Hingis Stays In Hunt Agassi, Sampras Post Easy Victories

The two teens strutted and preened as they took the court, Anna Kournikova and Martina Hingis facing off for fashion and tennis supremacy today in the glamour matchup of the Australian Open.

Fans packed the stadium as much to ogle and whistle as to cheer the latest chapter in this developing rivalry, and they weren’t disappointed in either the show or the tennis.

The top-ranked and defending champion Hingis, who beat Kournikova in straight sets in the French Open and Wimbledon in their two previous meetings, maintained her dominance, though by a slimmer margin, with a 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 victory.

This was a match that showed both how vulnerable Hingis, 17, has become in recent months, and how close Kournikova, 16, is to surging into the top ranks.

Kournikova’s biggest weakness, her typically slow starts, hurt her once again. But the blond Russian is more than just a model in tennis clothes. She can play, brandishing wicked groundstrokes and the kind of flair at the net that brought her back into the match in the second set.

Yet Hingis knows how to find and exploit an opponent’s slightest failing, and she did that in the third set by pounding shots at Kournikova’s inconsistent backhand. That paid off with error after error by Kournikova.

With the third set tied 4-4 after service breaks in the first four games, Kournikova dropped serve again on her 33rd backhand error. Hingis closed it out at love with the help of a backhand long by Kournikova and an overhead at match point.

Winning faster than most of the women’s matches, Andre Agassi is racing through the tournament as if he can’t wait to reach the final again.

Agassi, bouncing back from an excursion to the bush league of tennis, secured a spot in the round of 16 at the year’s first Grand Slam event with a 6-2, 6-2, 6-0, 67-minute route of Andrea Gaudenzi.

In a third set that lasted just 17 minutes, Agassi yielded only seven points as he ran the No. 61-ranked Italian dizzy.

Unseeded but playing like the champion he was in 1995, the No. 87-ranked Agassi is poised to play next against the winner of the third-rounder between U.S. Open champ Patrick Rafter and former French Open finalist Alberto Berasategui.

Agassi lost to Rafter in the fourth round of the U.S. Open last year and would love to get revenge on the Australian’s home court.

“Last time I was nowhere near where I am now,” Agassi said of Rafter.

In other matches today, No. 5 seed and U.S. Open finalist Greg Rusedski fell to Australian Todd Woodbridge 7-6 (5), 6-4, 6-2; No. 9 Marcelo Rios of Chile downed Australian qualifier Andrew Ilie 6-2, 6-3, 6-2. Four other unseeded players advanced: Germany’s Nicolas Kiefer, and Frenchmen Nicolas Escude, Guillaume Raoux and Lionel Roux.

Women’s No. 3 Amanda Coetzer beat Annabel Ellwood 6-3, 6-1; No. 5 Mary Pierce beat Olga Barabanschikova 7-5, 6-3; and No. 7 Arantxa Sanchez Vicario beat Rika Hiraki 6-2, 6-3; No. 10 Anke Huber downed Joannette Kruger 6-7 (4), 6-3, 6-2; and No. 16 Ai Sugiyama defeated Magdalena Grzybowska 7-6 (5), 1-6, 6-4. No. 14 Dominique Van Roost lost to Yayuk Basuki 6-4, 6-4.

Pete Sampras, the defending champion, advanced to the round of 16 with a 7-5, 6-3, 6-4 victory over Magnus Gustafsson, and there isn’t a seeded player in sight until at least the semifinals.

It’s been so easy for Sampras, that it seems too easy, as if somewhere he’s in for an ambush.

He goes up next against Hicham Arazi, the little man from Casablanca, who did Sampras a big favor by knocking out Mark Philippoussis in the first round. Arazi, a 5-foot-9 baseline scrambler, should be a perfect foil for Sampras, though Sampras rightly doesn’t overlook anyone.

Sampras will always remember how another seemingly easy baseline foe, Alex Corretja, made him run and run until he got sick in the 1996 U.S. Open. And there was Jaime Yzaga, the relentless Chilean, who ran Sampras until he trembled in the heat in the 1994 U.S. Open.

Strange and terrible things have happened to Sampras at the moments when everything seemed so easy. So he takes nothing and no one for granted.

“I have no complaints about the way my performance is progressing so far, and in the future things are looking real smooth,” Sampras said. But Arazi, he noted warily, “obviously doesn’t mind playing big players. Philippoussis played a big game and he beat him, so he’s a talented player, a lefty. It’s not easy to play a lefty.”