Persistent Mauresmo Wins the Italian Open

Back and forth went the small yellow ball. Forth and back ... 10 times over the net ... 15. This wasn’t pat ball. Amelie Mauresmo and Jennifer Capriati were belting away at each other intensely as Sunday afternoon waned.

The point kept going, the concluding point of the Italian Open. Crosscourt, down the lines ... 20 times ... 25 ... 30 ... and then Capriati’s backhand drive plopped an inch or so wide of the sideline.

Mauresmo, who had lost three of the last four Italian Open finals and survived a match point 20 minutes earlier, raised her right hand in triumph.

She and Capriati may have played better, tougher matches, but it would be hard to imagine. “I didn’t lose -- Amelie won,” was Capriati’s reasonable analysis of a title match that wound up as the closest in the tournament’s 74-year history: 3-6, 6-3, 7-6 (8-6).

Capriati saved Mauresmo’s first match point in the tiebreaker when she made a mad dash beyond the right sideline to overtake a severely angled volley, and bashed a forehand screamer past Mauresmo at the net as many in the crowd of 6,500 chanted “Jenny! Jenny! Jenny!”

However, Capriati then netted a forehand, and Mauresmo, with serve, launched the seemingly endless ultimate point.

Mauresmo barely served 50% but changed the course of the tiebreaker with her largest serves of the 2 1/2-hour match.

Having trailed 0-1, 1-3 and 4-5, she banged consecutive service winners of 102 mph and 100 mph through Capriati, who had been returning superbly. It was 6-5, time for Capriati’s running forehand winner.

During the excruciating third set, Capriati, who led 4-2, wriggled her way out of three break points to go ahead, 2-1, and three more to lead 5-4. She made what could have been the decisive move in the next game, by seizing three straight points from 40-15 to arrive at match point. Mauresmo pressured her with searing forehands, and Capriati missed one of her own on the 11th stroke.

Double-digit rallies were common, and more often than not exhilarating during this mostly baseline affair with some quality volleying on occasion. Even from Capriati, who actually won a serve-and-volley point to force a tiebreaker in the third.

Mauresmo, No. 3 and riding a two-tournament, nine-match winning streak into Paris for next week’s French Open, wasn’t looking at the Capriati whom she had skewered, 6-2, 6-0, at Berlin in the semifinals of the German Open eight days earlier. Said the No. 9 Capriati: “I’ve worked hard to prove to myself and Amelie -- not again. I can get better. The real Jennifer is going to show up in Paris.” Capriati won there three years ago.

“The level was satisfyingly high. The match,” Mauresmo said, “was hanging there to go either way. I thought I had a little more energy than her.”

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Top-ranked Roger Federer won the Hamburg Masters in Germany, beating Guillermo Coria, 4-6, 6-4, 6-2, 6-3, to end the Argentine’s 31-match winning streak on clay.

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Associated Press contributed to this report.