!90726054 by Pete Bodo
Afternoon, everyone. It didn't seem wise to write at length about Kim Clijsters on the day of the men's US Open final, so I saved my thoughts for today. Tomorrow, I'll take a closer look at the Serena Williams incident, and will spend the rest of the week wrapping up the the US Open, and the Grand Slam season of 2009. After that, we'll be back to business as usual.
I had a lively go-round at my Twitter account on the night Clijsters won, button-punching my way all the way from Queens to New York City on the press bus. Quite a few people came out to challenge me when I "wrote" a Tweet suggesting that Clijsters win was a damaging comment on the quality of the WTA players.
My feelings were based less on the fact that Clijsters was able to win the US Open, than that she was able to do it in just her third competitive event after taking a hiatus of about two-and-a-half years. Coming back after quitting the game in disgust, especially at a tender age, is a statement of protest usually lodged by frustrated, going-nowhere-fast journeymen, not Grand Slam champions and/or former No. 1 players.
Greg Garber of ESPN and I talked about the Clijsters case a bit at Flushing Meadow, and he noted that Moncia Seles left the main tour for just about the same length of time as Clijsters, and she also returned and shot back to the top of the heap. When Seles returned in 1995, she won her first event (Canadian Open) and then went all the way to the USO final, where she lost to her rival, Steffi Graf. That's an even more impressive comeback than the one Clijsters just completed.
But let's remember two things: Seles was an extraordinary champion; she won more Grand Slam events, in a shorter time frame, than any other player. She was on track to be the most prolific Grand Slam champion ever, had she not been stabbed in the back on that overcast Spring day in Hamburg in 1993. And while Seles's physical injury was minor (physically, at any rate; there's a great story to be told there, and perhaps one day I'll try my hand at it), Evonne Goolagong, who also won a Grand Slam after bearing a child, had plenty to say about the effects childbirth had on her physiology. She found it made her more injury-prone, and she was anything but a prima donna.
Clijsters, unlike Seles, was famous for being an under-performer. She won exactly one major, and had a disappointing 1-11 record in Grand Slam semifinals and finals until her comeback. A player so susceptible to pressure, or so unable to lift her game that extra notch, is many things, but she is no Monica Seles.
Let's also remember that the game is supposed to have moved forward since the time Seles played, never mind the Goolagong-Evert-Navratilova era. Clijsters played some great tennis to win the USO, no doubt about it. She didn't "deserve" or not-deserve to win the tournament - she earned the title, and her name will always be attached to it. She wrote a great story that will tower above any of the asterisks or quibbles, but that doesn't mean those qualifiers aren't valid, There's always a story, and you can ask Robin Soderling or Rafael Nadal about that.
Kim bucked 2 Williams sisters to win at Flushing Meadow, and she gets a lot of credit for that, too. But her pre-maternity leave record at tournaments, and her head-to-head (especially in big matches), makes it surprising that she faced relatively little resistance in her drive to the title. Bartoli and Venus Williams were the only players to take her to 3 sets; she lost just two games in her first match, and the same number in the quarterfinals. It wasn't exactly a cakewalk, but compared to some of the other inspired performances turned in by other unlikely suspects in majors over the years, it was a pretty smooth ride. Remember Stefan Edberg being down a break in the fifth in three consecutive matches as a prelude to the final of the 1992 US Open, which he won?.
Ordinarily, I don't like to compare men's and women's tennis, but some of the angrier responders to my Tweet challenged me with ATP comparisons. What about Agassi in 1994, playing in what has been called, by some, the strongest era in men's tennis history? I think that was substantially different. Agassi had a big year in 1992 - he won Wimbledon and was on the winning US Davis Cup team; his tailspin began with a wrist injury that left him terrified that he'd have to quit the game and, while his slide in '93 was precipitous, he was back at the top by the summer of '94, when he became the first unseeded player to win the US Open. It wasn't until the following year that Agassi even reached No. 1 for the first time. This was no clean break, or extended departure, but a speed bump in his career arc.
What about Goran Ivanisevic winning Wimbledon as a wild card? It was an equally magical and improbable moment, but with nothing like the backstory. Goran may have been struggling, but he was playing (when not injured), and his mind was on the game. No player ever seemed to "deserve" to win a specific major, based on the sum total of his history at and devotion to an event (Roger Federer at Roland Garros comes close, but he's a player of a different level). And as we all saw, Goran's path to the trophy was a harrowing, bewildering one that ultimately seemed nothing less than fated.
I focused on those examples because there's a big difference between hitting a rough patch and leaving the game altogether for an extended period. Agassi's triumphant return, or Ivanisevic's Wimbledon effort, were scenes from the same play. Clijsters win, while no less valid, was a different, new play - a sequel to her first career. One of the things that makes it so difficult to pull off an accomplishment like Clijsters' is that a great deal changes in tennis in two years, starting with the names - and games - of the actors. Recovering your match toughness and confidence is also a challenge of a higher order for a player who left the game.
