Hingis’ Climb, Mom’s Design

Speculation that Melanie Molitor chose Karol Hingis as a tennis sire will endure unless their daughter Martina changes her name to, oh, Lulu or Penelope. There never has been, as far as I can determine, a tennis champion named Lulu or Penelope.

But, Martina. Only the greatest female player ever should be named Martina, which she already was.

Well, one Ken Griffey was not, I guess, enough either.

But Melanie did pick out the name even before the little girl was born. Martina, as in Navratilova. As now in Hingis. Other choices could have been Chris or Billie Jean or Tracey.

Maybe, if it had been a boy …

The point is, this was a plan, a grand prewomb plan. At this time 16 years ago, Melanie could look down at her little treasure and see her on Centre Court, all happy grins and sincere menace, No. 1 in the world, a semifinalist, the heavy favorite to win. It is working out just swell. “Maybe this is surprising to other people,” young Hingis said, “but I have always believed I could achieve everything.” As for Karol, the birth father, he teaches tennis back in Kocise, Slovakia, where Melanie found him, while mommy and her little girl operate out of Trubach, Switzerland, stretch limos and hotel suites around the world.

At least Melanie didn’t insist the Swiss rename the town Flushing Meadows.

Both Melanie and Karol were tennis players, he better than she, each from the two sides of what was then Czechoslovakia. They married, they had little Martina and eight years later they were as separate as Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Mom took a Swiss husband, since discarded, and her maiden name back. The dispute was simple. Karol wanted a daughter; Melanie wanted a champion.

“My mother put a racket in my hand when I was in a pushchair,” said Hingis. “I have seen the pictures.”

She was in tournaments at 6, Wimbledon junior champ at 13, a pro at 14, the Wimbledon doubles champ at 15 and Australian Open champ this year at 16. She needs to get past another 16-year-old, Russia’s Anna Kournikova, to become the youngest Wimbledon finalist in the Open era.

“Anna (nearly 10 months younger than Hingis) is the youngest semifinalist,” said Hingis, who apparently keeps track of these sorts of things, “so she has one of my records.”

Women’s tennis seems to digest these precious prodigies without the least bit of indigestion. A Jennifer Capriati is a wonder child one day and then suddenly she is a desolate casualty.

And with Capriati’s example still painful and obvious, tennis seems ready to swallow a Hingis or a Kournikova like they were amphetamines.

Even those who make it into relative maturity, like Steffi Graf, do not get away without scars.

Hingis seems no more vulnerable to the perils of fame than Capriati did at the time, though a bit more alert. She would never, as Capriati did, identify Napoleon’s tomb in Paris as “the place where they keep that little dead dude.”

Hingis’ education is the world and her experiences in it.

“My mother makes sure we go to museums and art galleries and see all the great sights of London and Paris and Rome,” Hingis said. “I think that is better than just to read about it in books.”

Her tennis is what it is, better than any other woman’s at the moment, but not especially powerful nor precise. She thinks well and does not fluster.

When Hingis wins this thing, it will be for now and not for history. It will be just another part of the design, a resume begun before she existed.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Bernie Lincicome Chicago Tribune