david aames
Professional
NEW YORK TIMES
January 17, 2005
Blake Begins a Climb Out of a Painful Place
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
MELBOURNE, Australia, Monday, Jan. 17 - It was the worst year of his life. But it is 2005 now; another Australian Open begins here on Monday, and James Blake, despite all recent evidence to the contrary, still considers himself lucky.
Breaking your neck, watching your father die slowly from stomach cancer and having to live for months with half of your face paralyzed and your career in limbo would be enough to knock the stuffing and optimism out of many a golden boy.
"It's unbelievable, the things he's had to go through," Patrick McEnroe, the United States Davis Cup captain, said.
But Blake, a Harvard dropout turned rising tennis star turned hospital patient, is still upbeat, still looking his questioners in the eye and still answering respectfully and thoughtfully in his baritone voice. His ranking has dropped to 94 from a high of 22. He has fallen well below Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish, his close friends and former Davis Cup teammates. His left eye and timing are still not quite right.
He will never get his father, Thomas, back, but Blake will get another crack at making a success of the career path that Thomas was proud to see him take. "I definitely don't feel I took things for granted as much as a lot of guys, but now I'm definitely not going to take anything for granted," Blake, 25, said as he waved Australia's ubiquitous flies away from his face in the summer heat.
"This is what he wanted for me," Blake said of his father, who died on July 3. "That was the one thing he told both of us near the end. He used to play a bunch of tennis, and as soon as my brother and I started beating him, most people would say to him: 'Oh, man, that must be tough. How do you feel losing to your kids?' And he would say that it was the proudest day of his life when we started beating him, because he was so proud that he had taught us, and we were going forward and wanted to do kind of the same things he did."
Blake's progress stopped abruptly during a practice session on a clay court in Rome last May, when he tripped chasing a ball near the net and slammed headfirst into one of the metal net posts. The collision, which could have paralyzed him if he had not turned his head at the last moment, left him instead with a broken vertebra in his neck and no chance of playing the French Open or Wimbledon. Instead, he went home to Fairfield, Conn., for six weeks, which he considers the best thing that could have happened, because it allowed him to spend time with his fast-fading father.
They played golf and, above all, talked at length. "He didn't tell me to go win Wimbledon for him or anything," Blake said. "He wrote my brother and I a beautiful note about how proud he was. We as a family were not always the most expressive about the way we felt. The last few weeks was a time to actually express all that."
His father died the Saturday before a grass-court event in Newport, R.I., was to begin. But his father had insisted that James and his older brother, Tom, should play no matter what. James managed to win a round, but within a week, he had developed what he thought was an ear infection. A doctor prescribed antibiotics, but the next day, Blake awoke unable to move the left side of his face and with a rash covering most of his head.
The cause turned out to be shingles. "It's in everyone," Blake said. "Once you have chickenpox and get over that, it's in your system, but it comes out in reaction to stress. And I was amazed what stress can do to your body."
Blake had internalized a great deal. Though his father was found to have stomach cancer in 2003, Thomas Blake did not wish his illness to become public.
But Blake's own health eventually broke down, and it took more than three months to recover most of his facial movement. Because he could no longer blink his left eye, he had to push his eyelid down and up with the tips of his fingers and put drops in constantly.
Eager to return to the circuit after his neck injury, he entered events in Washington in August and in Delray Beach, Fla., in September. His vision was still occasionally blurry, and on his way to predictable defeat against Vince Spadea in Delray Beach, he sprinted wide to hit his best shot, the forehand, and missed.
There would be no more rushing back to the Tour, only intermittently intense preparation for the season. He changed his grip on his suspect volleys, visited friends, then watched from afar as his former teammates lost the Davis Cup final in Spain.
Looking at his face now, you would not notice anything unusual, although Blake said it did not feel quite right if he tried to blink several times quickly. Still, he said, it is only a nuisance that doctors assured him would disappear. Now for the next hard part: punching through the rust and doubts and winning again.
He opens on Tuesday against Florian Mayer of Germany, and though this is Blake's fourth Australian Open, it will feel as if he is starting over.
Agassi Easily Wins Opener
The four-time Australian Open champion Andre Agassi dispelled some of his health concerns with a convincing 6-4, 6-3, 6-0 victory over the German qualifier Dieter Kindlmann in the first round Monday.
On Thursday, Agassi retired from an exhibition match in Melbourne against Andy Roddick after feeling pain in his hip. Hip pain bothered Agassi at times last season and kept him out of Wimbledon. He lost several pounds in the off-season in an attempt to alleviate some of the stress on his hip. But after having a magnetic resonance imaging scan, the 34-year-old Agassi indicated that the injury was unrelated and was instead a microtear in an upper leg tendon.
He returned to the court Saturday to test the leg in an exhibition against Tim Henman and decided against withdrawing from the Open. He was not at his sharpest on Monday, but he showed plenty of mobility and gathered strength and confidence, chasing down drop shots and generating excellent pace, as usual, off both wings. "It held up all right; today, I woke up feeling the best yet since it happened," he said. "I pushed through, and I felt it loosened up nicely."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/sports/tennis/17tennis.html?oref=login
January 17, 2005
Blake Begins a Climb Out of a Painful Place
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
MELBOURNE, Australia, Monday, Jan. 17 - It was the worst year of his life. But it is 2005 now; another Australian Open begins here on Monday, and James Blake, despite all recent evidence to the contrary, still considers himself lucky.
