Well, the wickedest little juggernaut this side of a missile-armed Predator drone keeps winning, and pundits and commentators keep falling into step. Martina Hingis advanced again yesterday, in a yawner. At the same time, Mary Pierce got bounced by Iveta Benesova, KO’ing a potential third-round dream match between two resurgent Grand Slam title winners.
Now it seems reasonable to expect Hingis to make her quarterfinal date with Kim Clijsters, although this is exactly the point at which Hingis needs to be careful. For a champ returning to the game, like Hingis, brain-fatigue is easily as big an enemy as sore joints or a sore arm. She really needs to guard against going into the Benesova match with a blasé, been-there/done-that attitude. And it doesn't matter that she actually has been there and done that.
Great players on the comeback trail have to prove that they can still win big matches against top players. But first, they usually have to prove something less attention-grabbing but even more important: that they can grind out routine wins against tricky, troublesome, or extra-motivated foes. It’s a lot different meeting a Benesova in Round 3, after she’s smoked a contender, than in Round 1. So I see the upcoming match with Benesova as a more intriguing and potentially telling match.
Meanwhile, Lindsay Davenport has weighed in on Hingis’s game with opinions that mirror my own. If you listen to the doubters (and I’m surprised that Mary Carillo is among them), you’d think the women’s game was all about power, particularly from the serving line. This is a fiction. Women’s tennis is still predominantly a battle of groundstroke placement and consistency; just look at the two most important words in the women’s scoring lexicon: “unforced errors.”
Beyond that, though, I also see in Davenport’s charitable remarks the hint of a new alliance between two natural allies—kind of like when like-minded cheerleaders, realizing that neither is very likely to be elected Queen of the Prom anymore, form a pact to promote each other, thereby better positioning themselves to seize any opportunity that does happen to come their way.
Soundtrack: the Go-Gos
That's it. I’m outta here.