Richard Jago in Stuttgart tennis
Wayne Ferreira, one of the game’s great under-achievers and most volatile talents, achieved the best success of his career last week in the longest final of the year.
Ferreira, the old-stager alleged to be temperamentally unsound but who has always believed in his mental toughness, beat Lleyton Hewitt in the Masters Series. The five-set final lasted four hours and 12 minutes.
“I was ready to give up on the year and go on holiday,” Ferreira said before the final, “now I am ready to play for ever.”
There were phases when it seemed he might have to. Two men who swing the ball from side to side but move forwards only occasionally did so with a mixture of angles and a consistency that was mesmerising, but which after three hours caused a steady trickle of non-aficionados to the refreshment stalls.
Ferreira somehow escaped a code violation for breaking his racquet at the end of the third set and, to the crowd’s surprise, the come-back effort took more out of Hewitt, whose decline in the latter stages he attributed to a virus.
Behind the South African’s victory lies an altered attitude. By giving up expecting so much of himself the 29-year-old has concentrated more on short-term goals and on making the best of what limited time he has left on the tour.
“I felt great physically,” he said, “which was interesting to me. I didn’t think I would be able to last like I did. I was surprised. But I hadn’t been in a final for such a long time.
“I had come so far and I was having so much fun that I wasn’t going to give up.”
His success was a minor setback to the New Balls Please campaign which has been promoting Hewitt as one of the successors to Pete Sampras.
“There are a couple of good old ones too,” Ferreira chortled after the match, “but he [Hewitt] has the ability to become number one – he has a good chance.”
The defeat denied Hewitt the chance of emulating his girlfriend Kim Clijsters who won the Sparkassen Cup in Leipzig and left a message on the Aussie’s cellphone, which he listened to as he came off court.
It also left Hewitt just short of being a certainty for the eight-man year-end tour finals in Lisbon.