Whether she's at home in the Alps or planted on the baseline of a tennis court, Martina Hingis is on top of the world these days, thanks to hard work and an even harder-driving mother by Dana Kennedy
photographs by Bob Martin In recent years Trübbach has been the springboard for Hingis, 16who on March 31 became her sport's youngest top-ranked playerand her hard-driving mother-coach, Melanie Molitor, 40, in their extraordinary and relentless quest to scale the summit of women's tennis. And yes, it is their quest, one that began back when Melanie was pregnant with Martina in their native Czechoslovakia. Their mission, and it didn't really matter if little Martina chose to accept it, was officially launched when Molitor placed a sawed-off wooden racket in the tiny hands of her two-year-old daughter and hit balls to her every day for 10 minutes. "Since I was in her stomach, she was thinking I was going to be a great tennis player," says Hingis of her mom, who played professional tennis in Czechoslovakia for nine years and was ranked as high as 10th in her country. "She never thought I maybe wouldn't have the talent. In the beginning she wanted it more than I did." These days it's hard to tell who wants it more. Molitor, who named her daughter after her idol, Martina Navratilova, is as fiercely ambitious as the most notorious tennis father. But Hingis appears to have absorbed Molitor's dream and made it her own with no trace, at least so far, of the angst that has plagued tennis daughters like Jennifer Capriati or Mary Pierce. "If I had a daughter, I would try to hold her back from playing so much so early," says Navratilova, who retired in 1994, shortly after Hingis turned pro. "But her mother has been very smart with Martina. She's given her a balanced life. Martina is a tennis daughter, but she's a daughter first." | |
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