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'The best is yet to be' Love All - Charge of the Teens
Martina HingisWomen's tennis is hitting a new high with the new young breed of bubbly, vivacious stars who are sending the seniors bundling out of the courts and--importantly--drawing crowds
Women were always been discriminated against in tennis. In the French Open the women quarterfinalists have traditionally played at other courts while the Court Central has been reserved for men. In the Australian Open, women's matches were sidelights. Although women did get to the centre court in Flinders Park, less than half the seats were occupied during the final rounds. In fact, there were more people jostling for a glimpse of Andre Agassi practising than there were at the women's matches.
That was in 1995.
When everyone seemed to have given up on women's tennis, it has started to show signs of life. Young life. Leading the charge of the teen brigade is Martina Hingis, Iva Majoli and Anna Kournikova. Waiting in the wings are Venus Williams, Chanda Rubin and Mirjana Lucic.
Their arrival on the court has promised to change women's tennis. The appeal of women's tennis has almost always revolved around one or two charismatic figures who dominated the circuit for a long time. In the 70s it was Chris Evert. Martina Navritolova held sway in the 80s until she passed the mantle to Steffi Graf.Their domination robbed the game of its variety and sparkle. While the men's game has evolved--it threw up different winners at the four Grand slams last year--it was Graf who dominated the women's circuit taking three of the four Grand slams in last year--it was Graf who dominated the women's circuit taking three of the four Grand Slams in 1996. She had done that in 1995 as well.
Indeed the depth in the women's field has not been comparable with that in the men's for a long time. Major tournaments were dominated by the top one or two superstars who reached the pinnacle of the sport while still in their teens--a phenomenon common among the women.
Women's tennis has thrown up teenage sensations time and again. It was Lottie Dod who set the ball rolling when she won the singles title at Wimbledon at 15 in 1887. Chris Evert and Tracy Austin were teenagers when they started their reign over the game. Monica Seles caused a flutter in the tennis world when she became the youngest champ to win the Australian Open. She was a little over 17 when she won in 1991.
Even as tennis experts discussed her achievement. It was clear that everybody thought Seles' mindboggling record would remain unsurpassed for some time. Then, along with a bunch of teeny-boppers, came Martina Hingis.
The rest, as they say, is history.The Slovakia-born, swiss-raised teenager became the youngest ever champion at the Australian Open and later usurped the number I ranking--the youngest ever to get that privilege, man or woman.Hingis has made it a habit of setting records. So it was no surprise that when she reached the Roland Garros seeded no. 1, there was another one added to her collection.
For several years the world's top women players have assembled at Roland Garros with a clear favourite for the title in their midst. But it is not every year that the top position is occupied by a 16-year-old.
For another teenager, American Venus Williams, it was triumphant Grand slam debut. With her hair trussed in white beads and transparent braces on her teeth, the 16-year-old punched her way to victory over the 45th ranked Japanese Naoko Sawamatsu.
It was an incredible display of power tennis for a player who has no previous Grand Slam experience, not even on the junior front.
Coached by her father Richard Williams, Venus exhibited strong ground strokes launched with lightening speed from the baseline and came up with the occasional stabbing volley at the net.
There was another precocious kid in the draw--47th ranked Anna Kournikova. The 15th-year-old Russian had the bad luck to run into Hingis, her rival form the junior days. The would-be prodigy, considered by some to be another Hingis in the making, attacked the WTA age rules. Hingis has had an unrestricted access to the professional circuit since she made her debut at barely 14, while circuit since she made her debut at barely 14, while Kournikova has been subject to the new rules because she came in late when the new rules were in place to try and protect young teenagers from life in tennis' hothouse. Kournikova has been allowed to play in only 10 tournaments a year since she turned 15, a figure that will go up to 13 in the next 12 months.
Kournikova, who turned 16 only a few days after that pounding, is no mean player but still has not figured out how to hold her serve. It was their first meeting and Hingis made short work of the Russian.
Hingis herself will not be 17 until September 30, and according to Swiss law cannot take her driving test for another 16 months, which is galling given that she picked up a Porsche for winning a tournament at Filderstadt last October.
