怪不得都在倒数回澳洲的日子了。。

伤了么？

转自MTF网友的博客
Tennis burn-out: Barty, Kyrgios and the other kids
Saturday, 20 September 2014
Yesterday was a pretty sad day for tennis.
Falling by the wayside...
Reigning AO champion Li Na announced she was retiring.
Australia*s rising women*s teen star Ash Barty announced she was leaving tennis indefinitely.
And Nick Kyrgios announced that after playing in the Malaysian Open next week, he was taking the rest of the year off to recover.
Li Na*s decision is understandable in the light of continuing injury problems, and comes on the top of a highly successful career. The loss of a trailblazer will be felt, but those who seem to be able to determined to go on forever are the extreme exception, not the rule.
Rather more worrying to see our rising stars though, succomb to pressure.
Barty
The pressures on Barty were pretty obvious in my view: she*d been given a lot of Grand Slam wildcards, and though you might have thought she*d rather repaid the gift with her doubles efforts, there did seem to be a lot of angst in the tennis community about the apparent unfairness of it all.
Some have suggested the timing for her decision is strange given that she actually did manage to qualify at the USO in her own right. Well yes, but I*m sure she - and everyone around her - was also conscious of the other rising stars her age and younger who reached the very top levels of the tournament.
In any case, you have to respect her decision to take some time out to assess where she is at, and consider what she really wants to do with her life.
She could well come back with fresh enthusiasm and commitment a year or so from now - and she is still well and truly young enough to have a good career if she does. But if she doesn*t, well, she is the one who has to live her life.
Tomic take 2...
Of course the other person who everyone has been urging to take time out, and really does seem to need it is Bernard Tomic. He*s set to play in Malaysia next week, and signed up for a few more tournaments on the Asian swing thereafter, so I guess these could prove an interesting test of whether there is any hope to be found there.
Unfortunately, the ongoing saga of Tomic senior seems to be playing out all over again with Bernard*s younger sister Sara.
Sigh.
Female defectors
One of the key reasons Barty has long been under pressure of course, is the relative dearth of talent on the Australian women*s side. While there is a very strong field of contenders in the world 100-300 or so range on the men*s side, the women*s numbers have been lacking.
One might have hoped that the sudden appearance of a number of other (albeit in some cases not quite yet) Australian women in contention might have helped by taking the spotlight off Barty. But of course things are rarely that simple.
You have to suspect that John Tomic*s comments about Tennis Australia*s support for assorted defectors to Australia on the women*s side, while not giving those already here as much support as they feel they deserve, probably have a great deal of resonance with a number of people (entitlement mentality anyone?).
I have to admit that I for one will be rather more enthusiastic about supporting Daria Gavrilova, for example, in the light of the story over at Aceland which strongly implies her move might have something to do with being in a long-term relationship with one of the other up and comers, Luke Saville. I can understand the reluctance of everyone to mention this earlier (private lives and all that, things can fall apart). Still, love as a possible motivation has a lot more going for it as a storyline than the seemingly purely mercenary motivations of Tomljanovic for example.

