NEW YORK—As she walked to the sidelines and sat down at 4-5 in the second set on Wednesday afternoon, Kim Clijsters might have been wondering why it all had to end like this. Here she was, possibly playing the final singles match of her 15-year, Hall-of-Fame career, and she was doing it in front of a listless, distracted, three-quarters-empty crowd inside Arthur Ashe Stadium. Many of the stadium’s ticket-holders had bolted hours earlier to get a seat for the Venus and Serena Williams doubles match going on in the Grandstand—the sisters had upstaged Kim one last time. The only noise that could fire Clijsters up was the music blaring over the PA. But she was out of luck there as well—the DJ was spinning the most generic Counting Crows song imaginable. Was this fanfare-free moment going to be her final memory of the sport?
No, it turned out, it wasn’t. Clijsters had been distinctly second-best to her 18-year-old opponent, Laura Robson, all day, but she roused herself for one final rally. In the process, she also rallied the crowd, a New York crowd that had rooted for her through her three titles here. By the time she and Robson reached the climactic second-set tiebreaker, the tension had thickened and the decibel level risen inside Ashe. The two women gave the audience something to shout about, as they slugged and scrambled from corner to corner. In the end it was Robson, who was nine years old when Clijsters last lost at the U.S. Open, who played the braver and better tennis. She ended Kim’s career with a running forehand that smacked the sideline for a winner, and one last strong lefty first serve. While Clijsters, and the rest of us, would have preferred that she go out under the lights and in front of a packed house, it was appropriate that she should exit the tennis stage on the same day that a fresh young face appeared to have walked on to it.
Clijsters certainly wasn’t broken up about going out this way. She smiled and spoke easily, with no tears, through her post-match comments. She reflected at length about her late father on TV, and when she sat down at the microphone in the media interview room she clapped her hands and said, “Last one!” with a smile. Someone asked her if she was happy about that. “Yes!” Clijsters said, before catching herself. “No, no,” she immediately reassured us. That’s Kim, nice—in the simplest and most genuine sense of the term—to the end. Bitterness and sarcasm were beneath her.
Her final loss was unexpected, but it wasn’t a shock to anyone who had watched the “second career” that she had put together since coming back from an earlier retirement in 2009. Clijsters has lost early at a number of majors in recent years, and, as she did today, she has struggled to fight her way out of trouble. She never broke her habit, when things went south, of losing patience, rushing between points, and failing to move her feet. In the end, this second career has been both spectacularly successful—she won three majors in four years, two more than she did from 1999 to 2007—and frustratingly incomplete. Clijsters has been plagued by injury, and her desire to play has conflicted with a desire to raise her daughter and be with her family. That was understandable, but at times it gave her comeback a half-hearted quality. She seemed relieved to have those conflicts resolved today.
How should we remember Clijsters? The daughter of a gymnast and a professional soccer player, she was a supremely gifted athlete, a natural on offense and defense. She brought daredevil splits and sliding gets to women’s tennis, and few players could match her easy power or ball-striking skill. She was gifted enough to come back from long layoffs and win big immediately, as she did when she won the Indian Wells-Key Biscayne double after missing the Aussie Open in 2005, and when she won the U.S. Open in 2009 after two years away. Her flaw was that, like many naturals, she wasn’t as good at fighting through adversity, going to a plan B, winning ugly. Not that she couldn’t find ways to win; you don’t end up with 41 career titles if you can’t do that. But she could never match the killer instinct of her primary rivals, Justine Henin and Serena Williams. Clijsters said today that the most disappointing losses of her career had been the three Slam finals to her countrywoman Justine, when she couldn’t get herself to play her best tennis.
For many, Clijsters will be remembered most fondly not for her game, but for her personality. “Nice” is the word that’s always used to describe her (I’ve already used it in this article), and it’s the right one. But it’s not quite adequate. Watching her today, talking on court after the match, on ESPN, in the interview room, I thought that Clijsters had made herself a model of perspective for a major athlete. She didn’t make any more of her last match, or herself, than was necessary. She didn’t dramatize her past or her struggles. We want and need our stars to do this, of course, but Kim was a person first and a tennis star second.
Clijsters said that after her loss today she briefly started to go over in her mind what had gone wrong, so she could improve in the future. It was easy to imagine that happening, but the honesty of the statement was of a piece with everything Clijsters said today—you could trust that the feelings were real. This was a player whose demeanor made her popular with fans wherever she went; she was “Aussie Kim” in Melbourne and a well-liked champion in New York. But it was the people who were around her in the game, who knew her as a person, who liked her the most. It was nice, anyone in tennis will tell you, to have known her.
(Photo by David Kenas)