Teen-age tennis star Mirjana Lucic has fled her native Croatia after accusing her father of being abusive. "Beatings ... there have been more of them than anyone can imagine," the 16-year-old Lucic told a Zagreb newspaper, Slobodna Dalmacija. "Sometimes it was because of the lost game, in other cases for the lost set or badly played trainings. I don't want to even say what happened after the matches I lost." Marinko Lucic, who also was his daughter's coach and adviser, denied the accusations that he mistreated her because of tennis. "If I slammed her, that was because she didn't behave nicely, never because of tennis," Marinko Lucic wrote to the newspaper Vecenji List. The player said she fled with her mother and four brothers and sisters to the United States with the help of a U.S. senator whom she did not identify. She is attending Nick Bollettieri's tennis academy in Bradenton, Fla.
Rod Laver left the hospital Thursday, much earlier than expected.
Three weeks ago, when the only player to win the Grand Slam of
tennis twice was in the intensive care unit at UCLA
Medical Center, a doctor expressed the opinion Laver would probably
be hospitalized for months. Laver, looking good and speaking clearly,
was discharged from the hospital a month to the day after suffering
a moderate stroke. "I'm glad to be out of there," Laver
said with a smile from a wheelchair outside the medical center.
Laver, 60, was stricken July 27 while taping a
television interview near the hospital. "He's doing fantastic,"
said Dr. Eric Aldrich, a neurologist who worked with Laver the
last two weeks. "His strength is coming back. His coordination
and balance need some work. He's right on course."
It has been brewing since Wimbledon that Marcello Rios and his coach, Larry Stefanki, were going to part ways.
Rios, number one in the world, announced in a press conference in Cincinnati last week that Stefanki and he would part after the USOpen, "I want to go in a new direction."
It was Pete Sampras' old rival, Andre Agassi, who did it. At yesterday's quarterfinal match at the du Mauier Open in Toronto, Agassi dispatched his friend and rival 6-7 (7-5), 6-1, 6-2. Sampras won the first set in a tie breaker. But after playing an earlier match because of a rain-out on Thursday, Sampras apparently ran out of gas. Agassi overwhelmed at obviously out-of-shape and out-of-synch Sampras in the final two sets. Sampras' number one position will be taken over by Marcelo Rios of Chile.
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