From the publishers of THE HINDU Vol. 24 :: No. 38 :: Sep. 22 - 28, 2001	Home Contents
	COVER STORY/U. S. OPEN The Man with the Magic Feet NIRMAL SHEKAR ONE of the biggest reasons - perhaps quite the most compelling reason - why we watch sport is that it is an activity where anything can happen. It is a world without certainties, even where a Tiger Woods or a Pete Sampras is involved. AFP Their expressions say it all. After three marvellous victories, finally Sampras looked his age as Hewitt played irresistible tennis. A slice of sport is quite unlike a movie or a book or a play. A racy thriller may be loaded with suspense, and however much you may enjoy it, you know that the ending has already been decided, no matter that you may not have got to it. As much is true of a film. But sport? Sport is another matter altogether. It is a world where anything can happen and more often than not you don't have a clue as to what might unfold next. Yet, long years of watching sport prepares you somewhat to expect the unexpected, to posit possibilities unlikely to form part of the majority view. For, as a hardened observer of the sports scene, you do know that there is no such thing as a sure thing, there is no such thing, for instance, as a perfect climax to a perfect fortnight in Grand Slam tennis. For all that, who would have thought that a marvellous 12 days of tennis at Flushing Meadows in the last Grand Slam event of the year would finally lead us to the sort of final acts that we witnessed, with a sure feeling of disappointment, last fortnight? On the very scene of many a glorious battle over two weeks, with the events holding out the promise of two unforgettable title fights, what we saw finally enacted were two brief, eminently forgettable ceremonies where surrender treaties were signed! Ah sport, capricious sport! With a seductress's coquettish charm it sets out to woo us with the promise of a bounty only to mock at us as we sit, deflated, over a weekend such as at the U.S.Open when yet another Sister Act flopped and a tired legend was left praying for a pair of fresh young legs, the sort of "wheels" that steered his opponent, 10 years younger, to a maiden Grand Slam title. From being a glorious promise, anything-can-happen finally turns out to be a consolation as we ponder the sibling rivalry that will never perhaps become the rivalry that tennis fans hoped it would be, and the cruel irony of the game's most successful major league champion - after beating every man who has won the championship over the last four years in three celebrated matches - standing powerless against a 20-year-old playing in his first Slam final. Surely, not even the eventual champions, Venus Williams and Lleyton Hewitt, would have expected to get the job done quite as easily as they did over the climactic weekend at the Arthur Ashe stadium. REUTERS It is obvious that Serena Williams (left) doesn't relish playing older sister Venus on a big stage. If Venus has made it a habit of dominating the second half of the season - she won the Wimbledon and U. S. Open last year too - then for Hewitt the triumph at Flushing Meadows marked his first in a major event in what was his Grand Slam final debut. In fact, Hewitt has not even won a Super Nine event, all his nine other titles coming in lower category tournaments. After beating three successive Open champions, Pat Rafter (1997,98), Andre Agassi (1999) and Marat Safin (2000) without losing a single service game, the great master of Grand Slam tennis was generally expected to walk all over the young pretender in the final. But, barring a roller-coaster first set in which a chair umpire over-rule gave Hewitt the lead in the tiebreaker which he then ran away with, the match was an absolute disaster from Sampras' point of view. After having authored a spectacular turnaround during which he offered us more than mere glimpses of the Sampras of old, the great man was running on empty on that Sunday as the mercurial Aussie, working on younger and fresher legs, dominated the second and third sets. "It's upto Pete," Safin said after the semifinal loss to the great man when asked about his pick for the final. "Everybody who goes out to play him knows it. Pete is pure talent and Hewitt is a hard worker, a fighter. I think it depends on Pete." Indeed it did. Young as he is, Safin was very much on the mark. Every time a great, gifted champion like Sampras steps out to play, the outcome depends, more than anything else, on how well he plays, on whether as Safin pointed out, the genius comes up with his "A" game. This is very much true of every big match that Sampras has played on a big stage for the most part of his career. If, on that Sunday, Sampras' legs had responded to the mind's call well enough and the great man had played at 75 per cent of his ability, he would have beaten Hewitt in a tough match. If had played at 90 per cent, Sampras would have won in straight sets. As it turned out, the 13-time Grand Slam champion played at 50 per cent on unwilling legs and endured a second straight mauling at the very place where he announced himself as a world beater 11 years ago, beating Andre Agassi for his first Slam title. "You have to give respect. Pete is Pete. It's upto him," said an awed Safin after losing to the four-time champion in straight sets. But the point is, on court, Pete wasn't Pete on that afternoon while Hewitt climbed on some invisible ladder to play the finest tennis of his career for a famous victory, perhaps the first of many for the young man working on the finest pair of legs in the men's game since Michael Chang ran everybody to the ground at the French Open in 1989. If Sampras himself was flat as water on a tin plate following the tumultuous events starting with the match against Rafter and then the classic against Agassi, Hewitt proved that he was much more than an ambitious acolyte. Cracking winners like a kid living out his deepest fantasies, the the young Aussie brought up a fairytale