Her present form is such that it has built up an aura of near invincibility that can sometimes win matches by itself by instilling doubts in opponents.
The key to her success is not readily apparent. Hingis, who took over the number one slot from Graf in March, does not show the athleticism of her namesake Navratilova, nor does she possess the lethal forehand of Graf or the sheer power of Seles. But she is always there, moving with efficiency around the court, finding her shots where none seemed available and zapping her opponents.
"She has a very mixed game," said Seles. "She has every angle and a really great disguise on the backhand," Without doubt she is the best emerging player."
With the Australian Open and the French Open behind her Hingis' only weak link appears to be the Wimbledon. Although she took the girls' singles title there at 13, grass could be her problem turf.
It has certainly not taken Hingis long to become grand in her dealings with people. One of her matches at Roland Garros was originally scheduled to start at 11 a.m. She had it postponed to the afternoon. "I am not a very good morning person," She explained with her trademark disarming smile that makes it hard to find her arrogance offensive. The knee injury she sustained when she fell from a horse two months ago had not quite healed and affected her form in the mornings.
Yet, she had nothing to fear. There was nobody in the field who could have given her a run for her money except for Steffi Graf, the consummate veteran who captured her fifth French Open championship a year ago. Seles, the third seed, would have needed to draw on her considerable reserves if she wanted to beat the teenage sensation. In their last three meetings Hingis held the upper hand. Sure enough she bundled out Seles to take their score to 4-0.
Graf had not been having a good run. She was handed a comprehensive defeat by Amanda Coetzer--her nemesis at the Australian Open--in Berlin barely two weeks before the French Open.
In the Strasbourg Open in May, she had run into another teenage sensation, Mirjana Lucic of Croatia in the finals.
The 6-foot Lucic, who captured the Australian Open junior crown in January, lost that match. Those who saw the 15-year-old in action were sure that if Lucic had made it to the French Open she would have caused some upsets.
Graf had come to Paris following a 100-day hiatus after tendinitis struck her knee, she considered herself underprepared for the gruelling championship. To add to Graf's woes her draw led her straight to Coetzer, who it seemed, had not forgotten about their previous encounter and repeated her class act.
A petite, 5-foot-2inch overachiever, 11th seeded Amanda Coetzer has tied her new founder self-confidence and bravado to her string of dismissals of Graf. Coetzer reached her second Grand Slam semifinal this year and the third of her career. She had also defeated Graf January in the round of 16 at the Australian Open, and then trounced her again, 6-0, 6-1, at the German Open.
Although Graf may return to form, she is 27 and age is not on her side. Seles is the only other contender for the top slot but Hingis will be no easy walk-over and with a slew of other teeny-boppers sniping at her heels, it will prove increasingly hard for Graf to regain the top spot.
It has been long since one Martina era drew to a close. Another has just begun.
PRADEEP RAO
Italian Open Title
boost for Pierce
Mary Pierce, a former Australian Open champion once ranked third in the world, feels her career is back on track after her victory in the Italian Open. "I feel like I'm just beginning my career. I've been playing for along time but I feel like I'm just starting over," the 22-year-old French woman said.
The Canadian-born blonde has come through challenges in recent months that tested her far more than Conchita Martinez of Spain did in the Italian Open's final at the Ford Italico in Rome.
Pierce won 6-4, 6-0 and hardly gave Martinex a look-in, overpowering the four-times champion with an array of confident foreband passing shots. Martinez said she was injured and unable to move her neck properly but there was no doubt the the crowd, who had warmed to Pierce's personality, wanted a new heroine.
The French woman, a semifinalist in 1995, brought both novelty and glamour to a tournament lacking the former in the absence of teen sensation Martina Hingis of Switzerland and the latter without former heartthrob Gabriela Sabatini. The Argentine won four times in Rome and with her Italian surname and Latin looks, was a perennial favourite. The tall Pierce, whose earlier victims included Monica Seles, went a long way to filling the void, pleasing the crowd on a sun-drenched centre court by attacking the net and beaming broadly at every well-timed shot.
