Clijsters' husband a long way from Villanova

The VIP room at the Expodroom, the 3,900-seat home of the Belgian Basketball League's Euphony Bree, was unusually noisy that Saturday night in 2005.

Brian Lynch, a Villanova graduate playing for Bree, walked in and assumed his entrance had triggered the postgame commotion.

"I'd played well," Lynch recalled in a recent telephone interview. "I thought I was the big cheese there."

No, a teammate informed him, the buzz was because Kim Clijsters, the world's No. 1 tennis player and a Bree native, was present.

"Who?" Lynch asked.

Advantage, Clijsters.

Lynch and the tennis star were introduced. Less than two years later, in a ceremony that took place at 6 a.m. to deter the frothing Belgian media, they were wed. They now have a 19-month-old daughter, Jada.

Now, the 2000 Villanova graduate has put basketball and other ambitions on ice to be with his daughter and to allow his wife to continue the comeback - she prefers to call it "a second career" - that saw her win a second U.S. Open last week.

As Clijsters became the first mother to capture a Grand Slam event since Australia's Evonne Goolagong nearly three decades earlier, Lynch was the happy and supportive Mr. Mom, the lesser-known half of what, in Belgium certainly, is an extremely high-profile doubles team.

(When he announced he wouldn't be playing basketball this year, one Belgium newspaper termed his so-so career "radiant.")

"I'm happy," Lynch, 31, said from the couple's home in Bree. "I was in a good place basketball-wise. After bouncing around Europe for several years, I'd found a place here where I fit in with the coach, the team, the style. We won a championship in Bree. I was playing well and had a contract for next year.

"But when Kim got back into tennis, we decided I'd hang it up to care for our daughter and to give Kim a normal family life."

Clijsters' astounding comeback - she played her first tournament in August and just a month later became the first unseeded woman to win a U.S. Open - capped a tumultuous 28 months.

She became pregnant just before her father-manager, Leo, announced in May 2007 that she planned to marry Lynch and retire from tennis.

In February 2008, Jada was born. A month later, the terminal lung cancer of Leo Clijsters, a former Belgian soccer star whose careful shepherding helped his daughter become the tiny nation's first No. 1-ranked tennis player, was diagnosed.

He died in January of this year, at 52, not long after Clijsters decided to return.

"She's called it a second career because the first time it was just tennis," Lynch said. "Now she's got to deal with a husband, a daughter, and the death of her father. It's a completely different experience."

Despite the joy and grief, Clijsters somehow - Belgian sports columnists speculate that Lynch's calming presence may be responsible - not only got back into tennis shape, but also quickly won one of the world's most prestigious and physically grueling events, beating both Williams sisters in the process.

"As much as I thought Kim could get back to that level," Lynch said, "it was still extremely fast. Beating Venus and Serena? We weren't expecting anything like this until maybe 2010. But I really think that with all that was going on with her dad, tennis was great medicine."

Lynch, a 6-foot-6 guard-forward from Belmar, N.J., was a key contributor on Steve Lappas' penultimate team at Villanova, averaging 11 points a game for a 19-11 team in the Wildcats' 1999-2000 season.

"I knew I wasn't good enough for the NBA, but I felt like I was a solid player who might be able to go to Europe," Lynch said.

The next five years were like a frenetic European tour. He played in Poland before 9/11-induced homesickness brought him home. A year later, he was playing in Portugal. Then it was Greece, where his team neglected to pay him. He moved on to Germany, Italy, and France before landing in Bree.

There, playing for Chris Finch, a 1992 Franklin and Marshall graduate, Lynch finally felt at home. His stats and playing team picked up as Bree won a Belgian championship. Last year, with Antwerp, he averaged 7.4 points and two assists a game.

Bree is a town of just 15,000 in northern Belgium. But because Clijsters is the nation's best-known athlete, hordes of photographers and reporters have encamped there.

After she won the world's top ranking in 2003, her relationship and breakup with Australian tennis star Lleyton Hewitt became front-page news. So would her courtship with and engagement to Lynch.

Soon after their VIP-room introduction, Lynch and Clijsters began dating, setting a wedding date for July 14, 2007.

When the nation's media descended on Bree that weekend, Leo Clijsters developed a stealth plan. Mayor Jaak Gabriels, a friend, agreed to perform the ceremony a day earlier, at 6 a.m., at City Hall.

"It was something we felt like we had to do," Lynch said.

The groom made it in time despite drinking with visiting family members until just a few hours before the ceremony.

"The media weren't happy when they found out what we'd done," he said.

The family has been bouncing around the world recently. Father and daughter were in Flushing Meadows when, during Clijsters' semifinal win, Serena Williams had her now-infamous outburst of criticism for a line judge.

"I was there but I don't know what to say about it," Lynch said. "I know that Kim always had a tremendous amount of respect for Serena, feeling like she'll be known as one of the best women's players ever. I think she was just happy to have made it past her."

For the foreseeable future, Lynch will be caring for Jada while his wife is practicing, traveling, and playing.

"I really can't be at my best unless I know that Brian and Jada are at their best, too," Clijsters told a crowd of 3,500 that gathered in Bree's town square on her return from New York. "That's why having them with me is so important."

Someday, Lynch said, he may use his Villanova finance degree. He has already talked with Lappas, Villanova's Jay Wright, and others about making coaching a career, either at an American college or in Belgium. In the meantime, he'll be spending lots of time in hotel rooms with Jada.

"Kim really hasn't decided how long she's going to play," he said. "But after one, two or three years, however long it lasts, I can decide what I want to do. In the meantime, I'll just enjoy this."