ESPN sports anchor Kenny Mayne is sitting in his cubicle, sneaking a look around. Confident the coast is clear, he pulls from his desk drawer a Kenny Mayne doll and a Martina Hingis doll. In a high-pitched voice, he speaks for the Martina doll, telling the Kenny doll how wonderful he is, how she never misses his show. In his real voice, he speaks for the Kenny doll, telling the Martina doll she's the best tennis player ever. While Mayne prattles on, the real Hingis sticks her head in and watches unobserved. She smiles approvingly.

Cut! The cameras are rolling at ESPN headquarters, and so is Hingis. Clad in black, hair pulled back tight, she is all glamour and grace, walking the halls of Bristol. She is trailed by the vigilant Melanie Molitor -- her mom-slash-coach -- and Melanie's boyfriend, Mario Widmer, both of whom are also clad in black. This color-coordinated extended family flew in by private jet from Saddlebrook, Fla., for Martina to tape two SportsCenter ads and, Kenny notwithstanding, to demonstrate she's nobody's Kewpie doll anymore.

Once an adorable little overachiever subject to blurting spells, Hingis has outgrown her embarrassingly public growing pains. She is sitting in a small conference room, picking delicately at a grown-up's lunch of salad and fruit, declaring that everything in her world is good again.

"Now that I beat Lindsay I feel much better," Hingis says, just days after besting nemesis Lindsay Davenport in the finals of the Ericsson Open. "My technique is better, my forehand, serve, quickness. Everything is good now."

Everything?

"In tennis," she says, "and in my private life."

The weirdness of 1999 has been eradicated from her life. Having reached No.1 in the world at age 16 in 1997, then spending 80 weeks perched there, Hingis had, over time, become rather bored. "Everything came so easy," she says. "When I was young, everybody was telling me, 'You will be No. 1 someday.'

"But when I was 16, I was already No. 1. I won the Australian Open, I won Wimbledon, I won the U.S. Open. It was like, what else can I do?"

For one thing, guys started coming around. For another, Mom's vigilance played on her nerves. "It's just that I wanted to do something else," she says, "so I wouldn't practice as seriously anymore."

As a result, she fell to No. 2 in October 1998, only to discover she liked that even less than being bored at the top. Four months later, in the course of winning the Australian Open, this exuberant wunderkind worked one of her little adidas into her wide, toothy mouth by saying of Amelie Mauresmo, her brawny and openly gay finals opponent, "She is here with her girlfriend. She is half a man already."

Even though that statement bombed, the Adorable One simply could not stop. "They are hugging and kissing each other all the time. There is a limit." A day later, under heavy pressure from the Women's Tennis Association, Hingis solemnly ate her words. "It's not that she is a man," she said. "She has an unusual game, and she plays like a man."

Some apology. Privately, Hingis allowed she had no regrets about her catty remarks. "She can put a knife in you with a big smile on her face," Chris Evert says. "You wonder if she means it or if it's just innocence. You never know."

Although Hingis played well enough last spring to recapture her No. 1 ranking, she was headed for a meltdown. There is nothing unusual about an 18-year-old throwing a tantrum. It's just that most 18-year-olds don't throw one in the finals of the French Open. There, on center court at Roland Garros Stadium, facing the majestic Steffi Graf, Hingis had a fit. Not liking the ump's call on a shot ruled long, Hingis stomped over to the other side of the net to protest and got docked a point. She requested a bathroom break. Time passed.

Finally, she reappeared in new clothes and a new hairdo. She then proceeded to flounce about the court and pout as the crowd cheered lustily for Graf, who won. Barely brushing Graf's hand at the net, Hingis stormed off the court, then had to be yanked back out of the locker room by her mother for the awards presentation. Days later, Hingis was reportedly spotted in the south of France, frolicking on the beach with a young male tennis player.

"It was Cyprus," she says now, still picking at her food. "And for just those few days."

The final debacle came at Wimbledon, where, determined to assert her independence, she publicly disinherited Mom by showing up alone, then shocked the tennis world by losing in the first round (6-2, 6-0) to 129th-ranked 16-year-old Jelena Dokic. True, she did rally later in the summer at the U.S. Open, putting on a magnificent display of speed and cunning in beating Venus Williams in the semifinals. But she ran out of steam in the finals and lost to Serena Williams.

Sobered, Hingis went home and reorganized her game. "I have a system now," she says. "Every time I go back to Saddlebrook, I know what's going to happen."

Mom rousts her at 9:30 a.m. She starts playing at Nick Bolletieri's tennis academy at 10. In the afternoon she will hit with some of the other women players, like Dokic, Tara Snyder, Jennifer Capriati, Chanda Rubin. Or some of the guys at the academy.

And she reorganized her life.

Trapped in this Bristol conference room, with a reporter she has to be nice to, Hingis clearly does not want to be reminded of the bad times, not now, not when "life is almost perfect." So, when she is asked to "go back to last summer," Hingis looks up innocently and says, "What's so exciting about it?"

Was it a low point for you?

"What low point?" Hingis shoots back. "I don't think it's a low point being in the finals of the French Open, three points away from the victory. Maybe Wimbledon was. But sometimes you just don't do well. That's why I lost. But it could happen anytime to anybody. That's the past and I just want to look to the future right now."

That brings us once again to the French Open, which begins May 29. But first, a commercial break.

Fresh from hair, makeup and wardrobe, Hingis appears in a pink terry-cloth robe over a spandexy little pink- and navy-striped camisole and huggy shorts. On her feet are fluffy pink slippers. Along with three ESPN anchors -- Linda Cohn, Chris McKendry and Suzy Kolber -- and field reporter Melissa Stark, Hingis sits on the floor amid sleeping bags and a big bowl of popcorn. We are supposed to believe these women are having a slumber party.

