Martina Hingis is still smiling after frittering away a huge lead in the tennis rankings, reports Jon Henderson
For burn out, read chill out. If Martina Hingis is indeed slipping inexorably from her pre-eminent position in women’s tennis, we could be witnessing one of the most pleasing declines in the history of sport.
Rather than being consumed by the fires that have destroyed so many sad starlets reared in the furnace of their parents’ ambitions, the 18-year-old Swiss player appears alert to the danger and determined to stay clear of the flames – even if this does mean losing a few tennis matches along the way and, as she did recently, surrendering her position at the top of the world rankings.
Hingis, who started playing at two and entered her first tournament at four, has known just enough normality in her young life to realise that it may be preferable to the solitary pursuit of sporting perfection. She seems resolved neither to follow the path of slavish devotion to the game that has brought Steffi Graf so much wealth and despair, nor to regard a Jennifer Capriati-style dalliance with society’s pond life as the only way of deviating from that path.
In short, Hingis is coping with the teenage menopause with unusual good sense, establishing a broadly based independence while realising the importance of retaining the close relationship she has with her doting, twice-divorced mother, Melanie Molitor, who is still the only coach she has ever had.
Hingis became the youngest world number one on March 31 last year when she was 16 and six months. Two months earlier, she had won the Australian Open, making her the youngest winner of a Grand Slam title in the Open era, and, by carrying off two more major titles, Wimbledon and the United States Open, she had built a 3E000-point lead at the head of the rankings by the end of 1997. As Arthur Daley would have said, the world was her lobster.
But, since retaining the Australian title, this year has been more damp squid, as Daley might also have said, than thermidor. She has failed to win another Grand Slam title, relentlessly frittering away those 3E000 points. The last of them disappeared two weeks ago when she lost to the modestly talented Dominique van Roost in the quarter-finals of the Porsche Grand Prix in Germany to surrender the number one spot to the American Lindsay Davenport.
Engagingly, though, Hingis has frittered with an air of indifference, maintaining an insouciance that has furrowed her mother’s brow, but most of the rest of us have rather enjoyed. She said, typically, of one defeat: “I could have lost to anyone that day. I didn’t care if I won or lost. You can’t win every match.”
This blithe approach is nothing new. From her earliest days, when she was winning the French junior title as a 12-year-old, she has played with an apparent lack of earnestness, emphasised by the trademark perma-smile, and engagement that we had come to assume was a prerequisite for success. To be fair to the protective Molitor, she was responsible for encouraging her daughter to have interests beyond the tennis court – her horse-riding and rollerblading have been the most obvious examples – but Hingis has pursued these diversions with a will of her own, again causing more than a hint of maternal anxiety.
But the mother-daughter bond has remained intact with Molitor quick to repudiate suggestions that she has put undue pressure on a daughter who she said she knew would be a successful tennis player “from the time she came out of the womb” and backed her prescience by naming her after Martina Navratilova.
“I’ve never myself had the feeling that I’ve stolen her childhood,” she says. “I mean what is it that she should be doing, playing with puppies? Look at her, she’s a happy girl.”
Now their kinship seems to be surviving Hingis’s sometimes clumsy attempts to rework her off-court image. It cannot be easy for Molitor, who, unlike most mothers, has had to watch her only child – the progeny of her first marriage in her native Slovakia to Karol Hingis – experiment with her looks in front of a worldwide audience. Although she cares deeply about how Hingis conducts herself, and has said she will continue to travel with her on tour until her career is over, Molitor concedes her influence is diminishing: “When your daughter is 18, your role becomes very small. It’s her life now.”
The first sign of Hingis asserting her independence came a year ago when she put a blue streak in her hair. She then tried a purple one before having her hair cut short and dyed an unsubtle shade of black. She discovered make-up and decided to upgrade her wardrobe, replacing jeans and sweaters with designer dresses. She even showed a touching flash of jealousy towards the tour’s arch glamour-puss, Anna Kournikova. “I saw [Kournikova’s] pictures on magazine covers and I wanted to do the show, too,” said Hingis, who duly became GQ magazine’s first cover girl in the States.
She also emulated her mother by finding herself a boyfriend. While Molitor had the Swiss journalist Mario Widmer as her constant companion, and still does, Hingis took up with Julian Alonso, a 21-year-old Spaniard who is on the men’s tour. The end of this relationship, her first serious romance, was a distraction that may have contributed to her erratic form during the summer.
After Alonso opted to return to Spain rather than watch Hingis’s semi-final against Monica Seles in the French Open last June, the top seed gave a distracted performance in losing to the American. “I didn’t really tank [throw] that match, but it certainly wasn’t my best effort,” Hingis said with disarming honesty. “I knew right from the beginning that it was not going to be my day.”
Chris Evert, the former world number one who now counsels Hingis as part of what the Women’s Tennis Association call their “mentor programme”, knows exactly what Hingis is going through. She says: “Once I was leading a semi-final at Wimbledon 6-3 6-0 when I looked up and saw [former fianc] Jimmy Connors with [film star] Susan George. I proceeded to lose the next nine games and the match. So what if Hingis blows a few matches? She’ll get through it and learn how to focus just as I did.”
More than a year ago, the American correspondent Peter Bodo, considering the transitional problems that lay ahead for Hingis, wrote in Tennis magazine: “Independence is rarely given; it is almost always seized. Some prodigies, like Evert, claim it quickly and it all works out. Others struggle.”
There are encouraging signs that Hingis has done an Evert with a result that she may never again dominate the game as she did in 1997. But it will only be a decline of sorts. In most other respects it may prove to be Hingis’s greatest triumph.