Martina Hingis returns to the French Open next week desperate to atone for last year’s irrational performance
Stephen Bierley
Martina Hingis is still at a loss to explain exactly what happened and why. ”I think I lost my mind. There was so much pressure and I really wanted to beat her and win the title.” It was one of the most extraordinary few minutes on a tennis court since John McEnroe launched his infamous ”you cannot be serious” tirade.
Hingis, who was leading multi-champion Steffi Graf 6-4 2-0 in last year’s French Open final and playing the veteran German off the court, queried a forehand, called long, on the first point of the next game. Umpire Anne Lasserre came down from her chair, inspected the mark and confirmed the point in Graf’s favour.
Ordinarily, apart from a typically annoyed toss of the Hingis head or a swish of her racket, this would have been the end of the matter. But against all seeming reason the Swiss teenager protracted the argument and then broke the rules by coming round the net to indicate what she believed to be the correct mark. It was an act of unmitigated folly.
The 16E000 fans on the centre court of Roland Garros were already on the side of Graf, if only for nostalgic reasons, although there remained more than a whiff of resentment in the Paris air against Hingis, who earlier in the year at the Australian Open had rashly referred to the French youngster and beaten finalist Amlie Mauresmo as ”half a man”.
Fiercely believing herself to be right about the call – and the ball almost certainly was in – Hingis compounded the rapidly increasing hostility by plonking herself down on her chair and refusing to budge. Eventually, after stern warnings of immediate disqualification, the tournament referee Gilbert Ysern and Georgina Clark of the WTA Tour persuaded her to resume.
The tide of emotion was now set fair and square behind Graf and, although Hingis served for the match, the German staged a wildly popular comeback, winning 4-6 7-5 6-2.
Hingis fled the court, slapping a WTA
official in the process, although her mother and coach Melanie eventually dragged her errant daughter back on court for the award ceremony, with Hingis sobbing on her shoulder. Two weeks later, after a rift with her mother, who was absent from courtside, Hingis was beaten 6-2 6-0 in the first round at Wimbledon by the 16-year-old Australian qualifier Jelena Dokic.
Now Hingis is preparing herself for a return to the red clay of Roland Garros, starting on May 29, in an attempt to win the one major title to elude her.
The split with her mother was quickly healed but Hingis has since lost, regained and lost again her world number one spot to Lindsay Davenport, and the last of her five grand slam titles came more than 15 months ago in Australia. The former Can’t Miss Swiss might aptly be renamed the Swiss Miss Can’t.
Andre Agassi has remarked that one of the most difficult aspects of tennis is that ”you have to grow up in public”. Hingis is still only 19 and there is growing evidence that last year’s traumas, both on and off the court, have led to a greater self-understanding. Asked if she could forgive the French crowd for turning against her last year she replied: ”Well, I hope they have forgiven me.”
To make sense of what happened in that final it is necessary to take into account two factors: the intensity of her desire to win the title and her previously uncomfortable relationship with Graf – or, perhaps more accurately, with Graf’s reputation and record.
Unlike the German, Hingis is not a great athlete; nor does she have Graf’s weight of shot. Consequently, when she reeled off three grand slam titles in 1997 and was denied the true grand slam by having been beaten in the French Open final by Croatia’s Iva Majoli, she was aware of those who argued that her sudden rise to prominence had occurred only because Graf was injured.
The rise and rise of the Williams sisters and the resurgence of Davenport, another huge hitter, added fuel to the argument, with Hingis struggling to cope with their combined power.
So when, for the first time, she found herself facing Graf over the net in a grand slam final, she was bursting to prove a point, even if Graf was on the point of retirement. What better moment could there have been for Hingis to win her first French title than by beating the German, and what other explanation could there be for her remarkable loss of control when she was apparently cruising to victory?
Indeed, such was the intensity of that white-hot moment, it ultimately destroyed Hingis’s challenge. She was so convinced she had been wronged, and wasted so much nervous energy trying to right it, that she lost.
”I was surprised she was worrying so much about that point. It’s a game but I felt that for her it was something more than that,” said Graf. So it was, for Hingis was desperate to win. ”It would just have felt so good.” An innocuous little sentence but one carrying a wealth of meaning. As she perceived it, those pro-Graf critics would have finally and irrevocably been knocked off her shoulder. But it was not to be.
Hingis’s idea of a perfect day remains ”to win any grand slam and then have a picture taken with the trophy. You’re happy with yourself, you believe in yourself … you do something and you do it right. And then you can enjoy the rest.”
