It sounds like the setup of some oddball espionage flick: On consecutive days, the world’s top-ranked women’s golf and tennis players announce their retirement. Who is retiring the great female sports stars of the world?
Annika Sorenstam said Tuesday that she’ll be ending her career at the end of the golf season. On Wednesday, in a much bigger shocker, world No. 1 tennis player Justine Henin, two weeks shy of her 26th birthday and not injured, said she’s walking away from the game effective immediately. She’s the first player ever to quit at No. 1.
Imagine if Tiger Woods and Roger Federer had announced their retirements on consecutive days. They’d knock the NBA and NHL playoffs off the front pages for a week.
The bizarre coincidence of the timing of their announcements aside, Sorenstam and Henin’s retirements don’t have much in common. It would be easy to clump them together and ponder what it is that’s forcing the top women out of their sports early. But it might not be all that fruitful. Sorenstam and Henin are separate cases.
Sorenstam is 37 and at a more logical point in her career to step away than Henin, especially since she’s soon to be married for a second time and says she wants to have a baby.
Woods can shuffle his calendar to accommodate the birth of his daughter. It’s a little more complicated than that for a woman. Henin’s countrywoman Kim Clijsters, also a top tennis player, retired a year ago at the age of 23 because she wanted to have a baby, which she did in February.
While Sorenstam’s still a top player, she hasn’t returned to her earlier dominance since returning from a bulging disk in her neck last year. Even if she never swings another golf club in earnest again, she won’t have a legacy of what might have been.
“I’m very content with what I’ve achieved,” Sorenstam said, “and it just feels right.” Except for chasing Kathy Whitworth’s record of 88 career victories, which Sorenstam says doesn’t matter to her, she’s pretty much accomplished what she was going to accomplish.
Not so for Henin. The winner of seven Grand Slam titles including four French Opens, the last three in a row, she won’t defend her title at Roland Garros starting next weekend. Had she played in Paris and won, she would have become the first woman in the open era to win four straight championships there.
Reuters reports that she had spoken excitedly about the French Open just last week. She also had talked about playing in the Olympics and at Wimbledon, the one Grand Slam she hadn’t won.
Sorenstam is also that rare sports figure who has transcended her sport. She’s reasonably well-known to people who don’t follow women’s golf, mostly because she was so good she was able to compete against men in a PGA event.
Henin recalls the famous answer the drama critic gave to the Broadway publicist who asked how he could get his leading lady’s name in the New York Times: “Shoot her.”
Though she’s an exciting player with a full arsenal of shots, including a one-handed backhand that sends tennis-heads into veritable paroxysms of admiration, she’s had some personal drama — estrangement and reconciliation with her family, divorce, a feud with Serena Williams stemming from an incident at the 2003 French Open — and she’s notably smaller than most of her opponents and all of her top rivals, Henin, like Federer, has never captured the attention of those who weren’t already fascinated by tennis.
She has never been more famous than she is today, the first full day of her post-tennis life.
Unless she changes her mind. That’s always the speculation when an athlete retires while still playing well. Sorenstam even referenced that ultimate “did you say don’t go” diva of recent sporting times, Brett Favre.
Henin talked about how she’d lost her passion for the game she’d been playing since she was 5: “I gave the sport all I could and took everything it could give me,” she said at a press conference at her tennis academy in Belgium. “I take this decision without the least bit of regrets. It is my life as a woman that starts now.”
Yeah, yeah, say the chattering classes. See you in a year. Federer said he’d have taken a year off rather than retiring had he lost the ol’ belly fire.
Rare is the athlete who retires early and doesn’t feel the itch. Even Bjorn Borg, who walked away at 26, came back eventually, toting his wooden racket long after such primitive tools had themselves been retired.
Even more rare are sports figures who go out not just when there’s something left in the tank, but at the very top. It takes tremendous courage — or tremendous, Martina Hingis-like turmoil, which Henin and those around her say is not the case — to walk away at that point. It’s a hell of a thing to plunge from a world you reign over to one in which you’re just another person, albeit a rich one, trying to get by — “my life as a woman.” Henin sounded confident and appeared content and relaxed Wednesday. It was her coach, Carlos Rodriguez, not her, who choked up.
