The Blue-Flame Professional

I have to admit that the first thing I thought this morning when I learned that Justine Henin has announced her retirement from tennis was that she'd decided to enter the contemplative orders. I've often called her the Sister of No Mercy, because of her nearly religious degree of dedication to tennis, and an ascetic streak manifested in her very welcome and, to me at any rate, admirable indifference to acting out the tedious role of Crossover Female Tennis Star Cum Budding Fashion Icon.

Call me crazy, but I admire tennis players who are content to be tennis players, rather than hankering to be movie stars, apparel designers, entrepreneurs or UN Ambassadors of world peace. Contrary to the fears of many, there is life after tennis just like there is life after college. In an ideal world, that would be the time to start strutting your stuff as chat-show host or catwalk model. Besides, if you did that,  you would know that while your fame undeniably has helped - and why should it not? - it wasn't the only reason you pulled down that highly cherished walk-on role in a sitcom overloaded with T&A jokes. All of us seek validation and clarity. Justine apparently just found some.

I will miss Justine Henin. As some of her most ardent fans will happily point out, I've been hard on her: over the years, I've called her a "demented dwarf" (Sheesh, Pete, did you really write that one?), the Little Backhand that Quit, and, not entirely snidely, referred to her as Justine d'Arc. At times, the incessant self-absorption, the party-pooping gravity (if she appeared in the Periodic Table, her designation would be Pb, no relation to me), even that overwrought tale of her bond with her late mother eventually irritated as much as moved me.

Lighten up, I often wanted to say, you're neither the first person to experience hardship, but you may be the first to attempt to define or, in the worst case, justify yourself because of it. Justine has now cast off the burden, it appears, although I doubt that lightening up is on her immediate agenda. There's a certain romance to taking oneself so seriously.

I will still miss Justine Henin. The other day, while moonlighting for ESPN, I wrote a post on Novak Djokovic's shrewd if not entirely noble mastery of "career management." Some of the things I said about Djokovic apply equally to Henin, and apart from anything else they have shown a comparable degree of overt, blinkered professionalism. Don't you get the feeling that Djokovic is just dying to be a great player, the top player, in exactly the same way Justine once did? That appears to be a thing of the past for Justine; the baton of professional solemnity has been passed.

Writing about Djokovic, I suggested that the less savory stunts he has pulled, or been accused of pulling, must seem justified in his own mind because - well, look where they got him. And I argued how other great players did no less thoughtless and inconsiderate things than quitting during matches when things weren't going their way, or cagily manipulating their schedules, in order to attain their goal. By and large, the world quickly forgave and moved on; their ability to get to the top was more admired than their machinations were remembered.

Some fans of Serena Williams never will forgive Henin for the way she sandbagged Serena in that infamous Roland Garros "raised hand" episode, and fair enough. But you can't stop the water flowing under the bridge, and if you do it's likely get all backed up and become a foetid swamp. I'm no longer viscerally upset by that controversy, or by any of the other ones. Isn't the theme song to every successful tennis player's life that masterpiece of naked and bombastic self-justification, Sinatra's My Way?

Last year at Roland Garros, I had a chance to sit with Justine and two other reporters on the day before the women's final. Once again, I found her appealing in that kind of face-to-face setting. Her gravity reminded me of certain children who, by age six, have embraced a serious hobby like stamp collecting, or already seem to know that life isn't all it's cracked to be on the Disney Channel.  Justine must have been that sort of wide-eyed, quiet child, only the hobby was tennis. This is girl who was playing by that age; she's retiring after what is, in reality, a 20-year career.

I'll miss Justine because, well, who else is going to win 10 tournaments and dominate the tour the way Henin did in 2007? Who else is going to bring such pure, blue-flame professionalism to an arena that's grown increasingly crowded by half-hearted, no-hearted, and bleating-hearted idiot savants who have no idea of how good they have it, nor any seeming interest in doing the single, solitary thing that may distinguish them from the woman riding the subway to work with you, or delivering  your mail - playing tennis at an extremely high level, with the kind of dedication that is a given when found in a comparably accomplished neuro-surgeon, hedge-fund manager, ballerina or author. When it comes to representing tennis as a worthwhile profession and something worth doing for its own sake, Henin may not have been perfect, but she had no peer.

This, by the way, points toward one component in her popularity, especially among the real connoisseurs of the game. She appeared to play tennis for its own sake, because it happens to be a game that can be played not just effectively, not just successfully, not just interestingly - it can be played beautifully.  Henin, just 25 and an almost frail 5-5 and 126 lbs., played it more beautifully than any woman of her time. At the moment, I'm reading a book (a gift from Kamakshi), Catch and Release, by Mark Kingwell. As he put it,  in a meditation on casting a fly rod, "Can something that is beautiful also be useful? More than that, can its beauty come not as a surcharge to utility, but precisely as a function of utility?"

Justine Henin answers that question for us, and I come to the same conclusion as Kingwell did: "The cast is beautiful not in spite of its interest (purpose) but because of it. Beauty here is not superadded to, and so not separable from, utility."

I'd add one thing to that: Nobody with as beautiful a game has ever had to work so hard to reap its rewards. She had the mentality of a grinder and the strokes of a woodland fairie.

Actually, her decision to retire was foretold by her recent slump, and perhaps even prophesied by the banner year she had in 2007. While talking about this with Tomahawk Perrotta this morning, he suggested that we're seeing a replay of Mats Wilander, circa 1989 (the year after he won three majors and reached the no. 1 ranking). Wilander put his heart and soul into 1988, and discovered in 1989 that there was nowhere else to go - furthermore, there was nowhere else he wanted to go.

Wilander never won Wimbledon, nor did Henin. It's a pity, and the source of my only quibble with her decision to quit. As my editor-in-chief James Martin said, "I can't figure out why she didn't just quietly withdraw from these clay events and give herself one more shot at Wimbledon, one last shot at a career Grand Slam, before she decided to call it quits." I have to believe that she thought of that, or if she didn't, then her lifetime coach, Carlos Rodriguez, did. She must have rejected the idea. That she felt impelled to quit right here and right now, is probably a measure of how little she has left in her emotional tank.

I will miss Justine because for a small woman easily seen as a little girl, she the capacity of her emotional gas tank was comparable to that not of a Ferrari but a HumVee  - and if she had the armor as well, so be it. I will miss her because she gave professionalism in tennis a good name.

May the road rise with you, Justine.