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Scott's Spot - Burnout in the modern game

Hingis, Schuettler, Clijsters and others have destroyed their bodies due to the demands of the modern game

Player burnout in tennis is nothing new, it's been happening since the 70s when the likes of Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger were winning tournaments when barely out of primary school. By age 19, Jaeger had retired due to injury, and Austin succumbed to the pain by the age of 21.

It's a blight on the sport which administrators either turn a blind eye to or put in the too-hard basket because like politics, it's short-term results that everyone looks at, leaving a legacy for the future is just for the dreamers.

Why does it occur?

Think of what has changed in the game in the past 40 years since the game went professional.


1. Money

Tennis isn't just for kids from middle-to-upper class families anymore. Look at the Grand Slam champions of the amateur days - the vast majority came from Australia, Britain or the United States. Not just the best players came from these nations, the draw was similarly dominated as well. Now the lure of major prizemoney means tennis players come from all parts of the globe, and not just in singles either.

There are dozens of doubles specialists now making a living from the lower-profile part of the tour. South Americans, Eastern Europeans, players from the Far East - these players can come from relatively poor backgrounds and see life on the professional tennis circuit as their ticket out of there. Sometimes this comes from the player, more often it comes from pushy parents trying to live their dreams through their children.


2. Changes in surface

Back in the amateur days, there were only two surfaces - clay and grass. Claycourters slid and sliced the ball around the court, and on grass you served and volleyed. Now players train for several hours each day and play on hard surfaces which are usually a thin layer of rubber laid over the top of concrete. Grass courts, the softest surface on the body are all but gone because they are costly to maintain and event schedules are dictated by the weather.


3. Technology

Watch any archived match played with wooden racquets and you will see a completely different style of match. Players moving each other around like a polite game of chess, the only form of spin being the slice, and players not trying to belt the cover off the ball at every opportunity. The speed of the serve virtually enabled the server to reach the net before the opponent had made the return. Now stiffer racquets made of lighter and stronger materials enable players to go for every shot rather than wait for the right moment, the speed of the game making the serve-volleyer almost extinct.


4. Competition

For every player who makes the top 10, there are a thousand others who have tried and failed at their dream of making it big in tennis. Most weeks of the year there will be a dozen professional tournaments right down to the futures level with US$10k up for grabs. Professional sport is now big business. There are no players who mix between playing tournaments and either a job or study - it's a full-time profession as players practice constantly in order to perform in tournaments so they can pay for coaches, airfares, hotels, medical expenses and inevitably, accountants to sort out the mess come tax time. The pressure to survive means players will treat their body like a business - any time the business isn't open costs money thus it's work, work, work when the body needs periods of rest to perform at its best.

Look at just some of the players who have burned out in recent years:


Martina Hingis - a child prodigy, she played so hard from the age of 12 that her body was shot by the time she reached her twenties. Ankle and foot injuries from playing so many matches and training for so long forced her to take a break from the game for three years to let her body heal and her love of the game reappear.

Rainer Schuettler - a very different case. Germans tend to turn professional later as they study for longer before embarking into professional sporting careers. He was 22 by the time he played at Wimbledon for the first time in 1998. In 2003, Schuettler played more matches than any other player (101) and moved his ranking from 38 in January to 6 by year end.

He made the fourth round of every Grand Slam and the final in Australia. He raked in $1.875m in prizemoney but his body had nothing left to give. Since 2003, he has won just four matches at the Grand Slams and no longer qualifies by ranking. His playing style could be simply described as a grinder - no obvious talent, no flair, just sheer hard work, which his body could only handle for so long.

Kim Clijsters - one of the best players of the modern era has retired already before she even reached 24. The constant stress on her body from years of practice on hardcourts and playing the power game meant she could either stop was she was still young or keep playing and face having a family later in life as a virtual cripple.

Juniors aiming to turn professional often let their studies lapse so they have little to fall back on if they don't make it into the top 100. For most, it's not the talent pushing them into the reckoning but the drive for success. The dream is to make their fortune in professional sport when they are in their prime then live comfortably forever after? But how comfortable is life after tennis when the body is simply broken?

The Journal of Sports Medicine quotes a recent study of 33 elite-level players with 85% showing some sort of abnormality in their lower spine. Back injuries aren't even the most common injury on the tour, that goes to ankle and shoulder ailments, but it shows that players are booking themselves years of suffering down the line in order to chase their dream.

Team sports such as baseball have the structure to allow juniors to mature before they are capable of managing the workload required. Junior pitchers in the Australian 14 and under age group for example are limited to 80 pitches with a minimum of three days before they are allowed to throw again, a policy which no doubt came from America. After a stint of pitching, substantial recovery efforts are usually employed - icing, warmdowns and massage. Pitchers don't usually peak until their late twenties so the sport must look after their future stars.

Tennis players are self-employed. The battlers will play every event available to them to earn money while they can. While the headlines scream burnout and fatigue when star players speak out about too many events, that's the easiest part to regulate. If the professional tours brought in regulations, such as the WTA Roadmap for 2009 and beyond, to restrict the number of events players competed in, they'd have the money-hungry players screaming restraint of trade but also it would do little to prevent the damage being done on the journey to the pro level.

Being such an international sport, how do you bring the world into line and restrict the amount of matches juniors can play? When I was a junior playing tournaments against kids who later had a crack at making the big time, tennis was seasonal. You could play every day for six months and then the body had a chance to recover. Nowadays kids don't switch between summer and winter sports, and their bodies become scarred for life in return.