Well, I'm no Ed McGrogan, so this will be Monday Net Post Lite, maybe Ultra-Lite - just a way to drop in to say happy Monday (I will be out of the office all day) and give y'all a place to talk. And there's plenty of fodder for that; Gael Monfils won his first title (at Metz) after a four-year drought, Shahar Pe'er bagged her second consecutive trophy (in Tashkent), Albert Montanes won the third title of his career (Bucharest), and Ana Ivanovic continued her plunge into a career black hole, double-faulting 11 times on her way to a first-round loss in Tokyo.
But the biggest news yesterday came out of Seoul, Korea, where Kimiko Date Krumm became the second-oldest woman (after Billie Jean King, which isn't bad company at all) ever to win a WTA event. Incidentally, BJK won her historic title in Birmingham in 1983, at age 39 and seven months.
At Seoul, Krumm prevailed over the woman whose name I don't have a snowball's chance of every spelling correctly without checking a reference: Annabel Medina Garrigues.
See what I mean? It's Anabel with one "n".
But never mind. What a splendid day for Krumm, who turned 39 today, just hours after her triumph.
I wrote a post that will be published later today over at ESPNon what all these career resurgences may mean for women's tennis, and nut of it is that they may lead more and more women to contemplate taking a mid-career break - whether it's for child-bearing or rest and recreation. It's safe to do that now, thanks to Kim Clijsters, Krumm, Justine Henin and - lest we forget - Sybille Bammer. It's too early to call this a trend; but in light of Krumm having won Seoul after taking a dozen years off, it's safe to say anything is possible.
Tennis generally takes its cues from larger, broad cultural trends. Witness the way women's tennis evolved into the sport it is today in lock-step with the feminist movement. But just as feminism has changed over the intervening decades, and the notion of a "liberated woman" has gone through many and sometimes conflicting permutations, the women of tennis have been changing too - giving vent to desires and discontents they would have been reluctant to articulate, never mind act upon, in decades past.
!89805190 Until a few months ago, women tennis players didn't entertain the idea of taking mid-career breaks, and that was partly because of the original feminist paradigm. What the hail, the men players with whom the women were trying to achieve and demonstrate parity didn't do that kind of thing; it might look bad if women did. So taking a sabbatical was simply out of the question, it could be read as weakness, it might even suggest that the women doing it are somehow less "professional," Less worthy of equal treatment (never mind equal pay). This concern, and attitude, has taken a huge hit recently.
In retrospect, it was silly of me to get irritated about the way Clijsters and Henin had insisted that they were "retired" while still in their mid-20s. It was an easy thing to ridicule, but that's no excuse. If I had taken a slightly longer view, I might have realized that they declared that they were going into retirement not just because a form of depression made it inconceivable to them that they might come back, but because there was no template for taking a break - no established, viable option. You either were a full-time player or you were out of there. Give the Williams sisters credit here; they too were on the same track when they began to insist on their right to play as often - or as infrequently - as they chose.
But a new career template now exists. The women under discussion have found a career plan B, and who cares that the men don't do it? I'm sure one of you college professors could come up with a name for this, something like post-feminist tennis feminism. Can we say that neither Clijsters nor Henin, no matter how the latter's comeback eventually works out, is truly liberated? It's one thing to break out of your chains and disappear; it's quite another to realize that those shackles were imaginary, locked in place institutionally as well as personally and - most of all - that you don't have to run and hide once you escape. You can go right back to where you were held captive, free to do a as you wish with a reasonable shot at being not just as good, but maybe even better.
Bammer, Clijsters, Henin and Krumm might have conspired to bring about a sea-change in the mentality of women pros. Only time will tell. But the long-standing notion that women must be in thrall to career, especially as it's defined and practiced by men, now lies in smoking runs.