NEW YORK—When Kim Clijsters walks out onto the court of Arthur Ashe stadium to play the first match of the last tournament of her wildly fluctuating career, she’ll be returning to the scene of her most impressive triumphs, and the place where she re-invented herself from anxiety-prone choker to multiple Grand Slam champion.
Just how Clijsters will react to this obviously emotional, challenging situation (who wants to go out with a whimper, when a forehand bang will do?) is an intriguing question, made spicier by her profile as a player who’s been prone to flee hero moments, but also to surpass expectations—never more so than when they are at low ebb.
This is certainly a potential hero moment, and expectations on Clijsters are just as surely at low ebb. So what happens when the irresistible force of her self-sabotaging tendencies meets the immovable object of her still dangerous athleticism, along with her comfort and proficiency on the hard courts of the National Tennis Center?
Good question. But Clijsters fans—and they are legion, especially in this late “champion mommy” stage of her career—are probably just hoping that she can make it to the handshake in every match. For Clijsters has been wracked by injuries since she came out of retirement in 2009 to prove that she was capable of winning a major more than once in her career.
“(I am) too old to play the game that I want to play physically,” Clijsters <strong>recently told Erin Bruehl of the USTA</strong>. “I've put my body through enough strain and everything. The whole lifestyle, that's what I'm dealing with now, the lifestyle I've had for the last 15, 20 years.”
Her injuries of recent months and years are too numerous to recount, yet they’re only partly responsible for the herky-jerky nature of her career; if you were going to graph it, the result would look something like a panorama of the Rocky mountains. For first and foremost, Clijsters has been a dissident; a disgruntled athlete who has freely expressed her resentment of the price exacted by her profession, yet who has also seemed unable or unwilling to tear herself away from it.
This love-hate relationship, complicated perhaps by the fact that Clijsters’ talent and name ensure that she can earn a few million dollars a year just by showing up in tennis clothes, first became manifest during the spring of 2007, when she began to openly express her dissatisfaction with life as a top tennis player, along with a longing to settle down and raise a family. She married American basketball player Brian Lynch in July of that year and soon had a baby girl, Jada.
Apparently, though, life in tennis, or the rewards of that existence (Clijsters has carried more than $24 million away from the tour) wasn’t quite as horrible as it once seemed. Clijsters came out of retirement two-and-a-half years later, and surprised pretty much everyone—including herself—by becoming the 2009 U.S. Open champion as an unseeded wild card, and the first mother to win a major since Evonne Goolagong Cawley in 1980.
In the first stage of her career, Clijsters was most well-known among the cognoscenti for losing close matches and failing to come up big on important occasions. Up to the point when she retired, the thickly-built, curly-haired blonde was 1-4 in Grand Slam finals. She had been No. 1, but without a Grand Slam title, until she finally broke through at the U.S. Open of 2005—more than two years after she first became No. 1.
On top of that, for much of the time Clijsters had to play second fiddle to her Belgian countrywoman, seven-time Grand Slam champion Justine Henin. Where Henin’s game was “beautiful” in the Federerian sense, Clijsters’ was of a grinder. Where Henin was nimble and almost frail-looking (qualities that made her results and competitive grit that much more impressive), Clijsters was strong and muscular, with thighs like beer kegs, but mentally weaker. If there was ever a good time to take a break, 2007 probably was it.
By the time Clijsters returned, Henin too had retired prematurely (as always, there’s an element of farce in these intra-national rivalries; Henin would also come back, albeit for a much shorter period than her Belgian compatriot). Clijsters’ subsequent win at the U.S. Open (it was her second Grand Slam title) raised an interesting question: Had Clijsters somehow been able to wipe away all that karma, and re-invent herself as a competitor, during the long break?
The answer: Not entirely.
Clijsters successfully defended her U.S. Open title in 2010, but didn’t reach the semi of another major that year. She finally won a major outside the U.S when she took the Australian Open title in 2011, but since then, the best she’s managed is a semifinal at the same tournament this year. She’s also missed three Grand Slam events since winning in Melbourne, and she stumbled out of the Olympic Games a few weeks ago in the quarterfinals.
Still, after losing her first four Grand Slam finals, Clijsters has won her last four—although she’s never won more than one major in any given year. She’s a champion alright, but in fits and starts. And the opportunities have been manifold in the second stage of her career, with no woman clearly dominant.
That’s fine, though, because a dissident isn’t supposed to be a happy individual, contentedly adjusted to his or her circumstances. And that’s particularly true of disgruntled individuals who have lacked either the courage, will, or wherewithal to tear themselves away from a situation that they find unsatisfying or oppressive.
Does anyone else detect a strange and perhaps inappropriate hint of bitterness and self-justification in these words of Clijsters’, also from Bruehl’s story:
“I think for me the most important thing is I've always followed my heart. I've always done what I felt was right. I've always stayed true to who I am. Players change. There's so many other things involved than just tennis and practicing. I think you see players kind of losing the true sense of life, and of the sport.”
Given that Clijsters, now 29, seems to have been unhappy in tennis for longer than she was content, she’s done awfully well for herself. Twenty-five million dollars buys you a lot of insulation from realities that are even colder than the worst chill a WTA player might feel in a locker room full of younger women, all dying to be in your shoes. Or from the less pleasant aspects of the tennis pro’s job description, which to this point has not involved hurling kittens into a well.
I imagine conflicting emotions will be swirling around in Clijsters mind and heart as she plays her final tournament. For that reason, I don’t see her going out in a blaze of glory, a la Pete Sampras, or with a remarkable expression of deeply felt gratitude, a la Andre Agassi.
I imagine Clijsters will go out saying all the right things, but thinking. . . who knows what?