climax to a fortnight in which he had triggered a controversy with some on-court remarks that were perceived as racist. Whether he deserved the sort of adverse publicity he got for those remarks is debatable but there is no doubt at all that Hewitt, labelled the Boy with Attitude, carries his on-court aggression a little too far at times. He is a freshly minted millennium version of Jimmy Connors but lacks the great champion's spontaneity and sense of humour. In the event, if Connors, even at the worst of times, was enjoyable theatre, then the Hewitt Show does not quite regale the audience as did the Connors Act time after time. For all that, the little Aussie dynamo put the pieces back together with tremendous courage following the traumatic second round match against James Blake of the United States and then survived an excruciating five-setter against Andy Roddick in the quarterfinal. Perhaps it was his victory over Roddick that made Hewitt believe that he could go all the way and realise his dream. For, in that match, Hewitt had his back to the wall late in the fifth set. Serving in the ninth game, the young man staved off breakpoints with in-the-trenches resolve and then saw his opponent dig his own grave following a dispute on an over-rule. The experienced Yevgeny Kafelnikov was routed in the semifinal as Hewitt turned counter punching into an art form. And it was this virtue again that saw the young man turn one of the game's greatest giants into a hapless punching bag for two full sets in the final. "I have had to work on little areas of my game to be able to counterpunch those (big) guys," Hewitt said. "The return of serve is something I've worked on since I was nine or 10 playing in four or three year age groups against the bigger guys. I have always been a big returner." That the big returner was fast approaching the big league was obvious last year when Hewitt won tournaments in Adelaide (his hometown), Sydney, Scottsdale and Queen's Club where he beat Sampras on grass in the final. Then, after losing to the great man in the semifinals of the U. S. Open in straight sets, Hewitt qualified for the Masters' Cup in Lisbon before ending the year with over $3 million in prize money. The first teenager to win four ATP Tour titles in a year since Sampras in 1990, Hewitt struck up a wonderful rapport with his coach Darren Cahill and was widely recognised as one of a handful of young men who could go on to dominate the sport in the first decade of the new millennium. This was acknowledged by Sampras himself after his loss to the Australian. "You will see him contending here for the next 10 years," said the former world champion. You cannot argue with that assessment. Hewitt is certainly one of a few talented young players who seem set to rule men's tennis in the years to come. Safin, Roddick and the Swiss player Roger Federer are not far behind, to be sure. Then again, when it comes to being contenders at the Slams, you still cannot count out the dinosaurs Sampras and Agassi. While Agassi's name was on everybody's lips ahead of this year's U. S. Open, Sampras was almost forgotten. No matter the loss to Hewitt, what Sampras did over the two weeks was to prove that he still had it in him to win a major. As I said earlier, if Pete Sampras is playing at 100 per cent no man can stand across the court from him and make any sort of impression. You have to bring back a Bill Tilden or a Rod Laver or a Lew Hoad or Bjorn Borg at their respective peaks to see what happens. I have believed this firmly over a dozen years... and still do. That's precisely why one would like to think that Safin hit the nail on its head. It's upto Pete, really. But, on the flip side, one has to admit that even if Sampras' racquet skills stand by him for the next three or four of five years, his legs may not. Working through what was perhaps his toughest draw at a Slam in many years, Sampras found out that his legs wouldn't respond anymore once he got to the title match. This apart, Sampras was also "done in," so to say, by the scheduling at the Open. If you looked at the results of the semifinals and the finals in the men's event over the last 20 years, you'd find out that more than 75 per cent of the time it is the man who had played the second semifinal on Saturday who is left holding the runner-up plate on Sunday. As the only Slam that does not provide for a day off between the semifinals and the final, the Open at New York has always been unkind to the winner of the second semifinal who has very little time to recover. In fact, the situation used to be even worse when the second semifinal was played after the women's final. And when you consider the fact that the great man was giving his opponent 10 years - which is a whole lifetime in pro tennis - the odds might become obvious. Then again, the last thing that the great man would look for is excuses. In his mind, he was beaten fair and square by a talented young man with seemingly motorised legs, and that was that. Serena Williams, for her part, would also admit to as much after her latest Slam defeat to her older sister. Over the last two years, Serena, the first in the family to win a Grand Slam title (1999, U. S. Open) has found out that playing Venus on a big stage in front of thousands of people was not quite the same as slugging it out with Big Sis at home. The younger Williams sister seems to tighten up a bit even as Venus Williams, growing in confidence over the last 12 months, has become the irresistible force of women's tennis. That she is not yet the game's No.1 player is more because of the fact that she does not play enough tournaments to gain the necessary WTA points. For, a second year in a row, Venus has proved that she is in an orbit of her own. And that is her point, really... forget the numbers game. Contents • Daily Sports • The Hindu • Business Line • Frontline • Home Copyrights © 2001 The Sportstar Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Sportstar.