 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
||
|
Blake wipes slate of a
crushing year 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 U.S. 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 94th from a high of 22nd. 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 his father 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, Connecticut, for six weeks, which he considers the best thing that could have happened, because it allowed him to spend time with his rapidly 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. He knew how we felt. We knew how he felt, but it was still important to have the chance to say it." His father died the Saturday before a grass-court event in Newport, Rhode Island, was to begin. But his father had insisted that James and his older brother, Tom, 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 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 (his eye would remain open as he slept). Eager to return to the circuit after his neck injury, he entered events in Washington in August and in Delray Beach, Florida, 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 whiffed. His doctor told him it was time to write off the rest of the season. 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, compared with all that went awry in 2004, that is only a nuisance, one that doctors assured him would disappear. Now for the next hard part: punching through the rust and doubts and winning matches 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. "I just feel like
I need to prove that I belong back up there, that it wasn't a fluke,"
he said. "Maybe I can play even better. I really do think I can
eventually, but I'm realistic. It's probably not going to come back
right away."
|
