As a professional endeavor, tennis was never the laid-back country club affair most of the world associates it with. You always had to be fit, athletic, and agile if you were going to keep up. But in today's game, with stronger and faster players and rapidly evolving technology, the grind has become nearly too much to bear for even the most freakishly fit of athletes. We saw that in living color today as two of the most recognizable stars in the men's game bowed out of the tournament, both having their game severely undercut by injuries.
First, this afternoon (late last night for those of you back in the states), Andy Roddick struggled and gutted through five agonizing sets against Marin Cilic before losing 6-3 in the fifth. He called out the trainer on two separate occasions to look at a shoulder injury that first popped up during his match Sunday against Fernando Gonzalez, and said afterwards he was losing feeling in his fingers during the first two sets. A shot of painkillers and creative re-working of the game plan brought him from two sets down against Cilic, but he wasn't able to climb all the way back. Another hearty effort for naught in the past 12 months for Roddick, after a similar rally at the US Open ended with a fifth-set tiebreak loss to John Isner, which of course followed the memorable Wimbledon final last July against Roger Federer.
On to the evening session (which is really early in the morning back home): the defending champion of the event was dethroned with a retirement for the second straight year. Like Novak Djokovic in 2009 against Roddick, Rafael Nadal was being abused in the quarterfinals by an opponent named Andy (Murray, the #5 seed from Scotland), then ultimately threw in the towel. Stunning on a number of levels considering all the justified "freak of nature" praises the Spaniard gets, and it was a pretty swift turn of events watching it live down here. Nadal was his usual full-throttled self when the match began, popping off a couple impressive rallies and the super-charged reactions that go with them, but Murray capitalized on two early opportunities to break serve & take the first set. That's when the wear and tear began to set in, and Nadal appeared to pull up with a "tweaked" knee in the late stages of the match before retiring at 3-0 in the third. Even before the moment of injury though, he was beginning to show noticeable signs of battle fatigue from the Murray onslaught.This is impressive on the Murray side of things because not many players - not even Federer - have the distinction of bullying Nadal to the point of tapping out. Yet that's precisely what the champion did after 3 dismal games to open the third set while already trailing 2 sets to none. Nadal admitted afterward the move had a little calculation behind it in terms of the "big picture" - he felt he had no chance to win the match and saw no reason to risk another major setback to knees that had spent the second half of 2009 in rehabilitation mode. He'll be out for a month, but who knows what condition he'll be in when he comes back.
Roddick and Nadal were merely the latest in a long line of walking wounded at this event, which you would think (given its status at the first major and only the third or fourth tournament overall in the calendar) could avoid seeing a lot of players worn down by injury. Yet that's precisely what has happened to many top players: Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina (wrist), Jo-Wilfried Tsonga (wrist), Tommy Haas (back), Roddick (shoulder), Nadal (knee), Marcos Baghdatis (knees and shoulder), Lleyton Hewitt (hip), and Robin Soderling (elbow/exhaustion...proving again my "knowledge" of the sport, I was convinced this Swede could make a run deep to the tournament final. What a stupid I am). The women aren't faring much better: top seed Serena Williams keeps adding more gauze around her knees & thighs with every match she plays, as does Justine Henin (you'd think with two years off at least she would be fresh). The same night Roddick was soldiering on against Gonzalez, the women's #2 seed Dinara Safina hobbled off the court, retired with ankle & back pain.
So is it that this sport takes too much out of you, or even weirder, not enough? The fact that the Australian Open occurs so early in the calendar may be part of the problem - players not only were still playing regularly until November of 2009, denying them a true off-season, they then have to urge themselves into top form on the heels of a very short break for the holidays. The level of tennis just isn't there across the board at the start of a season which follows so quickly on the heels of the old one, and players scrambling to keep up find themselves in the infirmary more than the winner's circle.
Despite whatever calendar problems might be out there - plenty of top men & women are on the record with complaints that the season is too long - here's my theory on what might seem like an abnormal pile-up of injuries: the athleticism it takes to be a professional tennis player now is off the charts. Even big lumbering guys like Cilic & JMDP of Argentina have a stunning amount of power & agility; if they didn't, there would simply be no hope for them to compete. And when you have a group of athletes constantly pushing each other to the physical limit like that, injuries happen. The human body was only designed to take so much abuse, to be stopped & started & turned on a dime only so often before it snaps under pressure. You just hope players figure out ways to battle through it.
** Pretty long entry today, but I didn't get in the daily note on Australian culture. That's a little surprising considering today was Australia Day, the continent-nation's answer to the Fourth of July, complete with an absolutely stunning fireworks display that would rival anything we see back home on Independence Day. I grabbed a quick video; I'll post that tomorrow. Fair trade?
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