Down, But Not Out
The headline was self-explanatory: Injuries already mounting on both tours. If you didn't know better, you'd guess that the story was published sometime in mid-July, or during the North American hard-court season in August. Unfortunately, it was written exactly five days into the new year, before a single 2012 tournament has been completed.
I suppose it's a bit glib, but given the high-value names we'll be tossing around it's almost like it's hip to be hurt, although I'm sure that Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Kim Clijsters and the others don't see it that way. Shoot, by the time the tour gets to Rotterdam or Indian Wells, the ATP and WTA may have to be calling up juniors to fill a draw, the way some nations at war have conscripted 14- and 15-year-olds.
It all started when Serena rolled an ankle in Brisbane, the day after admitting in a frank press conference that she doesn't love tennis, and doesn't like "anything that has to do with working physically." You could contemplate how one thing (the injury) followed the other (the confession) and just mutter, "Clearly the gods have spoken." Now Serena's chances at the Australian Open are in jeopardy—if she's fit to play in the first place.
Note that Maria Sharapova, Serena's rival in theory if not in practice, also hurt her ankle. That was way back in Tokyo at the end of September. She made one false start after that, at the WTA Championships a few weeks later, but the ankle still wasn't right. Apparently, it still isn't, because Sharapova chose to forgo tournament play preceding the Australian Open—a huge gamble for a woman whose game has been so shaky, for so long, that it's hard to remember when she wasn't either hurt or riddled with anxiety about her serve.
Serena is not just increasingly injury-prone, she's also 30—an age at which athletes become more vulnerable to injury but have a harder time shaking off smaller ones, while taking longer to heal more significant ones.
Roger Federer is another 30-year-old feeling the cold hand of mortality on his shoulder. I imagine he can only wish his problem were as simple as a tender ankle. He quit a tournament for only the second time in his career today, pulling out of Doha with a bad back shortly before his scheduled semi-final against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
Federer has had back trouble in the past, and that's not a good omen. But he pretty much downplayed the threat represented by this one. He found an especially vivid way to describe how he felt as he struggled through his third-round, three-set win over Andreas Seppi: "I was really playing, you know, with the hand brake on, and I was just trying to manage the situation."
And then there's defending Australian Open women's singles champ Kim Clijsters. She abandoned her semifinal at the Brisbane International while leading Daniela Hantuchova by a set, citing spasms in her left hip. She later intimated that the withdrawal was precautionary, in order to avoid aggravating the injury on the eve of the year's first Grand Slam event. While awaiting the result of tests on her hip, Clijsters admitted that she had "a good feeling" about the upcoming major.
Bear in mind that Novak Djokovic battled a shoulder injury in the late stages of 2011, and we don't really know how thoroughly he's recovered. The world No. 1 and defending Australian Open champ is in seclusion at his Australian Open training camp after waltzing through the Abu Dhabi exhibition event. He hasn't hit a ball in anger since he limped away from the ATP World Tour Finals, and has no plans to strut his stuff in tournament play until Melbourne gets underway.
Even Rafael Nadal got into the act. Rumor had it that he too has a damaged wing, but he told reporters in Doha, "My shoulder is fine. I felt something at the beginning of practice, but later, after three, four minutes, when I got warmed up, I feel the shoulder with perfect condition. The shoulder needs days like today to get the power."
And wait, there is more: Venus Williams remains sidelined, dealing with Sjogren's syndrome, while Germany's Fed Cup team is decimated: both Julia Goerges and power-player Sabine Lisicki are hurt, the latter with an abdominal injury that may impair her ability to rain down those monster serves in Melbourne Park. She was a legitimate long-shot contender in Oz.
Is there a lesson or larger theme in this plague of injuries? Probably not, though it will be interesting to see how many of the aforementioned players remain impaired once the Australian major begins. Right now they're down, but not out. I've written before that the "precautionary withdrawal" is a relatively new and not very positive development, but I'd be the first to admit that it sure beats having the seedings decimated because hurt players don't know when to quit.