Mary Pierce, this year's French Open champion and the number four seed here, paid the price for playing against doctors' orders when she suffered a recurrence of her right shoulder injury - a pinched nerve - in her fourth-round match against Germany's Anke Huber and was forced to retire after losing the first set 6-4.
"The doctors recommended that I should take three months off but I was just too keen to play tennis," said Pierce, who had played only two matches between her Paris triumph on June 11th and her brief appearance here.
Huber now plays the 18-year-old Russian Elena Dementieva, who reached her first slam quarterfinal with a 6-3 6-7 7-6 victory over Lilia Osterloh of the US.
Although the Women's Tennis Association likes to trumpet the variety and marketability of the game, the lack of strength in depth means that the first four rounds of the slams produce a series of extremely one-sided matches with the minimum of shocks. Only 21 of the 96 first and second-round matches went to three sets in the first week here.
The predictability continued yesterday, save for the injury to Pierce, and a fighting first-set performance by the 17-year-old Australian Jelena Dokic, whose father, Damir, was banned from the US Open last week after an altercation in the players' restaurant.
Only a close line call - the ball looked in - prevented Dokic taking the first set against Serena Williams, the reigning champion. Dokic, who matched the American's power and cramped her for space, had three set points in total during the tie-break, but thereafter fell away sharply, losing 7-6 6-0.
Martina Hingis, leading France's Sandrine Testud 6-2 1-0 when the rain stopped their match on Sunday, completed a routine 6-2 6-1 victory and in her quarter-final will play Monica Seles.
Seles had a 6-3 6-4 fourth-round win over Jennifer Capriati, reviving memories of their epic semi-final nine years ago when Seles was 17-years-old and Capriati two years younger. Seles also won that one in an encounter of remarkable intensity and huge hitting.
"It was one of the classic matches. We were punching each other back and forth, and I think it changed the face of women's tennis," said Seles. Not this time. Although both remain capable of giving the ball a huge clout from time to time, they can no longer sustain the power of the Williams sisters or Lindsay Davenport. "It's a new day and a new age," said Capriati.
Magnus Norman, the runner-up in the French Open, and the number three seed here, rallied from two sets down, and saved four match points against Max Mirnyi of Belarus to reach the last 16 where he will play German's Nicolas Kiefer. Norman, better known in New York for his relationship with Hingis than the quality of his play, won 3-6 4-6 7-6 6-4 7-6 in just over four hours.
