Kim Clijsters: Bringing back the heart into tennis

The end didn’t come quite as swiftly, or quietly, as the rare low points of her career. Going out with a bang was never really Kim Clijsters‘s style, but as she fought tooth and nail against Brit upstart Laura Robson in the US Open second round, trying desperately to make sure that this wouldn’t be the last match of her singles career, the Belgian showed a striking departure from the way she usually reacted in the face of adversity during her career. There were no rushed steps as she hurried her way through her service games, no resigned slumping of shoulders as she saw the match slipping from her grasp, and no wild, seemingly uncaring shots that ended up well beyond the sidelines. This was a Clijsters who was determined to fight, to win another match, to prolong her farewell tournament and turn it into a fairytale ending. And just for that, it’s hard not to feel that she deserved to go out with a bang after all.

For a player as talented as her, Clijsters ended her career with a surprisingly small tally of 4 Grand Slam trophies. I say ‘small’ only in relative terms, of course; for most players, a collection of 4 Slams is the stuff of dreams. But Clijsters was no ordinary player – her smooth power, her eye-popping athleticism, and her lightning quick speed around the court made her as close to the ‘perfect player’ as anyone could get. At times, her play even made her look superhuman; there were things she could do on the court that just didn’t seem possible. Maybe that was precisely what it was, though: in her bid to do everything conceivable to achieve that day-to-day Holy Grail of tennis – getting the ball back over the net – Clijsters pushed the envelope of the physical limits of the human body too far. The result? An interminably long list of injuries that made their presence at every stage of Clijsters’ career, hampering her play and stunting her success.

There are many things about Clijsters that will remain with us long after the dust has settled on her career. Her quintessential ‘niceness’, of course, is the most obvious: it would be almost impossible to find a single tennis watcher who dislikes Clijsters. She was unfailingly polite – whether on the court or off it – and had the rare ability to say all the right things at the right times. If ever there was a tennis player who was born to be a spectator’s delight, Clijsters was it.

Her game wasn’t too shabby either. Her bone-crunching backhand, often hit with an extremely short backswing, was a game-changer. By sprinting to her left and leaning into her backhand, she put herself in position to send the ball wherever she wanted to, usually with terrifying pace, in the process completely turning the point on its head. Then there was that open-stance forehand, with which she could dictate a point in a way that few others in the history of women’s tennis have been able to. Admittedly, the forehand could sometimes spew out a series of inexplicable errors, specially when put under pressure, but when it was working, it was one of the most devastating weapons in the modern game. Her movement was a sight to behold too – Clijsters worked her way around the court in such effortless fashion that it would put the most lithe sprinters to shame. Clijsters’ game was the complete package – a combination of offense and defense that could intimidate as easily as it could frustrate.

For all of Clijsters’ physical gifts, though, if it hadn’t been for her 2009 comeback, her career might have been best remembered for a notorious and sometimes crippling inability to deliver on the biggest stages. Before her first retirement in 2007, Clijsters had a knack of coming unstuck whenever she was within touching distance of the biggest prizes in the sport. In the first four Grand Slam finals that Clijsters played, she mysteriously froze, playing nervy tennis to gift away the match to her opponent every single time. She redeemed herself a little by capturing the 2005 US Open, but she couldn’t completely shake off the lingering impression in the minds of tennis followers that she was a bit of a ‘headcase’ player and an under-achiever. But all of that changed when she decided to un-retire in 2009, as she displayed a newfound tenacity to win the US Open (defeating a foul-mouthed Serena Williams along the way) in just the third tournament of her comeback.

What changed for Clijsters in those two years that she spent away from the game? Some claim that the competition just wasn’t as strong any more (her early career nemesis, countrywoman Justine Henin, was notably absent in most of Clijsters’ post-comeback triumphs). But the likelier explanation is that Clijsters was just more at peace with herself and her priorities in her second innings. She had found marital bliss, and had been blessed with a beautiful daughter (whose celebration with her mommy at the 2009 US Open could bring a smile on the face of even the surliest person on earth), which meant she could play tennis with a freedom the like of which she had never experienced before. As paradoxical as this may sound, Clijsters seemed to have found the true purpose of her life – which wasn’t tennis – and that helped her become better at tennis.

After 2009, in whatever little time she wasn’t afflicted with some injury or the other, Clijsters was the epitome of grit and gumption. I can scarcely remember more than a couple of close matches in her second career that she lost, and I’ve lost count of the hard-fought encounters that she won - her 2010 Brisbane final against Henin, 2010 Cincinnati final against Maria Sharapova, 2010 US Open semifinal against Venus Williams and Australian Open matches against Na Li (2011 final and 2012 4th round) immediately come to mind. Clearly, this was a new and improved Kim Clijsters, and her impressive results in such a short span of time (at one point she had won three out of a possible six Majors) even made people wonder whether she’d surpass Henin to become the most decorated Belgian player of all time.

Her injuries, of course, had other ideas. As Clijsters made one belief-defying get on the court after another, the strain on her body kept mounting, and after a while her prolonged injury-related absences from the tour started making her look like a part-time player. She announced at the start of this year that the US Open would be the last tournament of her career, and it was hard to argue with her decision. She played in fits and starts through the year, but never seemed like a genuine threat to win anywhere (save for the Australian Open, where she was only stopped by a flying Victoria Azarenka). There was to be no last hurrah at the Olympics (grass was never her forte anyway), but the US Open, which was the seat of her greatest triumphs, still held the promise of one final exclamation point to her tennis journey. Robson put paid to those hopes yesterday, but not before Clijsters had put on show yet another endearing act – only this time, it was her willingness to fight, rather than her warm smile or disarming niceness, that stole the show.

Clijsters may not have achieved as much success in tennis as she had the potential to, but she achieved something that is probably just as important: a permanent place in the hearts of the sport’s followers. Her career had its share of ups and maybe more than its share of downs, but in the end, she is walking away from it all a happy woman, with her fans desperately wishing for her to stay on just a little bit longer. Along the way, she also produced perhaps the most iconic accomplishment of the Open Era: her victory at the 2009 US Open as an unseeded, unranked wild card is a feat that will only gain in significance as time passes, considering how unlikely it is to ever be repeated. And oh, the sight of little Jada running around inside Arthur Ashe stadium while her mother looked on with adoration might perhaps be the single most heart-warming memory you’ll ever get to experience in the world of sports.

Kim Clijsters will always be remembered, for showing us all just how beautiful a well-rounded life looks like; for showing us that sometimes, fairytales do come true.