A blue banner with the names of all the winners including Davenport was raised to the rafters of the arena during

A blue banner with the names of all the winners, including Davenport, was raised to the rafters of the arena during the post-match ceremonies.
To get to the final in this unique 16-player event, Hingis beat third-ranked Venus Williams in the semi-finals while Davenport downed No 6 Nathalie Tauziat.
“Yesterday I had a great victory against Venus, but Lindsay was a level too good today,” Hingis said. Along with her victory in Philadelphia, the Chase Championships crown was Davenport’s seventh of the year.
This one on the blue Madison Square Garden court was worth $500,000, and put her in the exalted company of other Championships winners, including Hingis, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf and Monica Seles. And for the second straight week, it was Davenport who walked off the court with the trophy. The American closed the match with her eighth and ninth aces of the day.
It was the second straight week Davenport had faced Hingis in a title match. Then Hingis badly misplayed the next serve, putting Davenport ahead 30-0.

“I did everything well.”
The final game was a perfect example.
Serving for the match, Davenport began with a wide ace against her Swiss opponent. Lindsay Davenport played her game to perfection today, dominating the world’s No 1 player to win the season-ending Chase Championships.

Taking charge from the opening stroke, Davenport overpowered Martina Hingis 6-4, 6-2 to reverse the outcome of last year and go for the big shots, Davenport said. Lindsay Davenport played her game to perfection today, dominating the world’s No 1 player to win the season-ending Chase Championships. That is, for sure, one of my goals and maybe I can finish in the top five.” Andres Gomez thinks it could be top three, eclipsing his own mark.
If that happens, Nicolas Lapentti may match the walker, Jefferson Perez, and find his face on an Ecuador postage stamp.. “When I was 90 in the world it would have been a bit silly of me to say I wanted to win a Grand Slam But now, in the top 10, I have the right to say it. Playing this tournament was only something I could dream about as a kid, so it will be very special.” His impressive command of English faltering for once, Lapentti vowed, “I will fight my heart off,” then added, “If you’ve had a great year you want to finish it well.”
Then, of course, there is the 2000 season to relish. “I don’t have the same game as Agassi but if he has to run as much as me he will get tired, for sure.” Right now, after two solid months in Europe, it is Lapentti who is tired, for sure.

But before he flies back to the family home in the luxurious Guayaquil suburb of Puntilla for a break, the world championships beckon and Nicolas confesses to a “very strange feeling”.
He explains: “When I was a little kid I remember watching it on TV at Madison Square Garden, watching Lendl, who was my particular idol, Becker and Edberg. “That’s how I learned on clay, running a lot,” said Nicolas, fingering the diamond stud in his left ear. The leap of 84 places into the top 10 is a one-year achievement second only to Agassi’s rise from 122 to sixth in 1998.
His 13 indoor victories this autumn, many of them over specialists on that surface, have further boosted the confidence of a sturdy-legged athlete with the perfect physique for tennis, who has blossomed beyond recognition.
Agassi, who beat him in Paris with much difficulty, paid tribute to Lapentti’s “wheels”. He has gathered more than £1m in prize money this year, won 58 of his 79 singles matches and lost in the first round once. Having kept close to his chest the ambition to mark 1999 with a place in the top 20, Lapentti found himself inside the leading 40 after one tournament and he has been building impressively from there.
Four years after that Bogota success, the kid reared on clay won the Indianapolis hard-court title in August, then set off for the indoor season in Europe. He arrived with an indoor career record of no wins and nine losses but in the Grand Slam Cup defeated Fernando Meligeni in a 16-14 third set, the longest in pro tennis this year. Then he beat Lleyton Hewitt to win the Lyon crown and crashed the top 10 with that semi-final in Paris and the quarters in Stockholm.

The 27 sets of singles and eight sets of doubles he played with Kuerten swept away any doubts over ability and durability. Never having previously gone beyond the second round of a Grand Slam, Nicolas won successive five-set matches against three Swedes at the Australian Open and marched to the semi-finals before being brought down by another Swede, Thomas Enqvist. The local media proceeded to write him off and Lapentti thought they might be right “They said I was maybe just another ATP Tour player I thought: ‘Nothing is happening. I am in the top 100 but I want more than that.’” On the advice of his Chilean coach, Patricio Rodriguez, Lapentti hired a fitness trainer, Carlos Aranda,and spent the Christmas period working with him.
It was a sacrifice which paid off spectacularly. But by the end of last year he had slumped from a high of 55 down to 92. “I thought ‘Oh, it’s that easy is it? I don’t have to work too hard because I have everything.’ It took me a while to realise I needed to be more professional.” Though another tournament victory eluded him, Lapentti moved into the top 100 in 1997. Transition to the professional circuit can prove a chasm, as many in Britain will testify, but Lapentti appeared to have completed an effortless vault when, in 1995, he moved straight from winning seven out of eight events on satellite tours in Ecuador and Colombia to qualify for, and win, the ATP tournament in Bogota aged 19.
Lapentti looks back on Bogota as an unfortunate landmark.

“By the time I was four I was already good and when I went to tennis for the first time at six I had the rudiments.” Since tennis still tends to be sniffed at as elitist in Ecuador, where there are no public courts, Lapentti was fortunate that his father, a former national basketball player and now a politician, could afford membership for his family of five children at the Guayaquil tennis club, the place which produced Segura and Gomez.
Lapentti, a descendant of Italian immigrants called La Penta whose name was changed by his grandfather, had an outstanding junior career, culminating in victory at the Orange Bowl of 1994. But it was Lapentti’s father, also called Nicolas, who set his son on the path, taking him to the beach as a small child to play ball with solid wood paddles. He has been a huge factor in the development of the youngster and, at the age of 39, is his Davis Cup doubles partner. When he won the French Open in 1990 and got to world No 4, Gomez was given a ticker-tape parade and went on to a party that lasted a week. Pancho Segura, the bandy-legged genius from Jack Kramer’s tennis pro circus, Gomez, and the 20km walk gold medallist at the 1996 Olympics, Jefferson Perez; that was the sum total of Ecuador’s sports giants until Lapentti.