Today Is Not Just Any Saturday In The Park

Talk about your Triple Crown. Martina Hingis loves horses and is a refugee from the former Soviet bloc. That gives her something in common with both Silver Charm and the Detroit Red Wings on this extraordinary Saturday.

Three sporting coronations were possible as the day began. The young and charismatic Hingis was going for the French Open tennis title in Paris. Silver Charm would try for the Triple Crown of thoroughbred racing at Belmont Park this afternoon. And the redder-than-red Red Wings will try for a sweep of the Stanley Cup hockey finals tonight in Detroit.

This is not a normal day, not when three different championships are being contested in gathering places named after a World War I fighter pilot (Roland Garros), a wealthy family (Belmont) and a legendary heavyweight boxing champion (Joe Louis).

In all three of these highly anticipated events, the favorites had a touch of the outsider, and they were trying to prove a point bigger than a single championship.

Hingis is threatening to match the other teenagers who have dominated tennis in recent decades. Silver Charm is trying to join Secretariat and the handful of other horses who could win three Grand Slam races in one riotous spring. And the Red Wings, with five Russian stalwarts, are bearing witness to the sporting skills of the defunct Soviet Union.

What with the 6-hour time difference between France and the East Coast of America, Hingis would go first. She would meet Iva Majoli of Croatia on the gritty red clay just south of the Bois de Boulogne.

The French Open always has an alien feel to most Americans, who don’t get into tennis until Wimbledon, which begins two weeks from Monday. The French is often dominated by European players who have mastered the thick, slow surface but struggle on grass and hard courts.

Hingis is something else. With her photogenic smile, she transcends nationality and surface. Her mother, Melanie Molitor, took her from Czechoslovakia to Switzerland at an early age; the prodigy has been encouraged to mature as a worldly young woman, at her pace. She rides a horse often enough to be regularly thrown for a loop. She and her mother know their way around museums and restaurants. And the kid is a killer on the court. She had won 37 straight matches going into today’s final, on pace to be as good as Evert, Austin, Navratilova, Graf and Seles. The only thing that might stop her would be a four-legged beast with a flare for the unexpected.

Silver Charm is more than a riding academy pet. He has emerged from the demolition derby that is 3-year-old racing to win the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, the first two legs of the Triple Crown. No horse has won those two races and the Belmont since Affirmed in 1978.

Americans tend to treat the Belmont with about as much interest as they do clay-court tennis. The average American fan pays attention to 2 minutes of racing every year, on the first Saturday in May. And that’s fine, because the Kentucky Derby is the Wimbledon of horse racing. But today, the Belmont is about immortality.

The third leg takes place at Joe Louis Arena in downtown Detroit, the spiritual home of the auto industry. In the Motor City, you could get called a dirty name for driving an auto made in Japan or Germany. Buy American. That’s the slogan. But the management of the Red Wings has seen the future, or rather the past, and assembled five crucial parts from the faded hockey foundry.

The five ex-Soviets come with differing temperaments and ages (teammates call Vladimir Konstantinov “George,” as in “Curious George,” the rambunctious simian with a penchant for trouble), but collectively they have been the revelation of this Stanley Cup. They bring maturity and skill and a finely tempered malice, a Dream Team within the Red Wings.

In the first two games, whenever Scotty Bowman would stick three Russians on the ice together, Philadelphia fans had nothing better to do than chant “U.S.A.!” Where did they think Eric Lindros was from, South Philly? He’s a foreigner, too, albeit from Canada, and the Flyers have their own Europeans, but the lunkheads in the stands were reviving the Cold War.

There may be no outsiders anymore. On this day of a potential triple coronation, it’s all about talent.