I want to pay a quick re-visit to Justine Henin-Hardenne to add to my post of yesterday, “Size Doesn’t Matter." In discussing at some length double-H’s pullout from the Los Angeles WTA Championships, I may have failed to sufficiently stress that I see this latest development as part of an ongoing saga—that is, Justine doing exactly as she pleases, regardless of all other considerations, and furiously playing the "woe is me" card for all it's worth.
Of course, all players like to cherry-pick their playing commitments to maximize their opportunities (as well as earnings and rankings), it just seems to me that Justine takes this to the extreme in what already is an “it’s all about me” culture. Justine’s website contains this amazing transcript of an interview she conducted on various subjects, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as I read it (don’t worry on my behalf, I laughed—as usual).
Have you ever read a more woefully self-absorbed tract in your life?
I mean, seriously, this takes the well-worn “nobody really understands me” genre of complaint to new and perhaps insuperable heights. I once feared that going off the game's radar was a bad thing for players—you know,idle hands are the devil's workshop . . . and all that. For instance, it could be tempting to monkey around drugs, including performance enhancing ones, during all that down time. But after reading this interview, I'm starting to think that the greatest danger in down time is that of a player falling irretrievably into the bottomless pit of self.
You know, it starts with thinking that nobody understands you (or that everybody wants a piece of precious you), and pretty soon you’re sitting in a room with the shades drawn despite it being broad daylight, surrounded by a mound of cardboard fast-food containers, gently nibbling on one of your nine-inch long fingernails as you click the remote, alternating between a re-rerun of your first successful Grand Slam final and reruns of Gilligan’s Island.
You want hilarious? Check out Justine’s rationalization for why she moved to Monaco. That she couldn’t even muster the honesty (or is it dignity?) to make, oh, some lame joke about the fact that the only reason anybody ever moved to Monaco was to take advantage of its tax laws is the most powerful—and telling—statement in the entire solipsistic transcript:
And tennis fans, you demented dwarf (Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I can’t help myself—stop typing, fingers! Please stop . . .), are attached to you, they’re holding you with them!