TENNIS
Iain Carter
If you’ve inherited genes that survived eight years’ hard labour in a uranium mine, emerging from the lows dealt by a life spent extracting vast riches from playing tennis shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Nor does it appear so for Martina Hingis, even though she’s been handed a sentence of hard knocks that threatens to become a life term.
So far she’s served 38 months. January 1999 was the last time Hingis felt the liberating effects of achieving what she was born to do win grand slam titles. She’s garnered five, but since holding the Australian Open trophy aloft that sunny Melbourne afternoon, she has appeared in five more major finals and lost the lot.
Yet as we sat amid the idyllic surrounds of Key Biscayne, Hingis exuded a disposition to mirror our setting in the Sunshine State. She is still ambitious, but content with her achievements, which include 209 weeks as the world’s number one. “I was playing well the four years I stayed at the top,” she says. “I had quite a few challenges in that time, Lindsay Davenport, the sisters [Venus and Serena Williams] and now it’s Jennifer Capriati who’s at the top. But I’m number three at the moment and what’s important I think is just to really enjoy the game, being able to beat anyone on the day.”
Hingis was born in September 1980 in Kosice in the then Czechoslovakia. Her mother, Melanie, first put a racket in her daughter’s hand at the age of two. Melanie’s father, a landscape architect, who was sent to the uranium mines to serve eight years in virtual concentration-camp conditions for his anti-communist beliefs, was a constant source of encouragement. He died when Martina was eight, by which time she and her mother had set up home in Switzerland.
So has she inherited his fighting qualities? “Definitely, they’re [those genes] running through my mum’s body and hopefully through mine. I was always very well prepared by her to expect what’s happened and that’s how things came so naturally to me. It was such a normal thing [to be number one].
“At that point, it just was very flowing, I didn’t even think about it. I just went on court and did my thing and I was very happy doing it. Now I look at it from a different point of view. I really enjoy it with a passion, it’s not only a job, it’s the thing you want to do, you want to be successful and you want to do well. It’s amazing to look back now at what I’ve accomplished and, I hope, there’s more to come.”
The problem for Hingis is that the others possess an asset she finds elusive. For all the hours she spends in the gym, she’ll never enjoy the power of the Williams sisters, Capriati or Davenport. Results since Hingis’s last grand-slam success suggest court-craft will ultimately fall at the hands of brute force. Her intelligence on court can still win big matches, but there are now too many power players to be overcome.
Having the ball pounded back at you match after match has a debilitating effect.
To counter her slight build, Hingis was schooled to be effective with every stroke and she’s not ready to concede that such qualities are now redundant. She points to the tournament victories she’s already enjoyed in Sydney and Tokyo this year: “I think I’ve proved myself already in the beginning of the season.”
Hingis came closest to breaking the power players’ stranglehold when she held four match points against Capriati in the Australian Open final in January.
“Well, you couldn’t get any closer than that, right?” she says. “Just being one point away but sometimes it shows how far that still can be.”
Although she won’t say it, it’s fair to assume only another grand slam title will make up for the bitter disappointment of that defeat. Already she is looking ahead to the French, where she’s twice been a losing finalist, and to Wimbledon, where, aged 16 years and nine months, she was the youngest modern-day champion in 1997.
Can she win another big one? “I hope so … there is no reason to doubt myself”, is as far as she’ll go. But, in light of the setbacks of the past three years, whatever she does will be done with a refreshing attitude: “There are a lot more terrible things going on in the world, war and terrorism, so I think if you lose a tennis game it’s not such a big deal.”
It’s hard to imagine Hingis’s rivals allowing such a perspective to infringe on the ruthless streak that’s needed at the very top, which has to be a worry for those who yearn for brain to beat brawn every once in a while.