Baby Face’s Game Is All Grown Up

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. —  The first look you get at Martina Hingis, you don’t know whether to buy her a lollipop or ask her to dance. I mean, you think this is Shirley Temple at the baseline and any minute she’ll break into “On The Good Ship Lollipop.” Or you figure she got lost in a mall and you should take her down to the police station and put the sergeant’s hat on her while you call her family.

Then you see her hit a tennis ball and you do want to call the cops, all right. For someone this young and this small to hit a ball this hard and this accurately shouldn’t be legal.

To say Martina doesn’t look like the world’s greatest tennis player would be an understatement. You almost want to look at that tennis racket and point and say “Shouldn’t that be a rattle?” Why isn’t she playing with dolls instead of with the best tennis players in the world?

We’re used to girl gymnasts being these little elastic toy people barely out of diapers. But women tennis players come more in bulk. The original Martina--Navratilova--was almost 6 feet tall. Lindsay Davenport is 6-2 1/2. Venus Williams is 6-1 1/2. Steffi Graf is 5-10, Monica Seles 5-10 1/2. Hingis is 5-6 or 5-7, give or take an inch. In boxing, she’d be a featherweight.

So, what is she doing winning Grand Slam tournaments (four of them) by the tender age of 17? Shouldn’t she be getting autographs out there, not cups? For the rest of the sport it’s a little like being fired on from a baby carriage.

But, if she looks like a baby doll, she plays tennis like a gun moll.

It wasn’t as if she rolled out of bed with a 120-mph serve and forearms like Popeye. She plays a tenacious, take-no-prisoners game reminiscent of Jimmy Connors in his prime. The ball comes at you hard and unpredictably, and she’s more like a junk pitcher with a great changeup and different locations on her fastball. Her serve is barely in the 90-mph range, but to hit it, first you have to find it. Hoyt Wilhelm never had a better knuckler.

Hingis is in command out there. She’s as hard to discourage as an insurance salesman. The other night, in the State Farm Evert Cup here at the Grand Champions Resort, she was down 1-5 in the second set against former Wimbledon winner Conchita Martinez. The prudent thing to do in this situation is to go through the motions for the rest of that set and conserve your energies for the deciding third set.

Not Hingis. Of course, at 17, energy is as inexhaustible as Mideast oil and, before the smoke had cleared, she had eliminated Martinez, 7-5.

She has an uncanny instinct of where to be on the tennis court. She is to tennis what Joe DiMaggio was to baseball. You will remember DiMaggio as the outfielder who never seemed to have to make a hard run or a leaping catch for a ball. When the ball came down, Joe was waiting for it.

So is Hingis. It is said she can hit a winner from the parking lot. And getting a ball past her is as difficult as getting a fastball past Henry Aaron. She is as confident as a guy with aces wired in five-card stud. “She doesn’t know how to lose,” says Chris Evert, the Martina Hingis of her day. “She figures that’s someone else’s problem.”

She improvises. In the tournament finale here Saturday, a 6-3, 6-4 victory over Davenport, she ran to return a volley and, to cut down the distance to it, shifted the racket from her right hand to her left and made the return. Most people are lucky if they can hit a tennis ball with one hand; she can do it with either. She is ambidextrous and has played entire matches left-handed.

At an age (2) when most parents are putting their children in strollers or on tricycles, Hingis’ put her on skis. They gave her a tennis racket before she could talk. I think the first words she learned were “My ad.”

She has won four of the past five Grand Slams, including the Australian Open twice. She will be the defending Wimbledon champion and U.S. Open champion this year. She breezed through the Evert Cup this week without losing a set--and not many games.

In the landscape of tennis she is monument-sized already. But, in person, she is almost a Valley girl. She giggles self-consciously, looks almost apologetic in her answers. She is everybody’s kid sister, the most popular Swiss miss since Heidi.

Then, someone hits a tennis ball at her and she turns into a bat. The eyes harden, the lips thin and, all of a sudden, her opponent thinks it’s raining tennis balls. On her good days, Hingis makes it look as if she’s playing two balls. She’s the world’s foremost woman racketeer.

It’s unfair. She should look the part. Get a scowl, lose a tooth, cut off the curls or even look worried. At least play in a mask. So those other world-class players can’t be seen seeming to be beaten by The Flying Nun. Or Gidget.