“I want to rediscover the small pleasures, not look at my watch all the time because I have to get to training the next day,” Henin said Wednesday. “I want to stay in shape but I want to spend time with the people I love, drive my nephews and nieces to activities, have time. It’s all I want right now.”
That all sounds great right now to someone who’s spent her entire adult life in a pressure cooker. But it might sound like torture a year from now to someone who, whether she realizes it or not, has been largely formed by that pressure cooker. My niece needs a ride again?!
Sorenstam plays a game that lends itself to much longer careers. Golf is that rare profession that, upon retirement, becomes an amiable pastime. Most people retire to, not from, golf. If she wanted to, Sorenstam could probably have a couple of babies, get them to middle school and then come back and at least compete on the LPGA and win on the Legends Tour.
The WNBA season gets under way this weekend. Lisa Leslie, one of the league’s biggest stars, will return to the court after skipping a year for childbirth and maternity leave. Here’s hoping Lauren Jackson, Diana Taurasi, Laura Beard and Seimone Augustus aren’t getting any big ideas from Sorenstam and Henin. The same goes for Danica Patrick, who’s in Indianapolis trying again to become the first woman to win the Indy 500.
It’s been an interesting week in women’s sports. A few more interesting weeks like it would be downright disastrous.
Serena Williams of the US returns a shot to France's Aravane Rezai at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon, Tuesday, June 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)(Credit: AP)
Ian Ritchie, the head of England’s Wimbledon tennis tournament, has told the Daily Telegraph in an interview that officials would “prefer to see less grunting” from athletes in the competition. Ritchie says he blames the grunting trend in tennis primarily on an “education problem with younger players.” (It seems this year’s particular problem comes in the form of Belarus’ Victoria Azarenka.)
Much has beenmade of Ritchie’s remarkstoday (let’s face it: How often do most journalists get to use the word “grunt”?). But grunting complaints are hardly new. In fact, grunting is a pet issue for the British press, almost as much of a go-to at Wimbledon time as strawberries and cream.
Last year, a Press Association report on Maria Sharapova’s loss to Serena Williams at Wimbledon declared that the Russian player “remain[ed] champion” in the “grunting stakes,” emitting wails of up to 104 decibels (compared to Williams’ more modest 91).
“Aircraft overhead and cheers from the crowd were at times drowned out by the pair during the pivotal first set tie-break,” the piece noted. (A study published later in 2010 claimed to present “unequivocal” evidence that grunting gives players a “real advantage.”)
In 2009, a Guardian article about the Women’s Tour Association’s stance on grunting noted that the WTA had long considered the practice a “construct of gnarled British news reporters armed with decibel-recording ‘gruntometers’” — pointing up the press’ seeming fascination with the topic.
Indeed, 2009 was a banner year for grunting controversy; that summer, BBC radio commentator (and former Wimbledon men’s singles victor) Michael Stich caused an uproar when he called grunting “disgusting, ugly, [and] unsexy” — adding that he thought “sex appeal” was a large part of what female tennis players “sell.”
In the same year, Martina Navratilova lashed out against on-court noisemaking (“The grunting has reached an unacceptable level. It is cheating, pure and simple. It is time for something to be done”), and the year’s most notorious offender, teenage Portuguese phenomenon Michelle Larcher de Brito, hit back:
“I’m not here to be quiet for anybody. I’m here to win. If people don’t like my grunting, they can always leave. … Tennis is an individual sport and I’m an individual player. If they have to fine me, go ahead, because I’d rather be fined than lose a match because I had to stop grunting.”
Before the 2009 tournament even began, the London Times had written of de Brito:
A 16-year-old Portuguese tennis player tipped as a future great, Michelle Larcher de Brito, emits a wail while hitting shots that seems to last longer than it takes the ball to reach the other side of the net. Sometimes her moans are loud enough to be heard three courts away. …
Tennis officials are now calling foul on grunting. The problem they face is determining whether a noisy exhalation of air is natural or done on purpose to put off an opponent.
