Credit: Andrew Campbell
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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Whee!
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Martina Hingis [SUI]Born: 30 September 1980
Career: 1995-2002, 2006-07, 2013-17 (doubles only)
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1998)
Peak Elo rating: 2,549 (1st place, 2001)
Major singles titles: 5
Total singles titles: 43
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Love her or loathe her, Martina Hingis was a quote machine.
“I mean, I have so many records already.” No big deal, 16-year-old Martina just won Wimbledon, brushing aside Mary Pierce in a 59-minute final.
The same year: “It’s all the time, ‘Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods.’ I am better than he is. I’ve been on top longer and I am younger. I’m just better.” Yeah, what has that Woods guy ever done, anyway?
At US Open juniors in 1994: “Boy, that was easy.” That’s how she greeted Anna Kournikova at the net after beating her, 6-0, 6-0. Anna probably wasn’t the only one to hear that line.
To Detour magazine: “I’m glad you’re doing this story on us and not on the WNBA. We’re so much prettier than all the other women in sports.”
My favorite of all, at the coin toss before a match with Lindsay Davenport: “OK, do you want to get broken first, or do you want to let me hold?”
Hingis was a journalist’s dream, a bright, witty teen with no filter. She was arrogant, no doubt, but most of what she said was at least partly true. (There were exceptions, sometimes noxious ones, like when she called Amélie Mauresmo “half a man.”) She did set records with almost everything she did in the mid-1990s. Winning matches was easy. I’m not endorsing the WNBA line, but in 1998, magazine editors had a definite preference for Martina, Anna, and their rivals.
Even her attitude was logical, she thought: “I’m number one in the world. Unless that changes soon, I have a right to be arrogant.”
Eventually, she got roped into a media training course. She came out as unfiltered as ever. She already knew that stuff, she said.
Hingis had the same reaction after a brief spell with master tactician Brad Gilbert, the man who Andre Agassi considered the greatest coach of all time. “Everything he told me,” she said, “my mother had already said to me years ago.”
She was, as S.L. Price wrote in 2002, the smartest girl in the room. For a few years, otherworldly touch and impeccable court sense were enough. It was an era when size mattered and women hit harder than ever before. Yet Hingis wasn’t big, her serve even less so. Her peak years were David and Goliath adapted for Nickelodeon: David always won, and the underdog capped every episode with a sassy putdown.
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There was a contradiction between the on-court and off-court Hingis. With a racket in her hands, she was capable of subtlety far beyond her years. In the clubhouse or the press room, no one was more blunt.
When Martina was winning, the arrogance added to her aura. Intimidation has always had its place in a one-on-one sport like tennis, and plenty of champions have adopted a more confident persona when speaking for the public record. Hingis had the same effect, even if she didn’t have strategy in mind as she explained to reporters why she was better than a rival.
“What rivalry?” she said of Kournikova. “I win all the matches.”
The downside of such directness showed up when she was losing. Despite her bluster before at least one coin toss, the Swiss Miss had particular trouble with the tall, hard-hitting Davenport. Hingis lost the 2000 Australian Open final to the American, 6-1, 7-5. It was her fourth straight loss to Davenport, and only a late lapse from the champion prevented it from becoming a complete rout.
After the match, Hingis blurted, “I just can’t play you.” Now 19 years old, she should’ve known better. It may have humanized her a bit–a useful shift for gaining fans and sponsors, but not a good way to keep her foot on the neck of the tour’s rank and file.
Hingis and Davenport in 1998
Davenport couldn’t believe it. It was quite a line to hear from the number one player in the world. After the admission, no one was surprised two months later, when Hingis lost to her rival yet again. While the Indian Wells final went three sets, it ended in a 6-0 set for the American. Hingis had only permitted her opponents five bagels in the past four years: three of them to Steffi Graf, and a fourth in a match she ended up winning.
There’s a postscript to this story, though. Yes, Martina could get frustrated. But as with her cockier utterances, she was never thinking too far ahead. She was discouraged in the short term only. Two weeks after Indian Wells, Hingis and Davenport met again for the title in Miami. Their 19th career encounter was all Martina, 6-3, 6-2.
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The latest twist in the rivalry wouldn’t have surprised Davenport. She knew as well as anyone how canny the Swiss Miss could be. She told a reporter in 1999, “Martina takes on a doubles player for a year, figures them out, and then moves on.” It didn’t always take a year: Hingis and Davenport paired up just once.
(Either Martina had a knack for picking partners, or she was so good it didn’t matter. Between 1996 and 2002, she won nine women’s doubles majors with six different partners.)
One indication of Hingis’s tennis brain was her lack of losing streaks like the one against Davenport. It took an excellent player to beat her twice; only a very select group managed it three times in a row. She played Venus Williams 19 times before she retired in 2002. Martina won 10. The first time Venus recorded back-to-back defeats, in late 1999, Hingis came back to beat her the next month in straights. Williams won both of their meetings in 2000, including a hard-fought US Open semi-final that many experts viewed as a sign that Hingis was on the way down. After that? 6-1, 6-1 to Martina in Melbourne.
Williams and Davenport held their own against Hingis. In 2001 and 2002, Jennifer Capriati and Serena Williams joined the club. Martina stayed a step ahead of everyone else.
Hingis’s game was built on balance and feel: She had them, and after a little while on court with her, you didn’t. Unless you caught her on an off day, your only chance was to hit it by her. Even that wasn’t as easy as it looked.
