Twenty-five game winning streak, 63-4 record, 14 out of the 16 tournament wins, two slams and a year end championship title. This is not the ATP, this is not Roger Federer<\/b>, this is Justine Henin<\/b> and it could have been three slams if she hadn\u2019t skipped the Australian Open to deal with her divorce.<\/p>\n
I spent a fair amount of time looking up comparable records on the women\u2019s side this morning. As far as I can tell, Steffi Graf<\/b> and Martina Navratilova<\/b> are the only women players with a better won loss record. Graf\u2019s record was 86-2 in 1989 and Navratilova was 86-1 in 1983. Notice how many more matches women played in that era, by the way, and yet they didn\u2019t appear to break down anywhere near as much as today\u2019s players do.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll see if Justine goes on to surpass, say, the Williams sisters in slams \u2013 go to the sidebar and cast your vote on the question \u2013 but it\u2019s more interesting to look at Justine\u2019s emotional arc than her numbers.<\/p>\n
The Williams sisters have their own compelling story: hardscrabble childhood, crazy like a fox tennis coach father, competing careers in fashion and entertainment. But Justine has somehow managed to play out her emotional life in front of us as she\u2019s made her way to the top, and unlike Serena and Venus, she\u2019s done it by revealing as little as possible about herself. No reality show for Justine just yet.<\/p>\n
These days Justine is a veritable fountain of sharing relative to the early part of her career. At that time we knew her mother had died when she was 12 years old, and we knew she was estranged from her father and siblings, but that\u2019s about it, and she wasn\u2019t going to tell us much more than necessary. If you saw her in the players\u2019 cafeteria, there she was with her coach, Carlos Rodriguez<\/b>, the two of them a little island in a sea of players. Even now she\u2019s one of those people who close her eyes when she talks to you as if to be sure she doesn\u2019t give away too much.<\/p>\n
Many players fall apart when life intervenes in their career. Nikolay Davydenko<\/b> is buckling under the pressure of an ongoing gambling investigation as we speak. Henin, though, just appears to be getting stronger.<\/p>\n
This year she divorced her husband and created a bit more independence from Rodriguez and his family – which was her substitute family after all. At the same time she welcomed her father and siblings back into her life. In the process of opening her heart a bit more to herself and to the public, she seems to have learned that the stoicism that carried her through the early part of her career was a brittle strength. It didn\u2019t allow her to stand on her own.<\/p>\n
For most players on the tour, though not all, tennis is an all-consuming passion. For Justine I think it goes one step farther and it\u2019s the key to why she\u2019s been able to keep rising up the ranks despite an emotionally wrenching journey.<\/p>\n
Tennis has been the substitute for some of Justine\u2019s life outside of tennis and now that the outside world is creeping back into her life, her tennis is secure enough that it enhances her game. Most people need their personal lives in order to perform well in their career. Some people do it the other way around. Success in their career gives them the confidence to open their hearts to those in their personal lives.<\/p>\n
Justine doesn\u2019t need a reality TV show, we\u2019ve been watching it all along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twenty-five game winning streak, 63-4 record, 14 out of the 16 tournament wins, two slams and a year end championship title. This is not the ATP, this is not Roger Federer, this is Justine Henin and it could have been three slams if she hadn\u2019t skipped the Australian Open to deal with her divorce. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113,119,72,85,120,121,125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-justine-henin","category-martina-navratilova","category-novak-djokovic","category-roger-federer","category-serena-williams","category-steffi-graf","category-venus-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}