Davenport Defeats Hingis in Final of Tokyo Event

Lindsay Davenport defeated Martina Hingis, 6-3, 6-3, Sunday in the final of the Toray Pan Pacific Open at Tokyo.

Davenport improved to 4-5 lifetime against Hingis, who was coming off a win in the Australia Open.

Hingis now has two losses this year. Last year, her second loss didn’t come until August in the Acura Classic.

Davenport, 21, of Newport Beach, is now 10-2 this year. “There are not many days when you feel like you play great,” she said. “Today I thought I played great.”

Hingis, occasionally coughing and sniffing, said her week-old cold was no trouble. “No, it wasn’t a problem at all,” she said.

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Top-seeded Yevgeny Kafelnikov of Russia will face Sweden’s Thomas Enqvist in today’s final of the ATP Marseille Indoor tournament.

Kafelnikov defeated Sweden’s Mikazel Tillstrom, 7-6 (7-5), 6-4, and the sixth-seeded Enqvist upset second-seeded Richard Krajicek of the Netherlands, 6-3. 6-7 (7-1, 6-3.

Jurisprudence

Anthony Mason of the Charlotte Hornets was arrested in New York and charged with third-degree rape for allegedly having sex with an underage girl Friday night.

Mason, a former New York Knick from the borough of Queens, was placed in police custody overnight at a Queens precinct.

Mason and his brother met two girls, aged 14 or 15, at a celebrity basketball game Friday at York College in Queens, took them for a ride in a limousine and allegedly had consensual sex with them, police said.

Police said the girls went home and told their families, who called the police.

Mason denies having sex with either girl.

A North Carolina woman filed a lawsuit in Columbia, S.C., against Charlotte Hornet owner George Shinn, renewing her accusations that she was attacked and sexually abused by the him last fall.

Prosecutors last year said there was not enough evidence to prove criminal charges against Shinn. In the lawsuit, the Charlotte woman repeats her allegations that she was lured to Shinn’s home and forced to have sex.

The Oakland Raiders have filed court papers in Sacramento, asking the court to dismiss a lawsuit in which Oakland and Alameda County demand they stay in Oakland for the next 13 years as part of their contract.

City and county officials called the papers, filed Friday, “a delay tactic.” Raider officials said the lawsuit should be dismissed because it was without legal merit.

The suit was filed Sept. 29 after the Raiders said they might leave the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum in the next 10 years. The Raiders, who returned to Oakland in 1995 after 13 years in Los Angeles, claimed they had the right to break the lease because the city and county failed to sell out home games.

Boxing

Graciano Rocchigiani, beset with a high fever, withdrew from his WBC light-heavyweight title fight against Michael Nunn in Berlin only six hours before the bout.

The match, for the title vacated by Roy Jones Jr., was tentatively rescheduled for March 14 at Berlin, Nunn’s promoter said.

The Rocchigiani camp said the WBC’s No. 2 challenger was visited by a doctor who diagnosed the fighter with a 102-degree temperature.

Nunn (52-3) hoped the fight would propel him into big money fights he never had while he was IBF middleweight and WBA super-middleweight champion. He is the WBC’s No. 1 challenger.

Rocchigiani (39-4-1) relinquished the IBF super-middleweight title without defending it in 1989 and withdrew from two other title fights before agreeing to face Nunn.

Miscellany

The UCLA women’s gymnastics team, with 195.4 points, won its own invitational for the seventh consecutive year, defeating Stanford (194.3), Michigan (192.6) and Cornell (178.125).

Val Whiting scored 20 points to lead the Seattle Reign to a 74-62 victory over the Columbus Quest in an American Basketball League game at Seattle. The Quest had won 13 in a row.

In baseball, the Dominican Republic remained undefeated in the Caribbean Series with a 5-4 victory over Mexico. The Dominican is 3-0 in the six-game series at Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, that pits the Winter League champions of four countries--the Dominican, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Venezuela.

Roger Bowker defeated Butch Soper, 278-258, in the title match of the PBA Columbia 300 Open at Austin, Texas.

Bowker, who won his fifth title, had one more strike than Soper. Bowker was leading by one pin going into the ninth frame when Soper left a four-pin that cost him the game.

Henry Ellard, the NFL’s fifth-leading receiver with 807 catches, will not be offered a 1998 contract by the Washington Redskins.