After a scripted opening, the dialog slips into ad-lib girlspeak. Let's listen in:

Hingis: "SportsCenter guys are sooo cool, but Rich (Eisen) is by far the cutest."

ESPN woman: "Are you nuts? Why don't you marry him?"

Followed by a chorus of "Martina loves Richie, Martina loves Richie," Hingis blushes. Then it gets interesting. The newswomen, being newswomen, want to know about Hingis' love life. Cuddling a stuffed animal, she falters, "I like fast cars. And I like champions."

What else, Martina? "Right now I like baseball, hockey and tennis players. And horseback riders. (She giggles) I just love their bodies. They look so big and so strong in their outfits. It's so sexy."

"Brad Pitt!" cries another newswoman. "How does he look with his clothes off?"

Although this is intended as a joke, the giggling this time is from embarrassment. Hingis, wanting to perform her role well, yet squeamish at the turn of the conversation, blushes some more and says to Cohn, "What about you, Linda? What's your love life like?" "Me?" Cohn asks. "I'm married."

Off-camera, Martina rolls her eyes. "This is getting too real for me," she says, squirming.

You want the real Martina, you go to the woman who knows her best. You go to the woman who gave birth to her, taught her how to hold a tennis racket, how to swing it, how to win with it. You go to the woman who was lauded as the perfect tennis mom -- the woman who made her daughter a rich, international star by age 16, but gave her a seminormal life in the process.

You go to Melanie Molitor, who is at this moment, in a Bristol hallway, engaging in kissy-face with boyfriend Mario. After the two of them retreat into the conference room, where the blinds have been drawn to keep the bright sun from affecting the lighting of the commercial, Melanie draws a chair close to the window to read a book in a weak ray of sunlight. Moments later, she is up (maternal habits die hard) and scraping food from the lunch plates into a garbage can. She understands English, but prefers speaking German. Mario translates as she talks about her daughter.

What happened last summer, Melanie says, was predictable. "Martina's not 16 anymore. What's most important as she gets older is that she understands not just the athletic thing, but the human thing. Every person has needs. Things happen with the body and the mind. At the moment, Martina is doing what's right for her. She's changing all the time."

Her daughter, Melanie says, has been struggling to find her own identity, struggling for three years, while she was an international figure, a household name, the No. 1 tennis player in the world, during a time when "a million different things were happening in her life."

That's what the French Open and Wimbledon were all about last year. Melanie understands. Melanie knows. And now her daughter does, too.

The rapprochement between Martina and her mom is confirmed by Hingis, with both insisting the "problem" lasted only those few Wimbledon days. "Sometimes you want to make your own experiences," Hingis offers. "It's not enough somebody telling you. You want to try it. Everybody goes through that stage sometime."

Still, leading her own life wasn't what it was cracked up to be, Hingis admits: "I definitely didn't feel good being by myself. On the court, I felt like something was missing, like I was only half there. The other half was missing. Just to know my mom wasn't sitting there felt strange."

After Wimbledon, Hingis says she returned to Saddlebrook to "do" the new house the three had moved into -- "decorate things, change things, get the practice going. It was like a new beginning."

The relationship with her mother is different now, stronger, Hingis insists. So it was a power struggle?

Hingis shrugs. "When you're 18, what do you do?"

Although it's rumored that Hingis has been "dating" Tampa Bay Lightning -- and fellow Czech -- Pavel Kubina, she says, "I can't really call it dating."

Seeing? She grins. "Yeah. We went out to dinner a few times."

However full her dance card might be, her social life is not getting in the way of Hingis' tennis, which she is approaching with a new steeliness. She has to because the sport has changed on her. Opponents like the Williams sisters, Davenport, Capriati, Mauresmo, Mirjana Lucic, Anna Kournikova and Mary Pierce base their games on power.

So Martina hired a trainer. She lifts weights, does tai chi, swims and works to improve her speed, all to augment her best weapons -- agility, shot placement and, above all, guile.

When she began winning tournaments in Czechoslovakia at age 6, she says, "I was the smallest of the youngest ones, so I had to think on the court. I couldn't beat anyone with my strength. I didn't have the same fitness or ability as the other girls, so I had to beat them with my mind. It was the only thing I had. It's still the same way. The other girls are still bigger and stronger."

By now, the slumber party has progressed to the next scene. The women are scrunched together, lying down, lights out, supposedly drifting off to sleep. Suddenly, the silence is broken as one of them blurts out, "Martina, you didn't shave! Your legs are like sandpaper!"

Not expecting this -- but not missing a beat -- Hingis fires back, "You better be quiet. You've got bad breath!"

Miss Don't-Mess-With-Me had made her point. Weeks later Martina would make it again at the Betty Barclay Cup in Germany, where she used her fine-tuned game to defeat Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario for her third title of the year.

The French Farce of 1999 behind her, she's a favorite to win in Paris this time. But now, with the tape in the can, she is out of the cute nightclothes and again dressed in black. She climbs into the back of a limo, which will take her to the airport, where she will catch the private jet back to Saddlebrook. Although she once stated that Switzerland was home, apparently Martina has revamped herself on this point, too. "Now Saddlebrook is home," she says. "I like going back there."

Is this the same girl who once declared that she would never live in the States, much less (god!) Florida? "That was when I first came to the U.S.," she says. "But now, with tennis and everything, it's perfect."

Hingis pauses. "The older you get, the more you learn."

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