MARTINA HINGIS will probably spend some time today riding a horse for fun while earlier this week she agreed to be a clotheshorse for an Italian sportswear company for an extra four years in a deal worth close to £5 million. Yesterday she. even squeezed in a little tennis, winning her first-round match in the Australian Open.

Pete Sampras also did a little squeezing of his own during his opening match and pronounced that the Slazenger balls were, without a doubt, the softest on the Tour and "tough to put away".

Not that this prevented him making short work of Romania's Dinu Pescariu in his first round match at Melbourne Park, formerly known (and still regarded as such by the locals) as Flinders Park. But the city's tourist board find marketing-men insist on the new name.

And the officials of this tournament similarly persist that the balls, previously criticised by the ousted champion Boris Becker, are exactly the same as last year. Not even the name has changed.

Sampras, never an unduly demonstrative man, has spent large chunks of his short life belting the hell out of numerous little spheres and just as wine tasters can tell their shiraz from their pinot noir, so the American can differentiate one ball from another. He knew what he knew.

"There isn't a ball on the Tour like this, and they are definitely softer than last year," said the world's number one with an emphasis and authority that only tennis officialdom has the brassneck to contradict.

Not that Sampras was making a meal of the issue. Not yet, anyway. He is here, as he rightly pointed out, to play tennis - and tennis is tennis whatever the state of the balls or the court.

But what about the state of the players? This, of course, is an altogether different matter and far more interesting than either the amount of air in a little ball or the relative speed of any particular playing surface.

The restoration of Jennifer Capriati had seemed to be gathering momentum last weekend when she reached the final in Sydney before going down to Hingis, but yesterday she lost 6-2, 3-6, 6-4 against her fellow American Jolene Watanabe.

Capriati, now 20, has suffered much. Her rise to fame and fortune was meteoric and her fall pitiful. Clearly shocked by her demise the women's Tour changed the ground rules concerning those under-16, strictly limiting their appearances.

Hingis, aged 16, slipped under that particular safety net last year but is obviously an altogether different personality to the American.

Capriati, with three Grand Slam semi-finals and six quarter-finals behind her, and over a $1 million in prize money, has hauled her way back to number 24 in the world rankings yet the mental anguish she still suffers was all too sadly apparent yesterday when she rushed out of a post-match conference in tears.

This was not because her interrogators had been either insensitive or overtly critical. Indeed the final questioner merely wondered if she could feel the public's warmth towards her. It was, alas, too much for Capriati's emotionally fragile state.

Hingis, who defeated Germany's Barbara Rittner, was sympathetic. "Jolene is always hard to play but Jennifer played, very well in the final against me.

The Swiss teenager, now ranked number four, is (in complete contrast to Capriati) currently waltzing through life with an altogether engaging uncomplicated openness. She smiles a lot, and she gets mad.

There are those who tut-tut at her on court tantrums, and the Melbourne crowd on centre court whistled disapprovingly when, frustrated by her own inabilities, she hurled her racket into the net, for which she was duly officially warned.

"I can smile, I can throw my racket - that's just my personality. Sometimes you cannot change that," Hingis said, while adding that it had, been, her aim "not to get a warning this year".

Unlike Steffi Graf, or Monica Seles in her pomp, Hingis is not the sort of power player who scares off opponents. "She doesn't kick you off court," said Rittner who, nevertheless, lost the first set 6-1. But then Hingis lost concentration, fretted, and went 4-1 down in the second set before eventually taking it 7-5.

Graf, who won her first round match on Monday, remains the favourite to win a fifth Australian title but if Hingis reaches the final, which she should, it may be extremely close. There is a maturity about Hingis now that was patently missing less than six months ago.

"I don't think players go out there and think they don't have a chance against her," said Rittner. "Well, not yet." The way things are going they soon will. Hingis is a gem.