Totally agree on this. One of the reasons that the current top 16 looks pale is because the C team never moved up to the B list. Maria Kirilenko, Shahar Peer, Sania Mirza, Tatiana Golovin and Nicole Vaidisova never made the big breakthrough despite all being pushed on the WTA hype wave with media coverage. Off course, alot of their elongated sophmore slump are due to injuries, but they haven’t improved their tennis games to go beyond steps made by winning their WTA Tier I or Tier II or Tier III titles.

In typical WTA mode, the machine simply moved onto younger “babes” like Wozniacki
and Cornet this year.

Nevertheless, some also quite like it like this, simply because you can have anyone win the tournaments now, and the up and coming wannabes also get their time in the limelight.

Women’s tennis cannot survive on “Babe” tennis players. Hype can only carry a player so far

Very well said, Pat. Hype will only last if results back it up.

Someone wake Larry Scott up! He’s sleeping in the deluxe suite of the WTA Titanic. Not only has the WTA tour suffered, the grand slams, and finesse fans of tennis - but the casual viewers have dropped interest in women’s tennis. Please note the blatant decline in major tv coverage since the Italian Open for women’s tennis. EUROSPORT showed more summer ATP hardcourt than WTA. The USA Network and even CBS yesterday showed more men’s tennis than women’s.

Women’s tennis cannot survive on “Babe” tennis players. Hype can only carry a player so far, but what I find the most missing in womens’ tennis right now besides Justine’s technique is a pure Tennis Star. A real tennis star, not a hyped tennis starlet, and that is what we have now.

The first time I heard of Justine was 10 years ago during my courses of French in high school. We had a series of cartoons and one displayed a girl playing tennis with a pacifier. Right after that, I saw the first matches she played and I was mesmerized and since then, I was sold as her fan.

In these 10 years, she reached what every Belgian tries to achieve: work hard, be successful and at the end stay modest. Luckily for her, she avoided the big spinning wheel of capitalism and commercialism. She lived for her sport and she wanted to achieve great things without having to act like someone else, since she probably would have felt this as selling her soul. At the end, she did achieve a lot, and of course, it’s a pity she never conquered Wimbledon.

Now, after 10 whole years of enjoying her play, I’m tremendously disappointed to see her absence but I also admire her. To be able to say: ‘Well, maybe I was just not good enough to win Wimbledon’. It’s that same modesty that got her so far without losing herself and I genuinely applaud that. How many people, who could change their career, do their jobs against their will and how many of these people are able to say: ‘***** it, I will do something I like!’? Most people don’t even know what they like, so to them only the virtue of criticism remains. And what do they hate the most? That what they are not, or what they cannot achieve.

I also hope that Justine does find again a sense in this other life and that it will fulfill all her wishes. Maybe that search might result in a come back, which would be great news for all her fans, but I now, personally, hope that she can find it in something else because a come back might indicate she couldn’t succeed in this new life of hers…

As for the current state of women’s tennis after Justine left…? We just turned the clock backwards with 10 years. That was the time where the hard hitters arrived, like the Williams’ sisters. It sure woowed us all or at least me. The Williams’ sisters with their strange things in their hairs blowing away all the competition… After that, we’ve only got more of the same, or something similar but just better looking at times. Justine was for me the next evolution… she was able to elegantly counter all that force. For that, I take off my hat and wish her all the best!

It was a shame to see her pull-out of the Olympics, but hopefully, her thumb will heal in time for the US Open.

However, a string of recent poor performances and the current thumb injury leads me to believe that I would have to wait just a little bit longer for her to reach her peak.