Wisegirl

Some of you watching Martina Hingis yesterday may have noticed that early in the second set, Peng Shuai threw up a lob over Hingis’s left shoulder, which ordinarily would have called for a two-handed backhand overhead. Instead, The Firekitten switched hands and put away a strong-side overhead.

It was a perfect technical metaphor for Hingis herself: inventive, creative, gifted and just a little bit (er. . . lot of bit?) cocky, all while lacking the raw power that usually gives you the credential for making such flamboyant statements.

Hingis is a somewhat polarizing figure, as I’ve come to learn from comment posters. To me she’s just about all good – impish in a sport in which off-the-charts self-dramatization is as common as string savers, frank in a public forum where anything you say can – and will - be held against you, and capable of living by her versatility and guile, rather than by her strength and color-by-numbers strategy.

So here’s the story of how Hingis developed her southpaw game:

So there's that story. Nadal coming up, in brief, then the Agassi's of Vegas.

What I love about this is the bit about how Hingis’s final-round opponent didn’t want to play her, so Hingis waited a week and beat her righty. . . Hingis was asked later if she tried from that point on to play with either (or both) hands. She said.