TENNIS:There is a rule of thumb that you can't come back. If you give up in the middle of the carousal ride, take a few years off and try to jump back on, it is easy to fall on your face. André Agassi did it successfully, Jennifer Capriati too, but yesterday, Martina Hingis showed how fraught the jump back into "Slam" tennis can be.
At the moment she has a hand on the rail, a good grip, but hasn't been able to make the leap to the top of a game that has changed dramatically since her comeback.
The Swiss former world number one and five-times Grand Slam champion was three months shy of 17 when she won here in 1997. In 2002 she decided the game that made her famous had become a drag, so she took four years off.
But in fourth place, with $20 million, on the all-time official prize-money list behind Steffi Graf, Lindsay Davenport and Martina Navratilova, she did not have to work in a chocolate factory to pay the household bills.
Back she came in November 2005, and 17 months later, at 26 years of age, the Grand Old Dame of the grass is still finding her feet.
A recent injury to a femur, which has not quite healed, compounded by her proclivity for first-round exits, almost made Hingis the story of the day before she discovered the old touch and ran off the 232-ranked wild card, Britain's Naomi Cavaday, 6-7, 7-5, 6-0.
That she had three set points in the first set, which was peppered with unforced errors put Hingis in the hole.
On the first set point she set up an easy overhead volley at the net, then banged the ball towards the tramlines, screwing up her face when the umpire called it out. But she knew it was out and took the long walk back to her seat.
"Maybe it wasn't the smartest," she said of her decision to play.
"My doctor, I spoke to him last week. I'm about 60 to 70 per cent. Like it's not healed out properly but I can't hurt it."
This year is the 10th anniversary of her win and although still young Hingis has changed as much as the game has over those years.
Her power cannot match that of the bigger players on tour, including Serena Williams, who walked onto court two, the graveyard of champions, a few minutes after the Swiss ninth seed departed. But her mental acuity and working angles have always gained her ground.
"The older you get, the more fears you have," she said. "At 17 you think the whole world belongs to you. I was number one at that time, so that year you feel like you were invincible. But a lot of things have happened since."
Well, they did. The Williams sisters came along with their muscles, some of which helped the hamstrung Serena win her opener yesterday.
So did all the other six-footers, including Maria Sharapova and latterly Ana Ivanovic and Nicole Vaidisova.
Nice then to see someone in the five-foot-something range triumph, Justine Henin winning 6-3, 6-0 against the qualifier Jorgelina Cravero.