Just over a week later, it had assembled a handy Q&A on “the main issues” about grunting at Wimbledon, since the topic had proved such a persistent talking point.
A Times piece from 2005 offers further back story:
Monica Seles [first] took things to a higher pitch in the 1990s, prompting British newspapers to measure the decibels on centre court. Seles registered 93.2 decibels, enough to make Jennifer Capriati scream “shut the f*** up” across the net.
Given grunting’s robust history of attention in the press, there’s no reason to assume we won’t be writing about it again this time next year. Until then, watch this clip for a sampling of Victoria Azarenka’s trademark vocal trill, and judge for yourself: Is it distracting? Is it cheating? Is it even “grunting”?
Martina Navratilova has been hospitalized in Kenya with an accumulation of fluid in the lungs after attempting to climb Africa’s highest peak, according to a statement released Friday evening.
The 54-year-old tennis great has been diagnosed with high-altitude pulmonary edema, said Dr. David Silverstein, a consultant in cardiology and internal medicine at Nairobi Hospital.
“It is potentially dangerous when someone is at high altitude, but once brought down, recovery is quick,” he said. “Martina is doing well and will continue to do well.”
Navratilova had been assisted down Mount Kilimanjaro by porters and driven to the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre for assessment after having to abandon her attempt to climb the mountain in Tanzania for a sport charity.
The 27-person climbing team Navratilova was part of has faced heavy snows and mist since beginning the climb up the 19,340-foot (5,895-meter) mountain Monday.
“I’m disappointed not to be able to complete this amazing journey,” she said in the statement. “It was something that I have wanted to do for so long but it was not to be.”
Navratilova, who won 18 singles Grand Slams, told The Associated Press last weekend that she has never climbed higher than 12,000 feet. She had reached nearly 14,800 feet (4,500 meters) when she was forced to give up after feeling unwell, according to the charity.
The Aspen, Colorado resident told AP she was “petrified” of failing to reach the summit “because then the whole world will know.”
Navratilova was climbing the mountain to raise money and awareness for the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation. The rest of the team will continue the climb and should reach the summit Saturday.
When John McEnroe opens his mouth, he has a knack for getting in trouble. That was true on the tennis court and it is apparently still true even now that he’s offering commentary from the sidelines. During a CBS conference call, the U.S. Open champion suggested that female tennis players are ”unable to deal with both the physical and mental demands of the game,” the Los Angeles Times paraphrases. It’s a bold contention considering the New York Times Magazine’s current cover story is about … the tremendous power and strength of female tennis players.
“I think that it’s asking too much of the women,” he said. “They shouldn’t be playing as many events as the men. … You shouldn’t push them to play more than they’re capable of.” He added, “They should be required to be in less events, there should be less events for the women. It seems it takes an actual meltdown on the court or women quitting the game altogether before they realize there’s a need to change the schedule.” Presumably, he’s referring to Vera Zvonareva’s teary-eyed “meltdown” at Wimbledon in July and at last year’s Open.
As McEnroe well knows, though, women aren’t the only ones who have meltdowns on the court. And, while it may be true that a number of top female players have suffered injuries this year that have taken them out of the game for some time, Michael Joyce, Maria Sharapova’s coach, points out in the Times that “reigning U.S. Open men’s champion Juan Martin del Potro is sitting out the Open — and has sat out most of the season — because of a wrist injury and … Rafael Nadal was absent from Wimbledon in 2009 because of his own injury issues.” He also added this biting remark: “The game is a lot different than when John was playing with wooden rackets 20 years ago. It’s not only the women.”
I’ll leave the core of this debate up to the experts — or, really, to anyone who knows anything about tennis (because I sure don’t). It’s interesting, though, to think about the differences in how we evaluate players’ emotional and physical capacity. It seems there is a tendency to either overreact to female displays of anger on the court, or to instead see these fits as emotional breakdowns rather than passionate, enraged outbursts à la, well, McEnroe.