Kyrgios
I have to admit though, that I*m a little more worried about Nick Kyrgios* decision to drop out of everything up until those *International Tennis Premier League* play matches in late November.
On the one hand Kyrgios has been suffering from an injury problem that doesn*t seem to be going away, so time out to let it heal is entirely sensible. And it probably was too soon to sign up for the very full program he had indicated he would play in the second half of this year given how few tournaments he has played on the tour to date.
On the other hand, it would have been nice if he could have had at least a stab at getting seeded for the AO say by playing the Shanghai Masters. He mightn*t have gone deep. But then again...
The issue is that it is hard to go deep in a grand slam unless you are seeded. And while historically most slam winners have done it at earliest at least a year or two after entering the top 100, Kyrgios looks awfully like he could be capable of making that run a lot faster.
There is a big tradeoff that has to be made here though: if he ends up the year in the top 30 he would then be locked into a very heavy program indeed next year as a *commitment player*. Perhaps he thinks avoiding that is a sensible investment for a less injury prone longer-term, a case of the cost of an early peak like Hewitt vs the staying power of a Federer? If so, well, something to be said for that.
The psychology of the tour
Rather more concerning, though, are Kyrgios* assorted comments over the last few months about not enjoying travelling and being away from home that much.
Maybe the move back to Canberra as his main base will help on this front.
In the end, though, tennis is a very internationalised sport, and Australia is a very long plane flight away from most of the tour.
Some men seem to absolutely love being on the tour (Federer springs to mind, though it probably helps if you can bring your family with you, have a team around you to arrange everything, and can afford to travel in style).
Not everyone is cut out to be a gypsy though. Perhaps we should be hoping Nick finds his equivalent to Mirka Federer sooner rather than later!
The cult of celebrity
It probably hasn*t helped to have assorted people telling him very publicly to toughen up, aim high and load expectations on him.
The trouble is though, that his own camp seems to be continuing to feed the frenzy, not least with the latest story on the hope of him winning next week in front of his Malaysian royal family connections. Of course he is going in there hoping to win his first title, we all really hope he does, and its a nice human interest angle.
But it*s obvious that Kyrgios has found the sudden vault into celebrity status pretty hard to deal with. There are some issues he is going to have to work through here, because you can*t have it both ways.
It*s simple: if you don*t want to be instantly recognisable and accosted everywhere you go, don*t capitalise on your tennis achievements to make money.
Tennis players these days basically make money three ways: prize money from tournaments; payments for exhibitions/competitions and appearance fees for tournaments; and sponsorship.
You don*t have to do the latter things, that appeasing of the consumerist gods, though. If Kyrgios just wants to make money off his racket and be left alone, the answer is simple: ditch the distinctive haircut and look; stop giving interviews and tweeting; stop appearing on tournament posters; and stop taking your clothes off to do Bonds ads!
Personally I kind of hope he keeps going with the media stuff if not the rest, because his ATP Insider pieces to camera this week were great; with that charismatic, warm on-camera presence he surely has a second career in the media just waiting for him once he finishes on the tour.
Still, if you do want to maximise yours sales power and make the loot, it comes at a price.
Hype and the tennis sales pitch
Kyrgios has been commenting in the media this week about the dangers of over-hyping USO junior Slam Champion Omar Jasika.
While it could be interpreted a number of ways, it looks to be a simple case of over-projecting - it seems to me it is actually nice for a young player*s achievements to be recognised for a change.
The Kyrgios effect has made that recognition possible - his rise, and the buzz around the other young Australians such as Kokkinakis (who appears in the ATP*s *Stars of Tomorrow* feature this week) is helping to generate a new enthusiasm in Australia for tennis.
To maintain that, you have to keep feeding the machine with new stories (and sorry but Hewitt*s fading dreams of winning the Davis Cup just don*t cut it for me anyway!).
From a promoting the sport point of view, it can only be good for the wider public to know a little more about who is coming up, and be able to share their struggles and successes.
Moreover, the stories do seem to be out there, just a matter of finding the occasion to market them to the mainstream media (should Luke Saville or John Millman win a Challenger or go deep in a tour level tournament sometime soon, for example...).
Hopefully, the wider the net of players we know about, the less the pressure on the few, and the lower the risk of them going under due to the pressure.
Rethinking
There are some deeper issues here though, about the way the tennis tour, and Tennis Australia support, operates that really need to be thought through a bit more.
Admittedly this is not easy - the ATP after all, gives players a break at the end of the year - only to find players then filling up the time they could be spending at home relaxing or training with this new Asian competition...
Still, older *commitment* players on the ATP Tour, for example, can get exemptions from having to play all those Masters - indeed Federer technically doesn*t have to play any of them because has been on tour for enough years, played enough matches and is over a certain age. Perhaps those under 21 need similar exemptions (not a big concession given that at the moment there are no players of that age)?
Secondly maybe more needs to be done to help our young players learn to love travel - maybe they should have to learn the key languages of the tour, for example, as they come up. And of course it would help if there were more chances to play at home (if only we had a semi-professional club circuit like the Europeans, or a US style college option).
Then too, there is the whole vexed question of just how wildcards are allocated, and who can access Tennis Australia*s loot...