Hingis at the 1995 French Open
“No one I’ve ever played has as good a court sense as Martina,” Monica Seles said in 2002. “She anticipates a step before anyone else. When we played doubles together, she would pick up balls I didn’t think she could get and place them.”
“She’s just a genius,” said Billie Jean King.
The more protracted the rally, the more time Hingis had to shine. She won few points off her serve, and she didn’t hit an unusually high number of return winners. She certainly didn’t go for broke on the return the way many players do today. Every exchange was constructed. The opponents who bedeviled her–like Davenport–were the ones who could short-circuit her plans by ending points early.
After securing the 1997 US Open title, Martina said of the defeated Venus Williams, “She plays the game I like: She tries to keep the ball in play. That’s too dangerous if you play me.” Venus would get stronger and her game would evolve to become more like Davenport’s, part of the reason she won more than half of her encounters with the Swiss from that point on.
In the late 1990s, fans thought they were already watching free-swinging, low-percentage tennis from the so-called “big babes.” But Hingis would nudge the sport still further in that direction. Craftswomen who came later, like Agnieszka Radwańska, would have an increasingly difficult time blunting the power game that Davenport, Venus, Serena, and others developed in those years.
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Martina’s court smarts were primarily due to the efforts of her mother and coach, Melanie Molitor. Molitor had been a pro player in Czechoslovakia, forbidden to leave the country because her family was politically suspect and not quite good enough to justify an exception. She poured her ambition into her daughter instead. She put a racket in the toddler’s hands at age two and named her after Martina Navratilova–not just for her athletic prowess, but also for her pursuit of freedom in the West.
Hingis came along at exactly the right time for a teen prodigy. The sport’s governing bodies were finally tightening up age restrictions after Capriati’s much-publicized burnout. Hingis and Venus Williams turned pro just before the new rules took effect.
Martina and her mother were not particularly concerned about the risks facing a teenager on tour. Molitor was careful not to work her daughter too hard, and she encouraged Martina to pursue other interests, even sports with some physical risk. Hingis shrugged off Capriati’s struggles as a distinctly American disease. “You don’t have to worry about us Europeans. We take everything a lot easier.”
Molitor wasn’t even worried about the chance that Martina’s career would end early. For her, Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger, the teen queens of the early 1980s, were role models, not cautionary tales. “Austin and Jaeger are happy people today,” she said. “Tennis is just a short stage of your life, and it can be good preparation for the rest of it.”
Hingis proved to be fully ready for the rigors of tour life. Aged 16, she won her first major at the 1997 Australian Open. She reached the number one ranking shortly thereafter, then kept it for a year and a half. She would go on to hold the top spot for more than 200 weeks, all before her 22nd birthday.
She had the usual adolescent ups and downs, struggling as her body changed and learning to balance the sport with a social life. But she liked celebrity and its perks. While she lost some motivation after achieving so much so early–she frequently called herself “lazy” and her mother emphatically agreed–she never stopped winning.
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Hingis and Molitor were right that burnout wouldn’t be a problem. Martina was forced off the tour by the other scourge of athletes doing too much, too young: injury.
Like Austin and Jaeger, Martina tried to play a 25-year-old’s schedule when she was 15. Maybe it was worth it. She became the youngest player ever to earn $1 million in prize money.
Martina had knee surgery in early 1997–one explanation for her shock loss to Iva Majoli at Roland Garros, her only defeat at a major that season. Feet injuries first appeared a year later, and she needed an operation on her ankle in late 2001. The feet and ankle problems, which she blamed on the shoes made by her sponsor, Sergio Tacchini, knocked her off the circuit after the 2002 season. She was 22 years old.
In 2006, a more muscular Hingis returned to the tour. It took just a month before her first top-five win, over Maria Sharapova in Tokyo. In May, she picked up the Italian Open title. In the semi-finals there, she beat Venus Williams, deploying tactics she’d had five years to devise.
Still only 25 years old, she was still the same one-of-a-kind competitor. Kim Clijsters beat her three times in 2006, even as she recognized what had made Hingis a champion: “I don’t think there’s anyone on tour who hits the ball as cleanly as she does.”
Austin, now a commentator, thought Martina could get back to the top. “I don’t think anyone’s yet figured out how to play her. She has so much diversity, no one else is used to it.”
Hingis cracked the top ten by the end of the year, and she reached number six in 2007. A hip injury shortened that season, though, and a positive test for cocaine ended her comeback.
This time, retirement stuck for longer. But the greatest doubles player of her generation, the woman who won the doubles Grand Slam in 1998 with Mirjana Lučić and Jana Novotná, eventually realized that she could make a comeback that wouldn’t demand so much from her body. As a doubles specialist between 2015 and 2017, Hingis added a whopping ten majors to her career tally, four in women’s doubles and six in mixed.
With partner Leander Paes at the 2015 Australian Open, the first of their four major titles together
In her mid-thirties, Hingis finally had a sense of what to say. She reliably credited her partners for their excellent play, sometimes even adding compliments for her opponents.
Still, the old confidence never really went away. Heading into her last tournament, the 2017 WTA Finals, she said, “We feel like we are the team to beat.” Hingis and partner Latisha Chan lost in the semi-finals, but they ended the season at the number one ranking. More than two decades after she first reached the top of the game, Martina said goodbye from the same perch.