Don’t you miss the good old days when Martina Hingis was still playing—the days when her presence on the court with, say, Anna Kournikova or Steffi Graf could lead an umpire to make the announcement, “Attention, tournament referee—saucer of milk on Court No. 1 please.”
In case you missed it, Fellow Press Pariah Jon Wertheim wrote a great appreciation of Hingis on the back page of the April 2005 issue of the mother ship, TENNIS Magazine.
Anyway, guess who should come strolling by while I’m catching up with Paul McNamee and Daniel Chambon (see below, “The Latin Slam?”)? Martina sat down with us—she’s known these guys at the table for ages, and before long they’re off and running, telling war stories.
You can Chucky this and Chucky that—the fact is Hingis has the lights-on appeal of a starlet, and she’s pleasantly free of all that boring waifishness that’s so common today. She wore no makeup, and a simple gray dress with a provocative and revealing slit along almost the entire length on either side. You didn’t exactly have to crane your neck or do contortions to see that her panties were red. How Hingis.
She has a wicked sense of humor, this one, and a guttural laugh that she likes to practice at least three times per thought. She’s more fun than a champagne water slide.
Here are a few things I never knew about Martina back when we had just the typically stilted player–press pariah relationship: She takes sugar with black coffee but nothing with regular coffee (this is kind of like hitting your down-the-line forehand with an Eastern grip, and the crosscourt with a Western); she spent the interval before the final set of that infamous 2002 Australian Open “heatstroke final” with Jennifer Capriati, crying (rumor had it that she covered herself in ice in the locker room); the player whose skills she most respects is—Jennifer Capriati. “Jen is the only girl who can hit any shot,” Martina said. “She can do anything with the ball.”
Speaking of which . . . Martina reports that Jen is still on the mend—and she would know. Hingis has spent most of the month at her home near Capriati’s in Tampa. She’s been hitting some, too. Nothing too major, but she’s taken advantage of the opportunity whenever someone like Justine Henin-Hardenne has been around and wanting to spar.
Hingis described her unofficial comeback match at Pattaya City for us in hilarious detail, gleefully painting a picture of her first-rounder against Germany’s Marlene Weingartner. Apparently, the match turned around when Martina, with a big lead of a set-plus, hit the scoreboard with an errant serve that caused the letters of Weingartner’s name to drop off.
“She got so pissed,” Martina said, her eyes just glittering slits. “She began to play like crazy and all the balls were going in. Inside, I was laughing. And I knew that was it when she won the second set. No way I was fit enough to win a long match. Oh well.”
It’s funny, some of us—the real tennis nuts are the prime offenders, I think—are prone to casting tennis in life-and-death terms, and the higher up you go in the food chain the more dead serious it is. While this certainly is true of some people (Pete Sampras or Steffi Graf, anyone?), it isn’t universal. Thank God we also have the Hingises and Gerulaitises and Shrivers—not to mention the scads of journeymen and women who just plain know that what they’re engaged in isn’t exactly tragedy, even if it can be more than pure comedy. I’m sure that a lot of people were wondering about how bummed out Hingis must have felt after losing that comeback match, and the answer clearly is—not at all. She was laughing.
And here’s another thing I didn’t know about Hingis: Goran Ivanisevic used to go nuts wondering why this grinning little pudge Hingis (they squared off a few times in Hopman Cup, McNamee’s event) was so good at returning his serve—acknowledged as one of the deadliest ever.
“He would always try to hit that big slice by me,” Hingis recalled, “and it just played very naturally to a shot I liked to hit, the inside-out backhand. And I didn’t have to worry about the net player, because his partner always was Iva {Majoli}. It wasn’t like she was going to poach.” (Majoli, a stereotypical clay-courter, still thinks a volley is the bottomland between two mountains.)
And just in case you’re wondering, Hingis said she hadn’t really made any kind of decision about a further comeback, one way or the other. But she knows that if she were to try, she would have to embrace a serious practice and fitness regimen.
In her heyday, that meant four-hours-per-day sessions while rivals like Capriati were doing—whatever.