I was very excited to read a Web preview of a piece in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine about, as the headline puts it, “Women Who Hit Hard.” In the sprawling article, Michael Kimmelman writes that professional female tennis players are “stronger, bigger, faster, better trained and pushed above all by the example of the Williams sisters. Serena, glorious and musclebound, and Venus, long-limbed and tall, have redefined the sport around power.” The point, you see, is to celebrate the strength and athleticism of the sport’s top female players.
That’s why I was surprised when a link to an accompanying video slide show titled “The Beauty of the Power Game” was forwarded to me by a co-worker with a note that he found it “kind of weird and creepy the way they glammed them up.” Having glossed over the slide show when reading the piece earlier, I clicked the link and started watching the first clip of Kim Clijsters. In slo-mo, she bounds into the frame, muscles rippling, and nearly goes into the splits as she brings her racket to the ball. She looks like a lioness on the hunt — long blond curls falling around her face, a sneer on her lip, her eyes narrowed with a singular, predatory focus. She is an awesome sight to behold. I think: What’s weird or creepy about this?
But then follow several more clips of various players, all in slow motion, with a swelling classical soundtrack. There is Serena Williams with her makeup meticulously done, her skin covered in glitter. She hits the ball and yet more glitter flies every which way. Elena Dementieva is up next wearing a bizarre strappy dress. She gracefully twirls in slo-mo, looking very much like a ballerina. Samantha Stosur’s arms look cut from stone, and her movements send mesmerizing ripples up her powerful thighs, but she is wearing a dissonantly delicate bandeau bra top (which prompted a friend of mine to comment: “Hello, nipples”) and a pleated lavender skirt.
I suppose part of the difficulty in fairly evaluating these videos is that we don’t do so in a vacuum. The common critique when it comes to women in sports is that they get attention only for being sexy, and that is especially true with tennis. But the Times didn’t toss Anna Kournikova in front of the camera in a teeny-tiny tennis outfit. These are truly some of the most powerful women in the sport, and they do challenge mainstream notions of femininity. (In particular, Williams, who has talked about past discomfort with her “super-curvy” body. Note, though, that she is one of two players who are filmed only from the chest up.) So, is it creepy or beautiful? A totally scientific poll of my instant-message buddies resulted in no clear consensus.
Personally, I find it to be a little bit of both. As a general rule, I’m not opposed to seeing female athletes as sexy or sexualized. That would make me quite the hypocrite, as I didn’t complain when Vanity Fair came out with its issue featuring male soccer players in their underwear. (Quite the contrary — I ran out and bought a copy the first chance I got.) Athletes’ bodies are in top form; they are exquisite and godlike. But the glamorous makeup and wardrobe — and that freaking glitter — in the Times slide show do seem a touch odd. As the co-worker who forwarded the link to me said: “The vibe seems to be ‘we will show you that female power can be sexy’ — which it can, of course. But then, they couldn’t just trust that — they had to add this other stuff, as if to say, well, it can’t be sexy on its own.”
For the first time in eight years, Roger Federer won’t be striding onto Centre Court for the Wimbledon final this weekend.
The six-time champion was upset in the quarterfinals by hard-hitting Tomas Berdych on Wednesday, stopping his bid for a record-tying seventh title at the All England Club and extending his recent stretch of disappointing play.
The 12th-seeded Berdych used his big serve and forehand to beat Federer 6-4, 3-6, 6-1, 6-4, on Centre Court for the biggest victory of the Czech’s career.
It’s the first time since 2002 that Federer has failed to reach the final. Since losing in the first round eight years ago, Federer had played in the championship match a record seven consecutive times. He won the title six times and finished runner-up once, bolstering his reputation as the greatest player of all-time.
Winner of a record 16 Grand Slam titles, Federer said he was unable to play his best tennis Wednesday because of pain in his back and right leg.
“I couldn’t play the way I wanted to play,” said Federer, who had been chasing the record of seven titles won by Pete Sampras and 19th-century player William Renshaw. “I am struggling with a little bit of a back and a leg issue. That just doesn’t quite allow me to play the way I would like to play. It’s frustrating, to say the least.”
Berdych ripped a clean forehand winner on his second match point to become the first Czech to reach the men’s semifinals since Ivan Lendl in 1990.
