One of the least appealing aspects of being a is professional athlete is that you leave the game - or get shoved out of it - at an age when you're in your prime by almost any other standard. In fact, you're probably fitter and stronger than at any previous point in your life. Calling it quits may be an even tougher decision to make when, as in Coria's case, there's no real physiological reason for throwing in the towel. "I didn't feel like competing any more," he said in his official retirement statement, "I've made the decision that I will not play again."
So ends the twisted tale of 27-year old Guillermo Coria, aka El Mago (the Magician), the former French Open finalist (2004) and world no. 3, who just can't find the most useful and fundamental weapon in a tennis player's arsenal, desire. It's an interesting quality to contemplate, now that Rafael Nadal, 22, is ripping through yet another clay-court season with an astonishing degree of attentiveness and focus. You know, you can debate two-handed vs. one-handed backhand, or the role of the winner-to-error ratio in tennis, until the cows come home. The bottom line is that tennis is like a cheesy romance novel - it's all about the passion, hot blood, and overarching desire - the only thing tennis lacks is those dudes in frilly white shirts.
This point is being driven home on a daily basis in Europe, where the question "Why should Rafa even care?" is answered: Because he wants more of whatever it is he gets out of all this, and he'll stop at nothing to get it. At the end of the early hard court season, one of the big questions in my mind was the degree to which Nadal's success at the Australian Open and on the hard courts of Indian Wells and Miami would influence his results on the spring clay-court circuit that he has dominated for four years now. Nadal's answer has basically been, Not at all, because it isn't about checking things off a to-do list (de-throne Roger Federer; win Olympic gold, take the title in Melbourne. . .), it's about loving your job, which for me means going out every day to prove that I'm the baddest hombre on the planet.
Coria once had that desire, too. It earned him a lot of money and made him famous; it carried him to a no. 3 ranking. Now, still in his physical prime, he's like the proverbial person who's lost his religion. This was something unexpected.
The first time I saw Coria play was at the Orange Bowl of 1998, where he was seeded no. 6. He slashed and scampered all the way to the final before losing to some kid named Federer. At the time, Coria was still just 16. He looked like a bandy-legged version of the rock guitarist Eddie van Halen; he had the same stringy hair and beady eyes. But Coria was built on a small platform, standing 5-9 and barely breaking 150-pounds.
Coria's agent at the time, Proserv's Patricio Apey Jr., was very high on Coria (it's part of his job description), although we were already in an era dominated by big, rangy players (think Pete Sampras, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg et al). One thing that Coria clearly did have was heart - and that can easily make up for what a player may lack in inches or pounds. And Coria moved beautifully, with the light, nimble steps of a cat.
That mobility enabled him to win the battle for court position, and that was the great key to his success. He acquired his nickname, El Mago, because of his great touch and unpredictability, and because he had a Houdini-esque ability to escape from seemingly precarious positions to win a point. The less esoteric way to put this is that he was one of the first among an emerging group of players who had a knack for making the transition from defensive retrieving to offensive dictating in the blink of an eye.
Out of curiosity, I checked out Coria's fan website, and found myself moved by the heroic effort to make the Guillermo Coria saga seem the ordinary story of a successful tennis pro. Here's one passage:
Then there was a large hiccup in the road on the path to glory beginning in 2006, a transitional time of elusive and often mysterious happenings, which saw King Coria fall from #8 in the world out of the top 100. And then off the tour for an entire year with injuries and uncertainty. The main recipe to his magic potion had always been his passion for his craft, and it was this that finally brought his retirement at age 27.
Hiccup?????
The man's career went over the cliff. At one point on his way down, Coria made over 20 double faults in a series of matches. He became one of that mysterious group of athletes who utterly and completely loses it. Here in the U.S., we have a name for that kind of thing: Steve Blass disease. Blass was the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball pitcher who, like Coria, woke up one day to find that his "stuff" had vanished. He couldn't throw the ball over the plate and soon left baseball.
But there's a big difference in these two cases, because I presume there was nothing wrong with Coria's strokes, or even his serve - at least not until he set foot on the court to play a match. As he said in his retirement statement, Coria no longer wanted to compete. And if you look at the differences between Nadal and Coria's records, you'll see just how important it is for a tennis player to want to compete and win. It's the unseen, extra hand on the grip of the racket; it puts bite into the serve and snap into the passing shot.
There's no greater gift than the gift of appetite. And when great players begin to struggle, the way Roger Federer is struggling, the root cause is almost always appetite. For once the appetite goes, the player begins to ask, Why? Why do I need to win Monte Carlo again? Why do I need to beat the no. 24 player in the world? Why does there have to be a winner and a loser, every time?
Coria has apparently decided that he can't really answer such questions with conviction. Part of this must be because he's fallen so far, so fast. The list of names between his own and that of the no. 3 ranked players is so long and so filled with talent, that it has to be disheartening. It's like Coria is waking from a pleasant dream in which he reached the no. 3 ranking, but he's now subject to a new reality - one that started to take shape in the 2004 Roland Garros final.
You may remember the Coria was the favorite to win the title that year. He beat former Roland Garros champ Carlos Moya in the quarterfinals, and Tim Henman (that's no typo!) in the semifinals.But, in an all-Argentinian final against unseeded Gaston Gaudio, Coria buckled. He served for the match twice in the fifth set, at 5-4 and 6-5, and had two match points - each of them swept away by his own hand, as he went for winners and missed the line by inches. Gaudio came back to win, 8-6 in the fifth.
Some pundits believe that losing the French Open final just kept eating away at Coria, corrupting his game like an insidious virus. There were also rumors of marital discord. Others attribute his loss of form to back troubles. But there's never really been a satisfactory answer for his dramatic and sustained loss of form, or at least none better than the one he offered: He just didn't feel any joy in competing any more. The kid, named after Guillermo Vilas and the son of a tennis coach, was simply burned out.
The curious thing about the story is that Gaudio, nicknamed El Gato (the Cat) has also struggled mightily since he won that title at Roland Garros. He's currenly ranked no. 762, while Coria quit with a ranking of 672. Unless Gaudio makes a move, Coria can at least claim to have surpassed Gaudio in the rankings. That French Open final was one of the most riveting in many years, and the men who contested have each paid a price for their moment of glory.
