Tennis: New hero shuns limelight

By TERRY MADDAFORD

Anne Kremer hopes things will have settled down by the time she gets home.

The 24-year-old winner of the ASB Bank Tennis Classic knows when she returns to Luxembourg next month she faces a hero's welcome.

"Sport is not really big in our country," said 24-year-old Kremer after beating Zimbabwe's Cara Black 6-4 6-4 in Saturday's final at Stanley St. "There is more emphasis on education and business. We don't have many sporting stars."

Kremer, the second seed for the Auckland tournament, studied English literature at Stanford University for two years before putting her studies on hold to pursue a professional tennis career.

She started playing tennis as a four-year-old on clay courts - "I hate clay" - and has spent much of her life in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a country of 400,000 people bordered by Belgium, Germany and France.

When she gets back after playing in Sydney this week and then at the Australian Open in Melbourne, she hopes life will have calmed down and her first victory on the Sanex WTA Tour will have been moved from the front pages of the country's four major newspapers.

For Kremer, the victory was in stark contrast to the 1999 tournament when she was dumped in the first round.

She raced to 4-0 against a tentative Black, but soon found herself struggling at 4-4 after dropping successive serves without scoring a point.

She broke Black to love in the ninth game and took the first set in the next, finishing with the only ace of the match.

The second set mirrored the first, with Kremer 4-1 ahead but only after struggling to hold serve in the second game. Again Black rallied to 4-4, but Kremer broke back in the ninth game and served it out in the next to complete the 1h 22m match.

"I really don't know what happened. Instead of stepping up [at 4-0] I stepped back," said Kremer. "I really wanted to win. Perhaps the experience of having played a final was the difference in the end."

It might have also made a difference to Black, who returned to the court later in the afternoon with Alex Fusai (France) to beat Austrians Barbara Schwartz and Patricia Wartusch 3-6 6-3 6-4 in the 1h 45m doubles final.

The top seeds, playing together for the first time after Fusai had spent many long days tracking Black down, fell behind in the first set when Fusai twice dropped her serve.

But the further the match went the more accomplished they became, although it was not until her fourth service game that Fusai held.

Black felt the victory compensated for her loss in the singles final.

"I'm pretty exhausted but happy now," said Black, who had played nine matches in six days.

Like Kremer, Black is already looking forward to returning next year.

While there were no really big names on court during the week-long $US110,000 tournament, the standard was even and matches hard-fought. In the end, the second seed beat the sixth in the singles final, while the top-seeded doubles combination beat an unseeded pairing.