A Cool Customer in Hot Australia

Heat.

That was the theme of the Australian Open, concluded with a flaming youth named Hingis and a flame-throwing server named Sampras as the only tennis players of 1997 with a shot at a Grand Slam.

One-hundred-plus-degree temperatures are nothing new at the Aussie, the leadoff of the four major tournaments that constitute a Grand Slam, the others being the French and U.S. Opens and Wimbledon.

“I was burning up. My brain was scrambled eggs,” complained the 1995 champion, Boris Becker, after he was upset in the first round by hot-handed Carlos Moya, a Spaniard who startlingly reached the title match.

Chimed in Pete Sampras, the men’s champion, “My feet were on fire. I’ve never felt so uncomfortable. But it is Australia.”

The competitive heat that razed the women’s tournament began to be felt on the sixth day, when a skinny 23-year-old Belgian, No. 43 Dominique Monami van Roost, knocked off No. 2 Arantxa Sanchez Vicario.

Sanchez Vicario has been off her game for six months. Still, Van Roost started something. Within 24 hours, four-time champion Steffi Graf, third-seeded Conchita Martinez, 1996 runner-up Anke Huber and seventh-seeded Lindsay Davenport were gone in probably the quickest decimation of the women’s elite ever to afflict a major championship.

Torching them were lightly regarded Amanda Coetzer, Sabine Appelmans, Mary Pierce and Kimberly Po.

Either women’s tennis was in ruins, or it was a welcome, attractive sign of rebirth. Was there a sneakered, miniskirted phoenix to wing it from the ashes?

Indeed. Flying from the charred wreckage into the record books was another prodigy, christened Martina--after Navratilova--Maria Hingisova 16 years 3 months ago in a Slovakian city called Kosice.

Martina Hingis, as we know her now, bridled the 1995 champion, Pierce, Saturday with a fusillade of imaginative variety.

She doesn’t remember the day her father amputated half the handle of a wooden adult racket and handed her a sort of sawed-off shotgun. She was 2 1/2.

But Karol Hingis, a coach who still operates a small tennis club in Kosice, recalls it well.

“We would play together a small court game with the service line as baseline,” he told a Melbourne friend over the phone. “Martina was hitting incredible angles almost right away.”

Papa, never mentioned either by his former wife, Melanie, or Martina, wept in joy and sadness while he watched the TV screen in his home at 4:30 a.m. Saturday.

As his kid belted a winning forehand on match point, he wondered if he would ever see her play in person again. Barely getting by on $3,000 a year, he has no spare change for airline tickets.

The kid left with $522,879 in prize money--$89,876 of it her share of the doubles victory--topping the $463,000 take of Sampras, who disdained doubles.

There is no hint from mama that anyone other than she nurtured Martina’s tennis career, but she has done well in bringing Martina along, refining a gem.

The new women’s champion isn’t overworked and does seem broader in her interests than most tennis tykes. She is natural, joyful and composed, with a good sense of humor.

Martina and Melanie both got a giggle out of Martina’s being thrown while horseback riding the other day.

“It was good for me, shook me up,” Martina says. “I wasn’t concentrating, paying attention. It showed me I have to do that all the time. You know the horse’s name? Magic Girl,” beamed the two-legged magic girl.

Courtwise beyond her years, Hingis became the champion in a nonchalant yet thoughtful 59-minute demolition of Pierce.

Thus she joined Maureen Connolly, Tracy Austin and the absent Monica Seles in the select society of those who have won majors at 16. Hingis, rising to No. 2 behind Graf, is the youngest, undercutting Seles by three months.