Hingis Jumps Forward Into New Life
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Hingis Jumps Forward Into New Life
By GEORGE VECSEY
SCHINDELLEGI, Switzerland
SHE started off as the youngest tennis player on the Tour. Now she is the youngest student in her English class. Martina Hingis always was precocious.
Most of the students are 30 to 50 years old, taking the language for enrichment or for their jobs. She is only 22, but, like many of her classmates, she is into her second career, a new path, a new adventure.
She plays tennis, yes. She plays it for fun — a human rebound machine, she says with a smile. She plays with her mom and says she has fun doing that, too. There is no longer the tension between the coach and the pupil. Martina Hingis is past that. She is retired.
People don't want to hear that. This is surely a temporary aberration, this pain in her feet. Just recently, Lindsay Davenport sent advice all the way from Australia that it was time for Hingis to deal with losing and to play through the pain.
"I don't want her to feel sorry for me," Hingis said yesterday from a family home overlooking Lake Zurich. "Lindsay had an absolutely different injury. How would she know how I feel? That was her decision. I think I should be allowed to make mine."
The decision is not to play, not now, not on the WTA Tour, not the six-hour practices, not the matches when the bottom of her feet felt as if they were sagging onto the court. She will not play anymore. Is that clear? As the country music song goes, what part of no don't people understand?
She seems to have a grip. It's impossible to tell, of course, because almost all the time she was a professional, from the time she was 13, she conducted herself with a smile that seemed eerie to some and mature to others.
Now she seems as poised as a newly retired athlete can be, with no grief lines that often accompany the death of an athletic career.
Some men go into decade-long funks, trying to remain the dude they used to be. Hingis went out and enrolled in an English class. Three mornings and one afternoon a week, she drives her yellow Porsche to the demanding classes out near the Zurich airport. This is a statement. More than a decade ago, she left primary school and children her own age and began using tutors on the Tour. Now she has gone back to quotidian Swiss life.
"How do you structure things again?" she said yesterday in English that is already quite subtle and serviceable. "I was taught to have discipline. You eat. You sleep. You practice. This gave me a chance to do things I was never able to do. This is where my life is just starting. Everything happened so fast. Now there are not so many stresses."
She had ankle operations, but the bottom of her feet still hurt. There is a lawsuit involving tennis shoes supplied by her former sponsor, Sergio Tacchini. It is hard to imagine Hingis staging this retirement as part of some legal ploy. She seems almost relieved.
She watched bits of the Australian Open, more impressed than ever with what Serena Williams has done in winning four straight Grand Slam events: "She wrote history, a great accomplishment," she said. Hingis, who won five Grand Slams, is in touch with "Monica" (Seles) and "Anna" (Kournikova), and knows she will see her other pals on the Tour down the line.
She does not miss the play. She thinks she might eventually use her English skills in college courses and in business. For now, she represents various sponsors at events like the opening of the world ski championships in St. Moritz, where she went down the hill in a toboggan.
"I ski, I go for a run with my mom, I play tennis," Hingis said. "I am maybe sore, but no pain-killers. It's not five to six hours a day."
She still has a house in Florida. Yesterday she thought out loud that she would not mind being warm. But then she said: "I love Switzerland. I love my house. I love being home."
This home is shared by her mother, Melanie Molitor, and her mother's companion, Mario Widmer, an accomplished Swiss sports journalist. Molitor has been helping tutor Myriam Casanova, a young Swiss player, and Widmer helps Hingis with her appointments.
Hingis has her own house in Trubbach, near the Liechtenstein border, and sometimes she stays with Molitor and Widmer in this pleasant hillside town, half an hour south of Zurich.
And then there is her horse. Hingis has always been around horses. One year she fell off, perhaps costing her the French Open title, the only major that she never won. She fell off another horse in Australia. She petted the great Cigar at Belmont when she was 13. She cajoled a trainer to let her ride a sedate exercise pony on the main track at Belmont.
"I am going to go riding," she said to a visitor yesterday. "Would you like to come along?"
Hingis changed into her riding gear and drove the Porsche down the hill, to a stable and indoor riding area. There she greeted her new chestnut mare, Lytizia, 8 years old.
"Some horses, if you make a mistake, they back off, they don't want to jump — but she just wants to go," Hingis said, stroking Lytizia's mane, as the mare cuddled up to her.
The pair began a slow, circular tour, but then "the competitiveness comes out," Hingis said, undoubtedly referring to both of them. They became a unit, edging toward the meter-high jumps in the center. Then Lytizia was over a jump, and over again, at a faster rate.
Once there was a slight clatter as Lytizia's front hoof clipped the jump, but the mare circled around and jumped again. In the cold and pungent stable, Hingis displayed her trademark smile. She is 22, and she is riding off into sunsets of her own choosing.
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※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.csie.ntu.edu.tw)
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