So they never come back, do they? They do if they are women. Women come back all the time, and for all kinds of reasons. They often come back as good as they were when they left, and sometimes they are even better. They do it in all sports: swimming, diving, athletics, skating.
And, of course, tennis. Sometimes they take time out to have children, sometimes they take time off because they are fed up with the life, sometimes they are fed up with a hectoring male coach, particularly when he is a parent. Then they remember the bits they liked. Things like winning.
So they come back. Sometimes with a child or so, sometimes with a new coach or no coach, or a new partner or no partner, sometimes with a new attitude. If you ever get into an argument about male and female toughness, ask why male athletes hardly ever make successful comebacks while females do it all the time.
So out came Kim Clijsters, who took time away from tennis to give birth to a daughter, Jada, and Justine Henin, who took time away — well, it seemed as if she did so in an attempt to reconcile the sadnesses and inconsistencies of her life, but if so, she did in an eccentric fashion. She became a Belgian television star.
But they both — separately? together? — felt the tug, the remembered love of the struggle, the sweet validation of victory, that glorious moment when you know that you are are better than your opponent, and that your opponent, for all the skill displayed and the effort put in, is — in the nicest way possible — fundamentally inferior.
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This pair are united in their comebacks, and united in their nationality, both being Belgians. In just about everything else they represent a glorious antithesis, of light and dark, happy and sad, one-handed and two-handed backhands, and of course, winner and loser.
They have been separated into the categories of winner and loser on 25 occasions so far. Yesterday, the 27-year-old Clijsters moved 13-12 ahead, winning a splendid fourth-round match 2-6, 6-2, 6-3. I would have been happy for this one to go — well, maybe not to 70-68, but you get the drift.
One of those quirks of seeding, with Clijsters at No 8 and Henin at No 17, brought them together in the last 16, so that these two, with nine grand-slam singles titles between them, could help to clear the path for the Williamses. Clijsters won her second slam after her comeback, in her third tournament back. She won last year’s US Open, the first time she had contested a grand-slam event since the Australian Open of 2007.
This perversely put her one up on her rival, who has until lately been slightly but decisively one up on her throughout their almost inseparable careers. Henin must feel she is almost owed a post-retirement grand-slam title, but these things don’t come for the asking, as Clijsters told her yesterday.
It all began so well. Henin, 28, played the first set like a cheetah going for a gazelle, devastating her opponent with her dazzling speed. She raced towards the ball, taking it early, placing it where she liked and Clijsters was flustered into a series of errors. When she did get the ball back into court it came fizzing back, sometimes from that incomparable backhand, sometimes from a forehand that Henin used like a razor in a street fight.
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It was a set that provoked the sentimental hope that Clijsters, the sunny one, the one who seems to expect the whole world to be lovely, would leave with her self-respect intact. You could say that she managed that. She began the second set with a tough hold, and then counter-attacked. Her big clubbing shots started to hit the lines.
Henin’s speed tactic couldn’t be expected to last the entire match, but it wasn’t just Henin fading. Clijsters was getting brighter by the game.
Thus the Belgians continued their career of polarising: the happy mother cruising past the one with the divorce and the rather dysfunctional family life, the one with the bright blue eyes of a horror-film doll taking the prize from the one with eyes like a robin. It was a good and intense tussle and if Clijsters can play as she did in the last two sets, she is a contender for the title.
It was certainly a triumph for Clijsters’s skill at playing a match, as opposed to playing tennis shots. “Automatically, mentally you grow into the match,” she said. “I think it’s not one thing that makes you make the switch. You read the game better and start to feel more comfortable out there. And in the end I played really good tennis.”
The comeback changes many things about a female athlete. There is less anxiety about pleasing people, more freedom to please yourself, more opportunity to set your own agenda.
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There is less guilt, less worry about results, a deep feeling that the whole thing is not really such a big deal as you once thought. It can even be — perish the thought — fun. Certainly, losing is never quite as dreadful as it was and the lessening of that terrible fear can free a female athlete to find her best.
“Since I’ve come back I feel a lot more comfortable moving-wise,” Clijsters said. “I really feel that on grass I can really — yeah, just step up.”