Australian Open Kicks Off Big Year Men, Women Look Forward To Plenty Of Drama In 1998

Andre Agassi is skinny again, his goatee is gone, and his yearlong honeymoon is over.

Mr. Shields is serious.

So is Pete Sampras, whose weight and face never change and who is defending his Australian Open championship, starting Monday, while going for an 11th major title.

Defending women’s champ Martina Hingis is chubbier, her hair is dyed dark, and she’s not jumping on Miracle Girl, the horse that threw her last year.

Hingis is serious, too. Especially after getting tossed early from the tuneup tournament in Sydney by the spicy new girl, Venus Williams.

Tennis is poised to begin perhaps its best and most fascinating year of the decade at the sun-roasted Australian Open, as rivalries in both the men’s and women’s game revive or emerge.

If Agassi, the 1995 winner here, is ready to cross rackets once more with Sampras, or if U.S. Open champion Patrick Rafter is up to the task, the sport will get the boost it needs.

“I’m second favorite with about 20 other guys,” Rafter says of the distance between Sampras and the rest of the contenders that has hurt interest the past two years.

For the moment, the sport will ride the momentum of the women’s game.

Women’s tennis is headed toward a boom year, one of those once-in-a-generation seasons where brilliant young players collide with established champions, with strong contenders scattered throughout.

Hingis. Venus and Serena Williams. Anna Kournikova. Mirjana Lucic. The return soon of Steffi Graf. The potential is huge for marquee matches at all the majors.

At the Australian, Agassi won’t be seeded, and he doesn’t deserve to be after his indifferent slide to No. 86. But he wound up fortuitously in Rafter’s half of the draw, on the opposite side from Sampras.

It’s a long way from happening, perhaps only a fanciful thought, but nothing would give tennis higher TV ratings around the world than a Sampras-Agassi final.

Venus Williams won’t be seeded, but she should be. Imagine the viewers who would tune in if she and her 16-year-old sister, Serena, were to face each other in the women’s final.

Won’t happen.

Only in tennis does a major championship give an advantage to some players who don’t deserve it, and shoot itself in the box office at the same time, by slavish adherence to strangely concocted, computerized rankings.

When the Australian Open stuck by the rankings this year, it set up the early elimination of one of the two hottest players - Serena and Venus Williams.

It wasn’t enough that the women’s draw already was missing Graf, Monica Seles and Jana Novotna. Now at least one of the Williams sisters is guaranteed to be gone in the first or second round. And maybe both will.

For a sport that needs all the personality it can find, the Australian Open blew it.

Grand Slam rules allow officials at the four majors, unlike those at other tournaments, to forgo the rankings. Wimbledon does it almost every year. The U.S. Open did it two years ago, though it stirred a fuss by also rigging the draw in a questionable way before doing it over.

But Australian Open officials, claiming the rankings have served them well in the past, decided not to make their own seedings despite plenty of good reasons for doing so.

They could have justifiably done their own seedings for the men, instead of giving five spots to Spanish players who mostly built up their ranking points on clay rather than the hardcourts used here. The exception, and a deserved seed, is last year’s finalist, Carlos Moya.

They surely would have had a strong case for veering from the women’s rankings after what transpired last week.

The 16 seeded women were announced Thursday, after No. 21-ranked Venus Williams had already beaten No. 1 Hingis and No. 19 Ruxandra Dragomir in the Sydney International.

Williams, a U.S. Open finalist who simply didn’t play enough last year to accumulate enough ranking points by the start of the Sydney tournament, certainly could have been seeded ahead of Dragomir, who got the No. 15 slot.

As it turned out, Williams would also beat Ai Sugiyama in the semifinals in Sydney. Sugiyama is seeded No. 16 in the Australian.

The new rankings on Monday will have Williams ahead of Dragomir and Sugiyama. By then it will be too late.

By not seeding Venus Williams, Australian officials increased the chances of her facing a top player early. The draw made that player either Serena or No. 6 seed Irina Spirlea, who bumped into Venus during a changeover at last year’s U.S. Open semifinal.

It would have been a big stretch to seed Serena, ranked No. 56 this week and No. 96 last week. But after the way she came back to beat second-seeded Lindsay Davenport in Sydney to reach the semifinals of her third tournament, Serena is probably better right now than half of the women who received seeds.

Certainly, she’s more charismatic, the kind of player a tournament would want to keep around.

Serena’s win against Davenport was no fluke. In her second tournament in Chicago a few months ago, Serena beat Monica Seles and Mary Pierce back to back.

But Serena drew the tough assignment of facing Spirlea in the first round of the Australian, with the winner likely to face Venus.

“I guess we won’t be in the final together,” Serena said when she saw the draw with her name and Venus’ only two lines apart.

Though only one of the Williams sisters can get past the second round - and it’s possible neither will - they don’t lack for confidence that their destiny is to rule women’s tennis.

They believe they will be No. 1 and No. 2 someday, maybe even this year. They believe they will face each other often in the finals of tournaments. And so they may. Just not in this month at the Australian.

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