The player whose story most resembles that of Clijsters' may be Bjorn Borg - if you can compare a woman who won one major with a man who won 11 majors and still has the highest career winning percentage in men's Open tennis history. Like Clijsters, Borg was young (26) when he quit, and he quit largely because he was disenchanted. Borg annnounced his retirement in 1983 and tried a comeback in 1991. He lost six successive first-round singles matches, and finally hung it up for good.
But Borg spent about three times as much time away from the game as did Clijsters, so even that comparison breaks down. The reality is that everyone's story is different, and any number of players have carved new, different, and seemingly unlikely paths to glory. Clijsters is just the latest. We're better off throwing out the apples and oranges and taking each case, sui generis.
Clijsters was only 23 when she quit, and she obviously felt a powerful call to motherhood. So this was no case of some player on the wrong side of 28, hoping for a last hurrah. Nevertheless, wasn't the dream a little too easily realized? I'm not a betting man, yet I think sometimes you find the most dispassionate and hype-proof analyses at gaming websites, if for no other reason than that they're all about capitalizing on facts and trends to make money (instead of, say, slobbering all over a player whom the writer happens to adore).
Here's a typically dispassionate analysis from one such site, and if it seems harsh, so be it. It strikes me as a reality-based assessment of the WTA; the kind of thing you would pay a high-priced consultant to come up with, if you were at wits end about why your firm wasn't performing up to snuff.
Of course, maybe Clijsters is - or has become - one heck of a lot better tennis player than we expected, or her record suggests. I'll leave the door open on that one. Who knows? Perhaps the extended break has had a transformative effect on her ability to compete, and the time off enabled her to both replenish and beef up her assets. Time will tell.
What struck me most about Clijsters is the exquisite timing of her return, and I don't mean "of serve." The women by whom she had been oppressed, and who forced her to eat gruel to their cavair, have either left the game, lost their games, or have so many miles on the odometer (the Williams sisters) that they've become more vulnerable. And the other contenders (Elena Dementieva, Dinara Safina?) and green but promising newcomers haven't taken control. I get the sense that Clijsters saw a window open in these last two years of relative chaos and decided to jump through - before some new Seles or Graf hit the scene.
More power to her; personally, this confirms my long-standing feeling that Clijsters is a much tougher and more calculating than her happy-go-lucky persona suggests. Many great champions are master opportunists, and capable of shrewd, self-interested calculations. It's one of the reasons they seem larger than life, like mythological personages. It's one of the reasons they end up at the top of the heap. Sources in Belgian television have said that Justine Henin, the dynamo who overshadowed Clijsters the first time around (that they were both from tiny Belgium only exacerbated the situation for Clijsters) recently ordered 14 custom-made racquets, and one Belgian tennis insider told me to expect a Henin press conference sometime during the week after the Open, announcing a comeback.
It would be interesting if Henin did come back, and the other WTA drama queens found their A-games again. I was never a huge fan of Clijsters game, but it's definitely good enough to beat any female player who lacks the physical tools to stand her ground, or the mental ability to ratchet up her game in those Grand Slam stare-downs. So Clijsters didn't just create a great story, she threw down a gauntlet.
I wouldn't be shocked if Part II of Clijsters career ended with her 11-1 in semis or better; one of the nice things about tennis is that a player can change; a chronic choker can develop into a great competitor. An excuse-seeker can become a player who refuses the comfort and shelter of mitigating circumstances. Pete Sampras had a stern conversation with himself after he lost the 1992 US Open final to Edberg and it was, in his own estimation, a career-transforming moment. And Martina Navratilova morphed, through determination and hard work, from a pudgy choker given to hysterics into one of the greatest players of all time.
To that end, the extended break taken by Clijsters may prove to have been a brilliant if not entirely calculated strategy resulting in a career makeover. Sometimes, tearing something down and starting over is far wiser than trying to fix or correct flaws built into the original model. Clijsters triumphant return ought to set alarm bells ringing between the ears of all the WTA players, including the younger ones, like Victoria Azarenka and Clijsters victim in the USO final, Caroline Wozniacki. The most satisfying coda to this finely textured saga would be a competitive renewal within the ranks of the WTA. What I took from Clijsters win, partly, was that the WTA is ripe for one.
And finally, did you see that smooch Brian Lynch, Clijsters husband, laid on his wife when she climbed into the stands after winning? I watched and thought, Whoa, hoss, let's keep this G-rated, we got kids watching! It was the best televised smooch ever, and it sure beat those father-daughter demonstrations with which we are all too familiar.
Clijsters magical run to the US Open gave us a lot to think about - not all of it revolving around the champion herself.