Mauresmo beats Pierce to win WTA Tour Championship

LOS ANGELES—Amelie Mauresmo lifted the WTA Tour Championship title with a gritty 5-7, 7-6 (7/3), 6-4 victory over compatriot Mary Pierce, becoming the first Frenchwoman to win the elite season finale.
In capturing the most prestigious title of her career, Mauresmo secured the year-end world No. 3 ranking, and silenced doubters who have said she doesn’t have the mental stamina to come through in big matches.
“It’s great,” said Mauresmo, who has held the world number one ranking but whose only appearance in a Grand Slam final was a runner-up finish in the Australian Open in 1999. “I had so many people who said I couldn’t win, and I’m so glad I was able to come through this one,” she said. “The way we both played today made it even better. It’s just a great reward for me to be able to hold the trophy at the end of the week.” Serving for the match at 5-4 in the third, Mauresmo endured a shaky moment, falling behind 0-40.
But Pierce couldn’t take advantage, making five straight errors to bring the close-run encounter to a close after 3hrs 6min. “I don’t know what happened,” Mauresmo said. “But I knew I gave her some points at the beginning of that game. And I didn’t want to give her any more points.” “It’s tough,” Pierce said. “Any loss is tough, especially in the finals, especially in a close match. Especially when you have opportunities.”
Pierce had plenty of those, but converted just four of her 16 break chances and hurt herself with 49 unforced errors. Mauresmo’s victory denied Pierce a fairytale ending to a remarkable comeback year. Ranked 29th in the world at the beginning of 2005, the 30-year-old Pierce reached the finals at both Roland Garros and the US Open and won two Tier One tournaments to climb to her current fifth in the world.
“I believe it’s going to movivate me even more in the off-season, make me a little hungrier,” Pierce said. Pierce had reached the final with a close but convincing victory over world number one Lindsay Davenport, and her powerful ground game was again in evidence against Mauresmo.
After they traded early breaks in the opening set, Pierce earned the decisive break in the 11th game to gain the upper hand. But Mauresmo responded, breaking Pierce in the fourth game of the second set and denying Pierce three break chances in the next game en route to a 4-2 lead.
Pierce clawed the break back in the seventh game, then saved two break points in the 10th as the set went to the tiebreaker. Mauresmo took a 4-1 lead in the decider with an ace, and evened the match on her first set point with a blazing backhand cross-court.
Pierce kept it close in the third, but Mauresmo, already challenging her opponent with her wide variety of shots and astonishing angles, began to unleash her groundstrokes with even more conviction. “I finally found the rhythm in my legs and on my game to really let my groundstrokes go, which was sometimes the case, sometimes not for the first two sets,” she said. Even when Pierce pulled back the early break of serve, Mauresmo held steady. “I’m so proud of what I did today, especially the way the match was and the way I hung in there,” Mauresmo said. “I kept fighting, even though someimes I was a break up and she came back. I was hanging in there.”—Agencies