Stephen Bierley Tennis
Jennifer Capriati overcame her old troubles to reach the final four of the Australian Open. Drugs were bound to come up. And they did within minutes of Capriati beating Japan’s Ai Sugiyama 6-0, 6-2 on Tuesday to reach her first grand slam semi-final since 1991.
At the subsequent press conference she was asked what she would have thought a year ago had someone suggested that she could win such a crucial match so easily. To be more specific, she was asked whether she would have thought that they might be “smoking something”.
Capriati smiled and hit an affable “no comment” back to reporters, her face a far cry from the police mugshot broadcast worldwide after her arrest for marijuana possession in 1994.
Her former problems are well-documented. She was a spectacularly good teenager, reaching the last four of the French Open in 1990 when she was only 14, the youngest ever grand slam semi-finalist.
But now, for the first time since those heady days of 1991, when she also reached the US Open semi-final, Capriati had done it again.
This was reason enough for Capriati to celebrate, though she was beaten 6-2, 7-6 by fellow American Lindsay Davenport in the semi- finals. More importantly she seems to have come to terms with herself. “I’ve stopped thinking what the world was going to think of me, and that’s a big step,” she said after sweeping Sugiyama aside. “Even if I lose a match I am not going to be destroyed or devastated. Because I felt negative about myself, I was convinced that the world felt negative about me. With help, I changed and made it positive.”
The other big help has been Harold Soloman, Jim Courier’s former coach. “I was desperately looking for somebody and I spoke to Harold. Right off the bat, we hit it off. He said he believed I could go all the way, even number one. It lifted my confidence.”
Capriati, who will be 24 in March, reached the last 16 at the 1999 French and US Opens, won titles in Strasbourg and Quebec, and ended the year just outside the top 20.
A strained abdominal muscle, sustained before she played Sugiyama, raised brief fears and she needed a seven-minute injury break in the first set, but her powerful hitting, a feature of her teenage days, was too much for Sugiyama.
Martina Hingis of Switzerland earned a chance for an unprecedented fourth straight title when she beat Conchita Martinez of Spain 6-3, 6-2 in 61 minutes in the other semi-final.
Andre Agassi is also a comeback kid. His metamorphosis from flamboyant profligate to professional, hermetically focused champion has rarely been more tangibly demonstrated than during his 6-4, 6-4, 6-2 quarter-final victory over Hicham Arazi.
If Agassi caught a bit of his former self in Arazi’s cavalier attitude, then he erased the image from his thoughts with the same intensity that he crushed the Moroccan. There were times when Arazi produced strokes of such quality that few players could even contemplate them.
And so, for the 29th time, Agassi and Pete Sampras, the two finest players of the past decade, will meet again. In all likelihood their semi-final will decide who will be crowned champion on Sunday.
“When Pete’s in the draw my general take on it is that I have to beat him to win the title,” Agassi said. “It’s better for the game if we meet in the finals, because of the interest it draws, but it doesn’t matter a whole lot.”
Agassi, who trails 17-11 in their head-to- heads, acknowledged that Sampras is “the greatest big-match player that has ever played the game”.
“Andre has been an inspiration,” said Capriati of her fellow American.
“She has certainly shown strength of character,” Agassi replied. “The results don’t come right away, so when they do it’s a pleasure to be out there, and it’s a pleasure to watch her.”