Breaking your neck, watching your father die slowly from stomach cancer and having to live for months with half of your face paralyzed and your career in limbo would be enough to knock the stuffing and optimism out of many a golden boy.
"It's unbelievable, the things he's had to go through," Patrick McEnroe, the United States Davis Cup captain, said.
But Blake, a Harvard dropout turned rising tennis star turned hospital patient, is still upbeat, still looking his questioners in the eye and still answering respectfully and thoughtfully in his baritone voice. His ranking has dropped to 94 from a high of 22. He has fallen well below Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish, his close friends and former Davis Cup teammates. His left eye and timing are still not quite right.
He will never get his father, Thomas, back, but Blake will get another crack at making a success of the career path that Thomas was proud to see him take. "I definitely don't feel I took things for granted as much as a lot of guys, but now I'm definitely not going to take anything for granted," Blake, 25, said as he waved Australia's ubiquitous flies away from his face in the summer heat.
"This is what he wanted for me," Blake said of his father, who died on July 3. "That was the one thing he told both of us near the end. He used to play a bunch of tennis, and as soon as my brother and I started beating him, most people would say to him: 'Oh, man, that must be tough. How do you feel losing to your kids?' And he would say that it was the proudest day of his life when we started beating him, because he was so proud that he had taught us, and we were going forward and wanted to do kind of the same things he did."
Blake's progress stopped abruptly during a practice session on a clay court in Rome last May, when he tripped chasing a ball near the net and slammed headfirst into one of the metal net posts. The collision, which could have paralyzed him if he had not turned his head at the last moment, left him instead with a broken vertebra in his neck and no chance of playing the French Open or Wimbledon. Instead, he went home to Fairfield, Conn., for six weeks, which he considers the best thing that could have happened, because it allowed him to spend time with his fast-fading father.
They played golf and, above all, talked at length. "He didn't tell me to go win Wimbledon for him or anything," Blake said. "He wrote my brother and I a beautiful note about how proud he was. We as a family were not always the most expressive about the way we felt. The last few weeks was a time to actually express all that."
His father died the Saturday before a grass-court event in Newport, R.I., was to begin. But his father had insisted that James and his older brother, Tom, should play no matter what. James managed to win a round, but within a week, he had developed what he thought was an ear infection. A doctor prescribed antibiotics, but the next day, Blake awoke unable to move the left side of his face and with a rash covering most of his head.
The cause turned out to be shingles. "It's in everyone," Blake said. "Once you have chickenpox and get over that, it's in your system, but it comes out in reaction to stress. And I was amazed what stress can do to your body."
Blake had internalized a great deal. Though his father was found to have stomach cancer in 2003, Thomas Blake did not wish his illness to become public.
But Blake's own health eventually broke down, and it took more than three months to recover most of his facial movement. Because he could no longer blink his left eye, he had to push his eyelid down and up with the tips of his fingers and put drops in constantly.
Eager to return to the circuit after his neck injury, he entered events in Washington in August and in Delray Beach, Fla., in September. His vision was still occasionally blurry, and on his way to predictable defeat against Vince Spadea in Delray Beach, he sprinted wide to hit his best shot, the forehand, and missed.
There would be no more rushing back to the Tour, only intermittently intense preparation for the season. He changed his grip on his suspect volleys, visited friends, then watched from afar as his former teammates lost the Davis Cup final in Spain.
Looking at his face now, you would not notice anything unusual, although Blake said it did not feel quite right if he tried to blink several times quickly. Still, he said, it is only a nuisance that doctors assured him would disappear. Now for the next hard part: punching through the rust and doubts and winning again.
He opens on Tuesday against Florian Mayer of Germany, and though this is Blake's fourth Australian Open, it will feel as if he is starting over.
Agassi Easily Wins Opener
The four-time Australian Open champion Andre Agassi dispelled some of his health concerns with a convincing 6-4, 6-3, 6-0 victory over the German qualifier Dieter Kindlmann in the first round Monday.
On Thursday, Agassi retired from an exhibition match in Melbourne against Andy Roddick after feeling pain in his hip. Hip pain bothered Agassi at times last season and kept him out of Wimbledon. He lost several pounds in the off-season in an attempt to alleviate some of the stress on his hip. But after having a magnetic resonance imaging scan, the 34-year-old Agassi indicated that the injury was unrelated and was instead a microtear in an upper leg tendon.
He returned to the court Saturday to test the leg in an exhibition against Tim Henman and decided against withdrawing from the Open. He was not at his sharpest on Monday, but he showed plenty of mobility and gathered strength and confidence, chasing down drop shots and generating excellent pace, as usual, off both wings. "It held up all right; today, I woke up feeling the best yet since it happened," he said. "I pushed through, and I felt it loosened up nicely."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/sports/tennis/17tennis.html?oref=login