The backlash of the Graf defeat saw the relationship with her mother briefly severed, followed by the humiliation of defeat by Dokic. Yet, at this very moment of blackest, bleakest adversity, Graf’s retirement drew the line under the past that Hingis’s defeat at Roland Garros had failed to do. Suddenly there was a future.
Hingis has a talent which in the modern blast-and-pass game is virtually unique. ”I have never played anybody who has a sense for the court the way she has, not anybody,” said Graf. Yet this may not be enough. For, as in the men’s game, power is the potent force.
The first intimations of troubles ahead for Hingis came three years ago, and again it was Roland Garros which provided the stage. After winning the Australian Open, her first grand slam title, Hingis had a riding accident and arrived in Paris some way short of full fitness. She nevertheless reached the final, only to find herself run into the ground by an inspired Majoli.
This defeat, which saw Hingis stretched to the limits of her physical capacity, later became a template for others, notably for Venus and Serena Williams and especially Davenport, who revolutionised her training techniques to add mobility to her intrinsic power. Her demolition of Hingis in this year’s Australian Open bordered on the dismissive.
There is invariably a time, as champions establish themselves, when winning is a breeze. ”Things are flying and perhaps they come a little too easy,” said Graf. This happened to Hingis. ”There was nothing which I could improve on, so I was taking it easy. I didn’t even practise much.” Her mother was not entirely happy but figured that, while her daughter was winning with such ease, there was no point forcing the issue of practice and training and risking teenage tantrums or, worse still, alienation. Such were Hingis’s supreme gifts that she could, and still can, beat the majority of players, and beat them comprehensively, by sheer technical brilliance and a tennis brain of formidable acuity.
However, a semifinal defeat by Monica Seles in the 1998 French Open (another seminal moment at Roland Garros) persuaded her that she had to train even harder. She had beaten Venus Williams in the quarter- finals and presumed the title was then hers for the taking. But her stamina gave out against Seles and still remains in question. She has yet to beat both Williams sisters during the course of a tournament.
Yet, despite losing to Serena in last year’s US Open final, and then to Davenport in Australia, Hingis believes she is on the right road to extend her record of five grand slam wins (Australia 1997, ’98, ’99, Wimbledon ’97 and the US Open ’97).
”I’m happy and playing well. There’s just Lindsay right now and it will be nice to play her again and beat her,” said Hingis, who must have been mightily relieved by this year’s decline, through injury, of both the Williams sisters, while noting Davenport’s back problems in Rome last week – a tournament the Swiss pulled out of because of a foot injury.
She spends little time in Switzerland these days, preferring to be in Slovakia, where she was born, or in Florida, and has been dating the Czech ice hockey player Pavel Kubina. ”I think athletes in general understand the lifestyle and what you have to do to be at the top. There is very little amount of time to spend together and enjoy yourself, so that’s hard for others to understand.”
There were times last year when Hingis, who had been used to speaking her mind, felt the world had turned against her and raged against what she deemed to be unfair criticism. ”You have those steps in your life, particularly when you’re in the limelight.” But she is not worrying about the past any more. ”I’m just looking to the future.”
There are no promises and no certainties. She is taking one tournament at a time. But how dearly she would love to be proclaimed the winner at Roland Garros on June 10. ”Somehow the French Open has never been lucky for me. But I will win it.”
Men’s seeds
1 A Agassi (US)
2 P Sampras (US)
3 M Norman (Swe)
4 Y Kafelnikov (Rus)
5 G Kuerten (Bra)
6 C Pioline (Fr)
7 N Kiefer (Ger)
8 T Enqvist (Swe)
9 L Hewitt (Aus)
10 A Corretja (Sp)
11 N Lapentti (Ecu)
12 M Safin (Rus)
13 T Henman (GB)
14 D Hrbaty (Slovak)
15 Y El Aynaoui (Mor)
16 JC Ferrero (Sp)
Women’s seeds
1 M Hingis (Swit)
2 L Davenport (US)
3 M Seles (US)
4 V Williams (US)
5 C Martinez (Sp)
6 M Pierce (Fr)
7 N Tauziat (Fr)
8 S Williams (US)
9 A Sanchez-Vicario (Sp)
10 A Coetzer (SA)
11 S Testud (Fr)
12 A Huber (Ger)
13 J Halard-Decugis (Fr)
14 A Mauresmo (Fr)
15 A Kournikova (Rus)
16 J Capriati (US)