Martina Hingis career crisis lasted about as long as an 18-year-old's summer vacation. She reached the French Open final in June as the top seed, then flung a teenage tantrum when the only Grand Slam title she hasn't won slipped through her fingers like a fistful of Roland Garros clay.
She lost her only match at Wimbledon, flew to Cyprus for a beach vacation with a boyfriend, skipped the WTA event in Stamford, but danced through the TIG Classic in La Costa in early August, winning $80,000 with a resounding defeat of Venus Williams in the final. Not a bad year's work for some players. "Some people wondered,'Is she ever going to come back?'" Hingis said after the La Costa final. "I think this is a good opportunity to say, 'Here i am again.'"
Yet Hingis' Dangerous Summer shouldn't be ignored. At 18, both clever and wise, Hingis would have been preparing for her freshman year at college this summer if she wasn't the world's most talented tennis prodigy since Monica Seles. She'd be buying new clothes, saving her money and probably putting a not-so-subtle distance between herself and her mother, who raised her in a single-parent household.
For many 18-year-olds, the transition from high school to college or fulltime employment is the time to assert at least a measure of independence.They'll learn the rudiments of adult life and often move away from home for the first time to set up a temporary household apart from their families. That's where Hingis would be right now, chatting on the phone in a dorm room, popping quarters into a coin laundry, fretting about midterms, gossiping with sorority sisters, flirting with a football player, maybe even fighting off a bout of homesick. All part of growing up.
Instead, she has been immersed in a demanding career for four years-and even stranger, her mother is working for her. Melanie Molitor isn't just Hingis' parent and emotional support system, but also her coach. It's how she makes her living, and has for some time.
Unlike Stefano Capriati, who maybe thought he was coaching, the mother here really does coach the player, says adviser Nick Bollettieri, who helped Hingis regain her equilibrium a year ago after she lost her No.1 ranking to Lindsay Davenport. "When they were here last fall, my job was to keep harmony between the mother and the daughter.I was the buffer. Perhaps it had reached a point where she didn't want to hear anymore from the mom."
Hingis' growing pains are wrapped up in her relationship with her mother, which wouldn't surprise Freud or Sophocles. It also doesn't surprise Anna Kournikova, Martina's doubles partner and another �migr� from a traditional Eastern European culture. Kournikova's mother Alla doesn't profess to know as much tennis as Molitor, who named her daughter after Martina Navratilova and had her primed for success in the sport by age five, but she has by all accounts saddled her own daughter with intense pressure to achieve, both on and off the court. Young Anna is halfway there: she's the WTA's most admired pin-up girl, but she has yet to win a pro tournament.
When Hingis and Kournikova were represented by the International Management Group, they feuded. There's a saying in Hollywood that all actresses want to sing and all singers want to act, and women's tennis gets more Hollywood all the time. Hingis was merely the best player in the world at 16, a tennis phenomenon with the court wisdom of a seasoned veteran, but she envied Kournikova's magazine covers. "I love doing these shots, getting dressed up," she confessed to Elle Magazine. "When I was little my dream was to be a model." At the same time, Kournikova-- the Britney Spears of the sport--ached to validate her popularity with some WTA tournament points even as Hingis racked up the majors.
Now that they've both signed with Advantage International, they're doubles partners and best pals."The Spice Girls of Tennis," Hingis calls themselves-- Kournikova is Baby Spice, Hingis says, and she's Posh-- and she's eager to be caught in the reflected glare of Kournikova's movie-star presence. Like all adolescents with growing pains, the two of them compare notes about their overbearing parents, voicing complaints that modulate somewhere between perception and reality. Even if Hingis hadn't already felt smothered by her mother, by the time she finished gabbing with Kournikova on the practice court, she would have.
For Molitor, who has invested time, money, energy and emotion in her daughter's tennis, such distractions are to be feared especially distractions who spend more time vamping for photographers than raising trophies after tournaments. "The mother may have perceived that Kournikova was a bad influence," says Bollettieri. "I'm not saying if she's right or she's wrong, but that may have been her perception. Kournikova is an outsider, remember, and they've let very, very few people into that inner circle."
