Justine Henin has rolled through her portion with relative ease, winning today with the loss of just four games against Patty "She is the great champion, I am just the little one" Schnyder. Those of you who saw my latest ESPN blog entry know that I am still very high on Rafael Nadal's chances (and no, the wind, the rain, the ryegrass, even the loss of half of his pantaloons has nothing to do with it). The woman I like in the other singles draw is Henin.
Henin is not just a woman transformed and visibly inspired by the touching reunion she had with her family at the French Open, she's also the best grass court player never to win Wimbledon. I just sense that it's her time. A few weeks ago, Doug Robson of USA Today and I had a little chat with Justine Henin on the day after she won her fourth Rolandn Garros title. I'll recap some of that conversation.
One of the more intriguing aspects of Henin's drive to win her fourth Roland Garros title was the pressure to win for her family, given that most of them had been more or less banished from attending for many years. That she was able to close the deal and bring home the title, providing a champion tennis player's most prized - and difficult - form of closure (and, just as importantly, validation), provides a sharp glimpse of her state of mind and emotions.
This is a young woman for whom life, these days, just keeps getting better. A year ago at this time, it was just getting worse. But there was only up-side for Henin in having her family present:
The win was powerful in another way. When Henin won her first Roland Garros title, in 2003, she dedicated the win to her late mother, who died of cancer before she could see her diminutive daughter win her first major title. After she won this last one, she said:
We all know how overwrought and self-dramatizing Henin can be, sometimes in causes far less likely to elicit sympathy. But forget that. This is a woman who appears to have been healed and reconstructed in a territory you previously couldn't find without going to Mapquest (head due north from her right wrist, turn east at the shoulder, continue south- east, but beware – one wrong turn and you wind up at the tummy).
It all adds up to a counter-intuitive theory: Perhaps what Henin really needed all these years was to play for someone else, not, as she had assumed and frequently admitted, for herself. Isn't that exactly what she was doing at Roland Garros? This is a difficult transition at some psychic level that is a little too amorphous to rassle into words. But the word that keeps coming into my mind is "liberation." And everybody needs a little of that now and then. In Henin's case, that liberation might be a tonic, because she plays a game that is meant to run free - to tumble and cascade like some mountain brook rolling
down from the glacier, which of course is a pretty handy description of the kind of grass-court tennis Henin can play.
Simply put, they put the dam a little too high on this tributary, but that obstacle may now be gone. If you’re looking for some metaphysical explanation for why a delightful game bathed in the sheen of a gladiator’s sweat hasn’t been enough to carry this girl to a Wimbledon title, this is where you need to be poking around, to go with the obvious and more game-based reasons.
Justine’s Spartan discipline and relentless emotional score keeping (once you decide to start getting even with the world, you’ve set yourself a big job) has carried her far. Now, a bit of indulgence – a little liberation – may be helpful. For some, that indulgence might be something as pedestrian as a little vacation, or shopping (we all remember Maria Sharapova’s famous remark about “retail therapy”, right?). But not our Justine. When I asked her if she was going to treat herself in any way after Roland Garros, go shopping or something, she replied: “No shopping, I am not interested in that. I prefer to spend time with the people I love, have a nice dinner, something like that.”
That packing away a nice Tortellini among friends and family amounts to a “treat”, rather than a commonplace occurrence,tells you a lot about Henin (although I’m imagine something got lost in translation there). Still, I’m sometimes tempted to cry out, Get thee to Gucci! It’s not about the
handbags, either! But it’s unlikely that Justine will lighten up substantially in that way. The sands are shifting and the substrata is trembling further underground. This is a woman to whom the word “serious” is a synonym for “half-hearted”,and I figure she’s, oh, 14 or 22 Grand Slam titles away form cracking a smile during a match. That’s okay, too. Everyone must find his or her way.
And when I asked Justine of she had a “guilty pleasure”, and was prevailed to define the term, she replied:
Doug asked Justine at one point if she ever cries, and she said:
I couldn’t help but say, Come on, you mean you don’t cry in front of Carlos (Rodriguez, Henin’s loyal, lifelong coach and surrogate father)? She laughed at that one; it was a “gotcha” moment. Then she said:
Yeah, I can cry in front of him when we have some pretty strong conversation. Not a bad one, but something deep. It’s never that I don’t want to show emotion when I am playing, but it’s a different feeling when I win. It’s a kind of relief, because I trust myself a lot and expect a lot of me. Now I know how good it is to share those moments.
Henin wants to win Wimbledon; she knows exactly what it would mean in historic terms. She noted in her presser today that doing so would put her in elite company, because among Open-era players, only Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi have won all four Grand Slam events – and the Olympic Games gold medal.
Just minutes ago, it appeared that Henin’s quarterfinal opponent would be Serena Williams (a rematch of their Roland Garros encounter at the same stage), but then Serena Serena went down with left calf injury of some sort; it appeared to be cramps, at first, but it might be “tennis leg”, which is the description a doctor once used to describe a common, mild tear in the lower calf muscle. It’s an excruciatingly painful injury, but nothing serious – unless you’re playing at Wimbledon when it happens.
I’ll have more on that as we learn it. But right now, it looks as if things are falling Henin's way.