“It’s really tough to show this crowd how I’m just feeling right now, it’s amazing to play in this stadium, to play such a great player as Roger is, and come here and be here as a winner is just really amazing,” the 20-year-old Berdych said.
Berdych will next face Novak Djokovic, who swept past Yen-hsun Lu in straight sets to reach the semifinals for the second time. The third-seeded Djokovic never faced a break point as he beat the 82nd-ranked Taiwanese player 6-3, 6-2, 6-2 in less than two hours on Court 1.
In other matches, No. 2 Rafael Nadal played No. 6 Robin Soderling, and No. 4 Andy Murray faced Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
With the loss, Federer will drop to No. 3 in the ATP rankings next week for the first time since Nov. 10, 2003. Since winning the Australian Open in January, he has failed to win a tournament.
Federer said his leg and back have been bothering him since the grass-court tournament in Halle, Germany, the week before Wimbledon. He hadn’t previously mentioned any injury problems.
“When you’re hurting, it’s just a combination of many things,” Federer said. “You just don’t feel as comfortable. You can’t concentrate on each and every point because you do feel the pain sometimes. You tend to play differently than the way you want to play.
“Under the circumstances, I think I played a decent match,” he added. “But I’ve been feeling bad for the last two, three matches now. If there’s anything good about this, it’s that I’m going to get some rest.”
Federer was playing in his 25th consecutive Grand Slam quarterfinal. He had won 23 straight, but now has lost two in a row. Federer fell to Robin Soderling at the French Open earlier this month.
Federer had won 76 of 77 grass-court matches dating to 2003 coming into this month, but has now lost two of the past six, including to Lleyton Hewitt in Halle.
Federer was clearly outplayed Wednesday by a man who has always possessed enormous talent but often failed to live up to expectations.
The 6-foot-5 Berdych was on the offensive for most of the match, smacking first serves consistently in the 130s mph (above 210 kph), winding up to rip forehand winners and not buckling under pressure. He hit 51 winners, compared to 44 for Federer.
“He played well when he had to,” Federer said. “It was brutal for me. Every time he had a chance, he took it. On the break points, he played great on those. … When I did have chances, I played poorly. It was just a frustrating match the way it all went.”
Berdych broke Federer four times, with the final break coming in the seventh game of the fourth set. Berdych served 12 aces, was broken just once and saved seven of eight break points.
Federer came in with an 8-2 career record against Berdych, having lost the first match at the 2004 Athens Olympics and the last in Miami this year.
“I don’t think I played poorly,” Federer said. “I think he went after it. I know Berdych. I think I’ve played him 10 times already before. That’s the way he plays.
“I think he’s been able to play more consistent last year or so, and I was just not able to defend well enough and I didn’t come up with the good stuff when I had to. It was disappointing.”
Lu stunned three-time finalist Andy Roddick in the fourth round, but couldn’t replicate that performance against Djokovic, the 2008 Australian Open champion.
Djokovic lost just 12 points in 13 service games. He won 26 of his first 28 service points, including 15 in a row. The Serb had 29 winners and 17 unforced errors, and converted five of 15 break points.
“Nothing is easy these days, especially at this stage of the tournament,” Djokovic said. “But the way I played, I deserved to win. I was hitting all the shots and I was really playing very solid from all parts of the court. I’m very, very happy with the performance today.”
Djokovic reached the semifinals here in 2007 but had to retire against Rafael Nadal with a foot injury while trailing in the third set.
“This time physically I’m fitter,” Djokovic said. “Those were very strange conditions and circumstances. I had to play three very long matches in three days and couldn’t hold on in the semifinal. This time everything is in order and I’ll give my best.”
Serena Williams of the US returns a shot to France's Aravane Rezai at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon, Tuesday, June 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)(Credit: AP) 
John McEnroe of U.S. gestures during his match against Sergi Bruguera of Spain at the Masters Senior tennis tournament in Madrid March 29, 2008. REUTERS/Juan Medina (SPAIN) (Credit: © Juan Medina / Reuters) 