But she has not had so much to smile about recently after a string of poor performances last year she took three months off tennis to nurse a nerve injury in one shoulder. The break has done her good, proved by her reaching the final of the Australian Open this year. Pierce, whose family problems have often disrupted her career, said the improvement in her game was due to in large part to the work of new coach Craig Kardon, former trainer of now-retired Martina Navratilova.
"The main thing with Craig that I haven't felt with any other coach is he really understands and is always there to talk about it," she said. " Somedays are very hard for players and to get over those day is really important. He knows how to handle different situations. That's the thing that is comforting," she added.
Pierce, who began on the tour as a 14-year-old, was put under huge pressure in her early years by father and coach Jim. The WTA tour banned him from attending any of his daughter's matches after an outburst from the stands in 1993 French Open, forcing Pierce to strike out alone.
There she was on the court again, now flashing her patented disarming head-back smile, then frolicking with her mixed doubles partner, spontaneously reacting to success and failure in much the same way that any average 16-year old would in a minor junior tournament in Chennai or New Delhi.
Not only was the teenager enjoying every moment on court, but more importantly, she was communicating that enjoyment to the audience. Suddenly, all your romantic, idealistic images of the theatre of sport being the paradise of the young came to life on that Sunday evening as a mellow sun prepared to call it a day.
yet, only a little over an hour ago, this was the teenager who had become the youngest winner of the Wimbledon singles tilt in 110 years! And, that's about as average an achievement as the landing of the Sojourner buggy on Mars.
Indeed, quite the most extraordinary thing about Martina Hingis is her very ordinariness as a person. Sport - especially tennis - at the level at which the Czech-born Swiss teenager plays is hardly child's play. It can make rather unusual demands on the performer, often making it almost impossible for a teenager growing up in the glare of spotlights to be normal, to be herself.
And, deep down, sport is full of contradictions too, which of course means it makes almost impossible contradictory demands ont he top level performers. A good 90 per cent of the people who are hooked on boxing have been turned into addicts by the essential savagery of the sport. yet, when Mike Tyson chews the ears off his rival the universal reaction, understandably, is one of shock, revulsion. That is because, what is permissible is savagery within the framework of certain rules.
Then, what of that greatest, and most elusive, of sporting virtues - killer instinct on the field of play and be at once charming and child-like? As incongruous as these demands are, there are some very special people who achieve it on the sporting stage. And watching such a person on and off the field of play, it strikes you that she/he is actually two vastly different people resident in the same body.
Few young sportspersons of our times have met the inconsistent, idealistic demands of sport as successfully as Hingis has in the recent months. She can at once be a ruthless executioner, pouncing on her rival at a moment of vulnerability that few might have noticed, and then toss her head back and flash an enigmatic smile after losing a big point, displaying a child-like spontaneity.
"I think when she is not on the court, she is acting like a normal teenage kid. She very good, she will be even better because she's very normal compared with the other players we saw burn out quickly," said Jana Navotna, half an hour after she had lost to Hingis in the final. Novotna also pointed another striking thing about the woman who had crushed her dreams of becoming a Grand Slam champion, at last. "Martina is very talented and also very respectful to other players. Today, before the match we were both in the trainer's room stretching out and we had a very pleasant conversation," said the 28-year old losing finalist.
To be sure, Novotna was not the only senior player to compliment Hingis on her willingness to get by as one of the girls. The Belgian pro, Sabine Appelmans, who lost to Hingis in the fourth round, paid tribute to the young champion too, saying that the teenager had no airs about her and spoke to everybody in the dressing room like she was one of them.
Indeed, in many ways, Hingis is one of them. But in some ways, she is as different from them as chalk from cheese. And that difference, in talent, temperament, tenacity is what makes her the champion she is.
In the 111th Wimbledon championships, in what was only her third appearance on the famous lawns, shotmaking talent alone might not have been enough for Hingis to become the youngest ever champion since Lottie Dod in 1887. She started her campaign rather tentatively and struggled now and again with the vagaries of moist grass court. A qualifier offered a serious test to the world No. 1 in the first round itself, and although Hingis did not drop a set coming into her third straight Grand Slam final of the year, she admitted that she was not feeling at home on the grass.
