Time Has Come for a Bright Hope Named Venus

Another year has come and gone and so has another huge tennis event in the desert. The master plan is two weeks of ground strokes and big serves amidst the palm trees and beautiful people. The plan worked again.

In contractual deference to the people who pay the big bills, it is called the State Farm Evert Cup and the Newsweek Champions Cup. Other than those off somewhere else faking injuries or planning new strategies with their brokers, it brings together the greatest male and female players in the world, not to mention Bohdan Ulihrach.

Ulihrach, the unheralded player from the Czech Republic--translation: nobody except his mother ever heard of him before--who played his way into the men’s final here Sunday before taking the inevitable grinding defeat from Michael Chang, called it “paradise.”

The assumption is that he meant the beautiful facilities, beautiful weather and beautiful people. Also, the beautiful $177,000 check he received for standing in the hot desert sun with Chang for 2 hours and 39 minutes.

The final score was 4-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-3, and anybody who thought after the first set that there would be a different result has not watched much tennis, nor much Chang. The No. 3 player in the world, and the defending champion in the Newsweek Cup event, is like a traffic light. He is always working. Once he won the second set and got up a break in the third, all the bounce was out of the Czech.

As a matter of fact, the argument could be made that much of the bounce was out of this event the moment Venus Williams lost the last point in her final-set tiebreaker against eventual Evert Cup champion Lindsay Davenport in the quarterfinals.

In a sport that grinds on from week to week with a sameness that can become stifling, Williams offered something new and different, something to really make those paying the $40 and $50 a seat here feel they got their money’s worth.

Before this week, she was pretty much a gimmick, a 16-year-old with braided hair and white beads and a father who kept her out of competition with such a fervor that nobody quite knew what to think. Could she play, or was this a female version of the Jensens? Was Richard Williams more interested in matches, or in marketing?

And then she knocked top-ten player Iva Majoli out of the tournament and went toe to toe with Davenport in a night match on Stadium court that was the high point of the two weeks of tennis here. Williams showed that she certainly can hit, and probably can play on this level for many years, given more matches and more maturity.

It was a badly needed sneak preview of a possible tennis academy award winner.

After Davenport got past Williams, she ran through the semifinals and final with the loss of only five games. They were quick, undramatic bloodlettings, the kind that leave the paying customers wondering why they had.

On the men’s side, Pete Sampras went early to Ulihrach, and the balloon of interest started leaking. That was followed shortly by the exit of Goran Ivanisevic, angering all the old people in this area who had wanted to go to whatever restaurant he was eating and fake heart attacks.

The departure of Andre Agassi hurt too, but not in the same way, since Agassi has been injured and inactive and played a competitive match in losing to Mark Philippoussis. Philippoussis, tall dark and handsome, with a serve that could crack a bulletproof vest, took the runner-up honors behind Williams as the most likely to be watched here.

After Venus, there were mostly matches involving Chang. He outmuscled muscleman Thomas Muster and hit Ulihrach with so many jabs that he eventually went down for the count. In typical Chang fashion, it was a good show, but lacked points for style and artistic merit.

These days, with Sampras in a bit of funk at the moment, Agassi struggling, Boris Becker off reading tea leaves somewhere, Goran discussing philosophy with golden retrievers and Steffi Graf and Monica Seles in some sort of injury/personal limbo, tennis needs a bit of style and artistic merit.

Since this is not likely to be the year of Bohdan Ulihrach, how about some more of those beaded braids, 118 mile-an-hour serves and devil-may-care forehands and backhands?

Are you listening, Richard Williams?