Rittner Dresses Down Pierce German Fashions Surprise Win Over French Open’s 12th Seed
Wearing the little black tennis dress that has launched a thousand wolf whistles and raised more than a thousand eyebrows among the sport’s fashion police, a quite contrary Mary Pierce, the next-to-last French Open hope of her not-so-native France, was whistled off Center Court Friday in a hail of derisive jeers.
The 12th-seeded Pierce was upset, 6-4, 6-2, by Germany’s Barbara Rittner, a woman equally as blonde as Pierce but considerably more conservative in her garb and shot selection.
Ranked 82nd in the world and a loser to Pierce in all four of their previous meetings, Rittner managed to ignore the Pierce decolletage - which has proven a great distraction and an irreverent marketing device for its maker, Nike - and the Pierce agenda.
“Everybody knows she’s trying to argue and she’s trying not to take a lot of time, to break your rhythm,” said the methodical Rittner, “so I didn’t recognize her doing this.
“I tried to put pressure on herself from myself,” added Rittner, who converted the first chance she had to thwart Pierce, broke a 4-4 first-set stalemate by breaking Pierce, and calmly served for the set.
“Then she got nervous and I started to play better,” said Rittner, now through to her first fourth round at a Grand Slam event.
The match between top-seeded Pete Sampras and 18th-ranked Todd Martin did not have the querulous edge of Pierce-Rittner, and the tennis was often sublimely contested. Sampras has occasionally felt like quitting this tournament, where the slow clay has aggravated him to the point of a temper tantrum, but not this year. Not when the clay has been playing like a hardcourt.
One round after handing a five-set loss to the two-time champion Sergi Bruguera, the consummate clay artisan, Sampras was undaunted by Martin’s 29 aces and outlasted his golfing buddy 3-6, 6-4, 7-5, 4-6, 6-2 in 3 hours, 21 minutes.
Sampras served 20 aces of his own and now has designs on capturing his first-ever French Open title.
“When I came here, my tennis wasn’t great and my mental state was up and down,” said Sampras, referring to his distress over the May 3 death of his coach, Tim Gullikson, “but I just go out and play, and play hard, and I definitely have intentions of doing well here and hopefully winning.”
After her performance Friday, Pierce no longer has that option.
A finalist here in 1994, Pierce committed an outlandish 38 unforced errors, most of them with a forehand that was severely out of tune, and made her earliest French Open exit since 1991.
“I don’t even feel like thinking about it just now; you don’t always do what you want to do on the court,” said Pierce, who, according to her coach, Brad Gilbert, takes her losses too personally to be able to be analytical about them.
The first French woman to win a Grand Slam singles crown since Francoise Durr thrilled Roland Garros in 1967, Pierce, the 1995 Australian Open champion, had barely recovered from her disappointing fourth-round loss here last year when she found herself beaten.
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This sidebar appeared with the story: FRENCH OPEN Winners: Top-seeded Pete Sampras defeated Todd Martin in five sets to reach the fourth round. Yevgeny Kafelnikov (6) and Jim Courier (7) also advanced. On the women’s side, Monica Seles, co-seeded No. 1 with Steffi Graf, won her third-round match against Sabine Appelmans of Belgium. Arantxa Sanchez Vicario (4) won 6-0, 6-0 over Russia’s Elena Likhovtseva. Losers: Mary Pierce (12) was the first seeded woman eliminated from the tournament after losing to Germany’s Barbara Rittner in straight sets. Brenda Schultz-McCarthy (8) was ousted by Irina Spirlea of Romania. Fifteen-year-old Martina Hingis (15) lost to Karina Habsudova.