"After the match I said I hate this court, that didn't want to play here," said Hingis after her semifinal. Asked if she'd go on to dominate Wimbledon the way the champion that she was named after -- Martina Navrotilova -- did, Hingis said, "Oh, she won so many here. She loved playing here. It suited her style. Maybe one day I will love it too."
The way she said it, that "one day" sounded like something that was in a very distant past. But, as the kid joyfully did a lap of honour with the trophy in her hand on the afternoon of July 5, you were sure that the day had arrived less than 48 hours after Hingis had talked about it. For, you cannot love a championship that is regarded as the greatest in the game after having become its youngest champion this century!
But, then, that's how it's always been with Hingis. Right from the time her mother put a racquet in her hand at age four, the kid had this habit of ignoring the popular script and the schedules to enact what was put down for a distant tomorrow, today.
Last summer, on the third Monday of a rain-ravaged championship at Wimbledon, Hingis became the youngest ever Grand Slam champion of all time, beating Lottie Dod's record, when she won the women's doubles title in the company of Helena Sukova, a player twice her age.
Since then, the climb has been phenomenal. And the day she played that thrilling five-setter against Steffi Graf in the WTA World championship finals, the kid had truly arrived. Everyone was keenly looking forward to the first Grand Slam of 1997 and a possible clash with Graf. But Graf departed in a hurry, unable to tackle a hot Amanda Coetzer and temperatures that soared into the mid-40s at Melbourne, and the kid promptly won the tournament, four months past her 16th birthday. That, of course, was the beginning of a winning streak that stretched right up to final of the French Open last month -- 37 matches to be precise. As well as Iva Majoli played that day, it must be said that Hingis, coming into the tournament after a long lay-off forced by a fall while riding a horse -- something that required surgery on her knee-- was fatigued, physically spent on that day.
But grass is Hingis's least favourite surface and no matter what the bookmakers -- surely, these blokes at Ladbrokes know a thing or two about winning and losing -- said at the start of the championship, many critics believed that Hingis might not be able to conquer the lawns of Wimbledon as easily as she started dominating the hardcourts and the claycourts.
Of course, the absence of the seven-time champion, Graf, did provide the opening for Hingis but it still took considerable adjustments, over the two weeks, to do what she did. As much as Hingis prefers to play from the baseline, she showed us that she was unafraid to advance to the net on the rare occasion when he felt that it was absolutely necessary to venture up and seize the initiative. And, we found out too, that she is no slouch when it comes to volleying.
While Hingis's serve is not something that would compare favourably with Graf's and she does not hit the ball as hard as a Kournikova, the world champion has fascinating variety and an extraordinary tennis brain. Her shot selection is absolutely marvelous and her anticipation, a virtue that's already stuff of legend.
How far she will go and how many major titles she can win as she gains an inch or two and is able to generate more power are questions that cannot be answered without a few speculative elements creeping in. But what is beyond dispute is this: Martina Hingis is the greatest champion her age we've ever seen.
In terms of star appeal, women's tennis, on the other hand, has never had it so good in the last few years. Led by the near-invincible Martina Hingis, a dazzling array of teenaged superstars have moved to centre stage to underline a much-awaited glorious transition and these are the young women who will usher the long-suffering sport into the new millenium. For more than three years, from April 30, 1993 - the day a deranged, unemployed lathe operator, Gunther Parche, struck Monica Seles with a meat-cleaving knife at a Hamburg tournament - the game was in a comatose state.
If Steffi Graf's inevitable return as the all-powerful Queen helped fortify the legend and saw her race past Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in the Grand Slam hierarchy, then the absence of charismatic challengers to the German turned women's tennis into an often dull, predictable and boring sport which failed to draw crowds even at the Grand Slams.
In the event, the best thing that happened to the game was the emergence of Hingis as a fore to reckon with towards the end of 1996. Winning her first major tour title at Filderstadt, beating the likes of Aranxta Sanchez-Vicario, Lindsay Davenport and Anke Huber two weeks after her 16th birthday, Hingis announced her arrival in style.
