In spite of having tickets for both the day and night sessions, I decided to limit my visit to the Acura Classic to a night session. It was too hot to move and the thought of sitting in the sun for hours didn't do much for me, so I skipped the day session, though I was sorry I didn't get to see Monica Seles play.
I arrived at Manhatten Beach Country Club at 7:30pm ... the match started almost at 8:00, and the whole stadium was full. I was sitting pretty far from the court, but close to where the players came in, so I had a good glimpse of Martina Hingis. She was shorter than I'd expected, but other than that looked pretty much like she does on TV. Perhaps the camera does not add on ten pounds after all.
What struck me about the match -- and this is NOT to take away from Martina's win -- it didn't seem to me that Martina won the match, it seemed more that Sidot lost the match. She made so many unforced errors, especially off the backhand side.
The first set started out with an ace by Sidot, then a point by Hingis, then three straight errors by Sidot to give Hingis the break. The second game Sidot broke right back, coming from being down 40-15. She hit some great shots to do that. Then in the third game, Sidot was broken again, thanks to a few of her zillions of errors and some double faults. Hingis held after that, Sidot scraped out a service game, and then it was all Hingis. Or I should say all Sidot errors. Anne-Gaelle just played so .. not bad, but erratically. Without trying to take anything away from Martina, I must say that Sidot had some really, really unfortunate errors, like a missed overhead and countless backhands into the net. She has a really pretty backhand when it's on, perfect form and everything. She had chances to break, game points, the works, but she didn't capitalize. Hingis didn't have to do much but wait for Sidot to miss. Martina did hit some good shots though that were dead on the line, and she had some aces.
The second set was pretty much a repeat of the first. It started out with Sidot being broken, she had breakpoints in the second game to get back on serve, but she didn't do anything with them. She only held serve once more to make 5-1, all thanks to her errors.
After the match a bunch of people headed to the player entrance to get Martina's autograph. The guards had a rope up to make a path, but people kept trampling over it. Andrea Jaeger's Kid Stuff foundation had set up a photo opportunity with Martina for terminally ill children, in which sick kids got to go on court with Martina and have a photo taken with her, and get her autograph. After that photo shoot, Martina came off the court, and sadly the security guards would not let anyone get through the human wall they had set up. There were a LOT of disappointed kids who let the world know how they felt by screaming loudly.
In the manner of truly dedicated journalists, I hung around the media tent with a bunch of other people to see if Martina Hingis would come out -- I wanted to see if she was as nice as people say. She did, about 75 minutes later! The stupid guard she was with tried to block people away from her (even though there were only three of us, everyone else left earlier), but I guess standing around for so long does something to a person because we pretty much knocked him out of the way to get to her. She was nice enough, she signed the autographs and posed for a picture with one guy. Someone who didn't like her would say she was a bit standoffish, someone who did like her would say she was just in a hurry to get away. From my experiences, I'd say Anna Kournikova is (gasp!) nicer to fans than Martina, although I realize to some people that might sound way off base. I'm just happy to have seen her in person though.
One last note - I asked if she was on-line. She is not. And not likely to be in the near future. Sorry guys!