Hewitt in triumph of the will

There are very few players who can win a tournament by sheer force of personality but that is what Lleyton Hewitt did yesterday, adding a second Masters Cup trophy to his already imposing collection.

His 7-5, 7-5, 2-6, 2-6, 6-4 victory over Juan Carlos Ferrero in the final here in China was yet another triumph of will over circumstance. It could scarcely have provided a more fitting finale to his year.

Hewitt has played five matches this week, comprising 16 sets of gruelling tennis, at the end of a long and ultimately triumphant season.

He has somehow managed to win Wimbledon and four other titles to dominate his sport this year despite struggling with chickenpox for the first few weeks and a viral infection on and off for the past six months.

His mystery illness, one that has never been properly diagnosed, would be relatively minor for most players, but speed and fitness are Hewitt's trump cards and he has not been able to train properly during the latter half of the season. Goodness only knows what he might have achieved had he been fully fit.

"This year I went up against the odds in a lot of ways and was able to bounce back and I think that was the most satisfying part about it," he said. "The chickenpox just hit me a lot at the start of the year and it would have been easy for a lot of guys to go through the motions and not to try and prove something. That's what I tried to do. I've played some great tennis at different parts of the year."

He played some great tennis at different parts of yesterday's match too, but Ferrero was rampant by comparison and by far the better player for much of the three hours and 52 minutes they played.

At times the Hewitt serve was so weedy that it barely crept over the net, yet at others he seemed to generate so much power from his exhausted, wiry frame that he appeared to defy the laws of physics.

Thereby hangs the tale of what separates the very good players, such as Ferrero, from the great ones, such as Hewitt. At 1-3 in the fifth set, with exhaustion setting in and faced with an opponent hitting him off the court, mere mortals would have started to write their runner-up speech.

Hewitt, as he has been doing all his tennis life, frowned, took a deep breath and tapped into what Rudyard Kipling called "the will that says to them 'hold on'." Forget all that stuff about treating triumph and disaster just the same - in Hewitt's mind one is a certainty, the other anathema.

Almost inevitably he broke back and miraculously the first serves which had been absent for most of the match appeared out of nowhere. Ferrero cracked, Hewitt broke back and from then on he prowled the baseline, eyes bulging and fingers compulsively picking at his strings, waiting for more cracks to appear in the Spaniard's psyche.

The scoreline records that Hewitt won the first two sets but by rights he shouldn't have won either. He was a break down in the first but fought back and, despite being up a break early in the second, struggled to keep Ferrero at bay.

It was the shape of things to come; as Hewitt's fuel gauge moved into the red, Ferrero dominated the third and fourth sets.

"My legs just felt dead out there and after I sort of put everything into winning the first two sets, I had a bit of a letdown and just hit the wall out there," explained Hewitt.

"I wasn't able to get that push up on my serve and that was hurting me a lot. I don't know why, but in the end it started to pay dividends a bit more.

"I guess that never-say-die attitude helped a lot out there again."