And, by the time the Swiss teenager flew into Australia for last year's championship, she was already a serious challenger to Graf's thorne, although it was a pity that the German lost to Amanda Coetzer and the much-anticipated showdown did not take place.
The rest of the year, even as Hingis dominated the sport, she never had the opportunity to play Graf in a Grand Slam tournament as the German disappeared from the scene after yet another early defeat by Coetzer, this time at the French Open, to undergo surgery on her left knee.
Now, even as Graf's withdrawal from the Pan Pacific tournament in Tokyo raises a huge question mark over the great German's future in the game, a superb, energetic young supporting cast has assembled around the lead player, Hingis, to suggest that Graf would not be missed as much as we might have imagined last year.
Anna Kournikova, whose every strategy performance - the smiles, the pouting, the preening - in a tank top seems to be worth a million or two in endorsement contracts (or,so it appears), has matured as a player if her third round contest against Hingis at the Australian Open was any indication. And the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, will soon be edging towards the top even as the engaging 15-year-old Croatian, Mirjana Lucic, gains experience and climbs her way up.
While it is but natural that the focus at this year's Australian Open should have been on the teen brigade, then it is not as if the older players such as Conchita Martinez, Anke Huber, Lindsay Davenport, Iva Majoli and Mary Pierce have agreed to vacate the stage and let the teens steal the show every single time.
Pierece, Huber, Majoli and Davenport are not much older than Hingis & Co., and there are bound to be several intriguing battles this year as the players jostle for positions behind the Swiss superstar.
While it is too early in the day to think about where Hingis, still only 17, will end up in the game's history - whether she would go on to become another all-time great like the player she was named after, Martina Navratilova - what is clear at the moment is this: she, more than any of the other teenagers who are breathing down her back, is natural born winner.
Women's tennis goes through long periods where one or two players tower well above the rest - Navratilova and Evert, then Graf and Seles, each dominating the sport in turn. While the Hingis era is well into its second year, it remains to be seen who can pull alongside the young champion and set up the sort of fascinating rivalries that we have witnessed in the past, featuring Navratilova and Evert and then Graf and Seles.
Venus Williams beat an under-prepared Hingis in the first round of the Sydney tournament a week before the Australian Open and then Kournikova, with every male spectator in the stands, young and old, backing her vociferously, offered a severe test to the champion in a thrilling third round match at the Open.
Lucic, 15, who won the doubles title alongside Hingis to become the youngest ever champion at the Australian Open, is a superb shotmaker like the William sisters and Kournikova and may well pull alongside the older ones before the end of the season.
In terms of tactical maturity and strength of character, Hingis is still way ahead of the others. As Martinez pointed out after losing to Hingis in the final, " Martina knows exactly what shot to play every time. She always plays the right shot. She is so smart. She never gives you the chance to be aggressive."
Shot selection and her commendable anticipation apart, Hingis' ability to handle pressure and come up with her very best in the face of adversity is reminiscent of Seles in the years she ruled the game, in 1991 and 1992.
In the semifinals against Huber, whose uninhibited shotmaking was the result of being in a position where she had nothing to lose, Hingis was in some sort of trouble after losing the second set and faced two breakpoints in the second game of the decider. But the champion showed tremendous resilience and a granite will as she clawed her way back from the hole. As Hingis stood her ground, making her bold statement when she needed to, Huber's game collapsed in a heap of errors.
In the final, there were no dramatic twists and turns, although Martinez engaged the champion in a few long rallies before Hingis became the youngest player in the professional era (post-1968) to successfully defend a Grand Slam title, eclipsing Seles' record set during the 1991 defence of her French Open title (aged 17 years, six months and six days).
"I have always been the youngest in whatever I did," said Hingis, matter of factly. "This is the hardest Grand Slam I have won so far. There were so many different expectations of me, the pressure, especially from myself..."
For the best of champions, the more significant of achievements are the ones where they have matched their won expectations. The precocious Swiss teenager did just that at Melbourne.
Maybe, for Hingis too, the best is yet to be!
Courtesy The Sportstar
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