep Peter locked up during the trial, particularly since Steffi has put the $13 million in back taxes she allegedly owes into a government account, pending an appeal of the total. Like many Germans, Steffi had come to view Peter's lengthy confinement with a cynical eye, believing he is as much a captive of his name as of any crime. "I'm sure a lot of this would have gone a lit differently with my father if there hadn't been that name," she says. "It is like he had killed somebody."

For all that Peter has put her through, Steffi says she feels neither resentment nor, anger toward him. "When you know what alcohol and tablets can do to you," she says, "it's difficult to be angry.

So after more than a year of sobriety, what will Peter's role be if and when the latch is finally sprung? "Supportive father?" Steffi suggests. In any event, there will be no return to the way things were. Having finally come of age off the court, she appears determined to stay in control of her life.

"He understands this," she says. But the most fundamental matter of the heart has not changed. "I love him dearly," she says. "Nothing in that department will change. He needs help. He will need a lot of help. I know what's ahead of me.

Steffi had no inkling, in August 1995, of the journey that lay before her, a voyage full of pain but also of growth and discovery. Even in the beginning, when the headlines were the harshest, she sensed a warming shift in the way her countrymen felt toward her. On her return to Germany after that 95 US Open victory, they greeted her as though they had glimpsed a human face behind that old mask.

"A great many people approached and told me, `It's fantastic how you stuck it out'," she says. "I got so much encouragement. People were much more open toward me. I wasn't used to that. In the past they were either very loud - `Look! That's Steffi Graf over there!' - or they didn't say anything. I had never experienced this personal approach before."

A similar warming may have occurred inside Graf. When Jennifer Capriati returned to tennis in November 1994, after bouts with burn out and drugs forced her off the tour for 14 months, Graf was among the first to offer an embrace. "A very caring person," Capriati says. "And more outgoing than I've ever seen her."

On a drive from Bruhl to Heidelberg last month, as she rushed at 75 mph past stands of trees whose leaves were turning from green to brightest orange and burnished gold, Graf was changing hues herself - alive and animated here, incredulous and soft spoken there, and finally serious and dark and hauntingly sad. Recalling that this was the road whose shoulder she had needed to cry on in February, she relieved all of the experience. She did not speak for several minutes. "I never talked much about this," she finally said.

More than the maples in Bruhl were changing. Graf had begun to stay put the night after winning a tournament. A few years ago, after Graf won yet another US Open, the WTA's Fuhse watched her scurry about muttering, "I've got a plane back to Germany in two hours." Fuhse threw up his arms and said, "You're always in a rush to go nowhere!" But last summer, right after winning Wimbledon, Graf was in a van with her coach Heinz Gtinthardt, when they passed a disco. "Let's go in!" Graf blurted. So Gtinthardt and the seven time All England Club singles champion danced for nearly three hours. "I used to win and go home," she says, "I celebrate now.

Physically Graf is not the player she was in 1988, when she won the Grand Slam and the Olympic gold medal. Injuries, lost training time and the events in Mannheim have dulled her game. The dominant metronome of the past, the player for whom bliss was defined by 6-0, 6-0 victories, has discovered something else.

"There is so much joy in being on the court and winning when it is so much more difficult because of all the circumstances," she says. "I treasure these moments so much more than I ever did. When you're 17, you win and you win and you just accept it. Winning was so much more natural than it is now. Maybe my heart wasn't so much in it as it is today. It's nicer to have these feelings. This joy!"

This adversity. This struggle. This new and very human life.