This is nothing unusual. What parents haven't occasionally questioned a child's choice of friends or companions? But when the parent is saying it not merely as a mother but as a coach, teenage rebellion becomes more problematic. "Any time you have a parent get into an additional role, you complicate matters," says Dr Carl Pickhardt, a practicing psychologist in Austin, Texas, and author of the 1997 book Keys To Single Parenting. "Sometimes this person is the mom, sometimes this person is the coach, sometimes she's both.And when the parent becomes the coach, the coaching role then becomes enormously intensified.You can't correct your daughter as a coach without also correcting her as a parent."
By June, Hingis decided she'd finally heard enough. So for the first time in her career, her mother stayed away and didn't accompany her to Wimbledon. Without a coach or a parent along, Hingis floundered. One 6-2, 6-0 first-round loss to teenager Jelena Dokic later, a long fortnight away became a quick flight out. "I figured out pretty soon that being on my own while playing tennis is impossible for me", says Hingis, who reunited with her mother in Florida and spent a month training and working on her game before La Costa. "It just didn't feel right."
Such emotional schizophrenia may be unsettling from a world-class athlete, but it's standard-issue for an 18-year-old.Only a few weeks before, Hingis had been crying in Molitor's arms when certain victory over Steffi Graf in Paris became a nightmarish defeat as thousands jeered. Hingis's emotional breakdown surprised not merely the millions watching worldwide, but her colleagues on the tour.
"I don't think anybody had ever seen her react that way before," says Sandrine Testud. "She put so much energy into winning that tournament, and she came so close. Then she disagreed with a call, and there was a break, and it all came apart. Everybody thinks of Hingis that nothing ever bothers her, that she's just so strong mentally and so clever on the court. But that doesn't mean that she's always that strong and clever off the court.She's 18 years old. She's human.And everyone finally saw it in Paris."
Testud, who never reached the quarterfinal of a Grand Slam tournament until she was 25, is like most of the WTA Tour in that she was able to grow up relatively anonymously. For others, their passages from adolescence to adulthood are part of the public record. "The feelings we have, no one can understand," says a defiant Kournikova like most every other disaffected teenager in the world.
Rebellion, which can take the form of indifferent grades or a sullen demeanor for a high schooler, is writ large when the world is your classroom."I think her fame started a little later than mine, but that doesn't make much difference," says Jennifer Capriati, who reacted to pressures both parental and professional by self-destructing so that no one could have a piece of her. "It's similar.I would tell Martina to stay true to herself, not to change who she is, through the winning, the losing, the bad press, the good press, whatever."
Hingis is no Capriati, whose adolescent rap sheet ultimately included a drug bust and shoplifting.She's an unusually mature 18-year-old who seemed to step into her role as champion with just the right mix of haughtiness and charm, and remains truly wise for her years. She's back at No.1 already, having proven twice now that she will fight for the designation after losing it. "I'm used to being something special,"she says.
Yet that doesn't necessarily mean her problems are over. Growing up happens in fits and starts, and when the process is truncated by tennis or anything else, the natural inclinations of a teenager merely get postponed.
"That focus on this one activity means you have to ignore a whole lot of other stuff in service of this one area of your personal growth,"says Dr.Pickhardt. "All other areas of personal growth are languishing.So at some point, there is going to be a crisis of independence. She has to be able to make the bridge, to re-commit to tennis on her terms.Once she's doing it for herself, she will decide to what degree she wants her mom's involvement.And the mother will have to make the adjustment."
Molitor has always been better than most at letting Hingis enjoy some of the pleasures of youth-skiing and riding horses and giggling while she changed her hairstyle-but the tennis was always there, waiting. " When you are a child and become so good at such a young age, no matter what anybody says, some of the childhood is going to fall by the wayside,"says Bollettieri. "And as you get better and better, the requirements to focus and continue to succeed get higher and higher.I think maybe the mother was zoned in on tennis, and tunneled too much, and perhaps the needs of the daughter as a daughter sort of went by."
In that sense, the events of the summer may ultimately prove helpful for Hingis.Molitor now seems to understand and respect her daughter's uneasy maturation into both a woman and a professional with her own career. At the same time, Hingis has learned that, at least as long as her mother is coaching her, their fates remain intertwined.
"There is no better coach in the world than my mom," she says now. "Nobody can help me as much as she can."
With the victory at La Costa and the return to the top of the WTA's rankings after six weeks away, Hingis also confirmed that when she puts her mind to it, she remains the best female tennis player in the world.That won't help solve every adolescent trauma, but it'll be no small consolation during the inevitable ambiguities of growing up.