The job of reclaiming his aborted pro career after losing three years to back trouble and two surgeries seemed so daunting a task to Taylor Dent that he found himself reaching for a pencil and paper - not to scrawl a suicide note, but to write down some goals. Not to be No. 20 in the world, or to make the Wimbledon quarters. Not to beat at least three Top 50 players in a tournament. They were small goals. Much smaller goals. The first one was to make it through a long walk around his neighborhood.
One of his first tennis-specific ones was complete a ball-feeding drill - five sets of ten balls apiece, hit back across the net and into the court, off puffballs that Dent could reach at a stroll. "That's been the trick to this comeback," Taylor told me when we sat to visit at the IMG Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy recently. "I had to try to keep from being overwhelmed. That first day I hit I saw how far I'd fallen from the peak of my game. I was just sucking wind, hitting balls terrible. I was on the verge of tears."
Little by little, one small goal at a time, Dent hobbled back - all the way back to a year-end 2009 ranking of No. 76, a number that seemed stratospheric back in May of 2008, when he played the first match of his comeback at Carson, Calif. That day, he lost to Cecil Mamiit, a battle-scarred veteran who was nearly 32 at the time. Dent didn't win a tour level match until November, but every match he lost up to that point had been a three-setter. So hope gleamed.
Starting in Brisbane in 2009, Dent began to win matches. He qualified for Wimbledon, but lost a heartbreaking first-rounder to Daniel Gimeno-Traver, 6-4 in the fifth. He broke into the Top 200 in August, and ended up winning two rounds at the U.S. Open, beating Feliciano Lopez and Ivan Navarro (9-7 in a fifth-set tiebreaker) before Andy Murray put him out in straight sets.
"I'm not looking too far ahead," Taylor told me. "But I've had a lot of small highs and a lot of silver linings to some of the losses, and my progress in general. It all culminated at the U.S. Open. I didn't feel I was playing that well going into the event, but I was able to compete at a pretty high level thanks to my fitness and a lot of hard work. That win over Navarro was great for me, even though Murray beat me in the next round. I followed up that tournament with wins in Tulsa and Knoxville (Challenger events), and a final in Champaign (Ill.). That was gratifying."
Dent is an interesting character. His father Phil was a Top 20 Australian pro; his mother, Betty Ann Stuart, was a Top 10 American player. Dent is a strapping, 6'2" 200-pounder with an atomic serve and daredevil's volley, but he's also an intensely cerebral young man man with a taste for abstractions. He prides himself on his abilities as a handyman, and he and a buddy built a Ford Cobra hot-rod from the ground up, from a kit, a project that took two years to complete. He says his "hobbies" include politics and religion. He's also emotional.
The combination of cerebral and emotional doesn't always work well in tennis, and it seemed to account for some of the obstacles Dent struggled with in his first incarnation on the tour (he still rose to a career high-ranking of No. 21 shortly before his back troubles laid him low). In that first section of his two-part career, Taylor was known for working himself into a lather and running off the rails, the mental equivalent of tripping over his own two feet. He believes the time he's spent away from the game has helped him develop a clearer perspective.
"The break really helped, no doubt about it," he said. "I've always been hungry to win - that's never been a problem. But I was always too emotional about it. It was always my way or the highway. It didn't matter if someone came to me with a good reason to do something a little differently. I was so emotional about wanting to win, and win my way (with that go-for-broke serve-and-volley style), that it worked against me. I was relying on luck, rather than reason."
Dent isn't interested in having a coach, at least not the way he defines the word. "My game is what it is. I'm 28, it's too late to change now. I'm the foremost expert on my game; it's hard to imagine by this time that someone would come up with an idea I haven't already thought about. But I'll bounce ideas off people like Red Ayme (one of Bollettieri's right-hand men) or Brad Gilbert, and I ask a lot of questions. What I want, and welcome having, is something more like . . . consultants."
This form of complex thinking is classic Taylor Dent. Other players wouldn't even bother to make such distinctions, and would call it over-thinking - definitely not a good habit for a professional athlete.
Dent once was one of the last of the old-school type serve and volley players; if he went down, he went down with his guns blazing. But he's come to believe that the style is no longer viable as a basic game plan. By the third set of his difficult match with Murray in New York, Dent says he actually "felt better" after missing a first serve. "When I served and volleyed earlier in the match, I felt on the defensive every single point. And that's a death sentence for a player like me. Knowing that I could - and should - stay back when I missed my first serve made me feel secure."
That's one of the more interesting observations I've heard recently, and it puts the general style of play in today's game into perspective. So I framed a situation for Dent, asking what he'd do now when serving against a high-quality player at 30-all.
"Maybe in the past I would have just gone for the big serve and volley play. Now I'm more likely to think: What's been my winning percentage in serve and volley in the deuce court? How's his return on the side I'd prefer to serve to? How well am I hitting the big bomb down the T?
"It would be a game-time decision, based on the conditions. But let's face it, if you win the point, whatever decision you chose will be deemed right, and if you lose the point you were wrong. That's the nature of the business.
"Let's be frank - my game is based around hitting the volley. Even during baseline points, my game is set up to get me to the net, and to make it hard for an opponent to keep me off he net. But I'm not coming in behind any old ball. I have my plays that get me to the net advantageously, and that's what I'd try to implement."
Dent believes that you need three things to win a match: a sufficient level of execution, relative to the ability of your opponent; fitness, and the mental toughness to maintain that first quality - good execution.
"You can control two of those things going in," Dent said. "You can be fit, and work hard enough to be able to execute, and know what you can execute, at your best level. Before my surgeries, I believed that if I played well I could beat anyone. So I went out there hoping to play well. But when you're playing well, everything is pretty easy anyway.
"Now, I go out prepared to deal with the two things that can go wrong. You can play badly, and you can miss opportunities. Those are the only two obstacles you have on the court, although you can still get outplayed and lose, of course. But if I'm mentally prepared to face those problems and deal with them, I won't beat myself and that's all a player can hope for. These days, I feel that no matter how many shots I drill into the back fence and no matter how many opportunities I let slip away, I'm going to keep trying to execute at a high level. I'm going to have that focus and mental toughness."
Dent is optimistic about next year. He said he'd be surprised if he doesn't surpass his career-high ranking of No. 21 sometime before he set the sticks aside for good. Besides, he's playing for two people, and soon he'll be playing for three. His wife, former touring pro Jennny Hopkins (career-high WTA ranking: 52), is expecting a baby boy they plan to call Declan. The baby is due on the same weekend as the Australian Open final.
"When we looked at the calendar, Jenny said, 'You're not allowed to come back from the Australian, because if you're still there when I'm due you'll be in the semis or final.'" Dent paused to contemplate his dilemma. "That could be a hard decision, you kind of want to be there for the birth of your child. But if I do that well in Australia, I'd be better off staying, just because of what it would enable me to do for Declan's future."
Declan will certrainly need shoes; and Taylor can use those ranking points if he's to make good on his determination to be a Top 20 player again.