Andrea Jaeger used to laugh about how her phone at her Silver Lining Foundation in Colorado would ring from morning to night whenever a young female tennis star was in the news for a not so positive reason, maybe because they were just struggling with their game, or had decided to walk away from the sport prematurely.
For the media, Jaeger was, after all, the go-to authority on the subject having quit tennis herself at just 19, three years after reaching No 2 in the world and becoming one of her sport’s biggest stars.
So, when the likes of Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters retired when they were at their peak, if not quite as young as Jaeger was when she had had enough, or when Naomi Osaka talked about her mental health struggles, her phone would begin buzzing.
And it might have been buzzing again last week after Emma Raducanu’s first-round exit at the US Open because, increasingly, the narrative around the English teenager is that she is folding under the pressure and level of expectation brought on by her magical 2021 US Open win, the same factors, so it was told, (along with having an overbearing father), that prompted Jaeger to quit the game at the age Raducanu is now.
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It turned out that there was a whole lot more to Jaeger’s decision than met the eye. “My story was that she couldn’t handle the pressure … I could play in a tornado and still win a match,” she told the London Independent earlier this summer. “I never had a problem with pressure. I had a problem trying to keep myself safe and sane at the same time.”
The safety issue concerned the incessant sexual harassment she experienced, from when she joined the tour as a 14-year-old, by a Women’s Tennis Association official, the same woman spiking her drink at a players’ function in Florida before “trying something on with me”.
It was later that she completed one of the more dramatic career switches of this or any other time: having been a millionaire professional sports star she became a nun
When Jaeger reported the incident, and the general harassment she was suffering, to someone in authority at the WTA, “they said if you say one more word about this, we’ll make sure your sister’s scholarship at Stanford gets pulled’. Every time I tried to stand up for myself, I was threatened with someone else getting harmed.”
If she often seemed surly and bad-tempered while playing tennis, seemingly taking no joy whatsoever from the sport, it’s easy to understand why now.
By the time she injured her shoulder, subsequent operations failing to fix the issue, Jaeger was just relieved to have a reason to quit the sport. “When my shoulder popped, I thought, ‘great I can go and help kids full time’,” she said.
And that, not tennis, had always been her passion, driven by her deep religious faith, so she set up her Silver Lining Foundation, which provides long-term care to children with cancer and children in need. She’s devoted herself to that cause ever since, Jaeger is now 57.
It was later that she completed one of the more dramatic career switches of this or any other time: having been a millionaire professional sports star she became a nun.
There have been times in the last year that Raducanu might have wished she was in an enclosed order.
There’s nothing, of course, to suggest that she has experienced any of the horrors that Jaeger did during her brief career, but watching her lose to Alizé Cornet in the first round of the US Open last week, she appeared almost as joyless as Jaeger did back in the day. The contrast with her exuberance from only a year before, when, more than anything, she just appeared to be having fun out on the court, was striking, and not a little dispiriting.
There was no shame in losing to Cornet, mind, the French woman, 13 years Raducanu’s senior, having rediscovered some of the form this year that saw her rise to 11 in the world just over a decade ago. The draw, then, had been unkind to Raducanu, she could hardly have got a tougher unseeded opponent.
But, inevitably, her defeat was met a string of ‘where did it all go wrong?’ pieces, the ‘blame’ largely placed on the fact that she’s changed coach so many times in the last year, four at the last count with two ‘temporary’ coaches thrown in. The injuries have hardly helped either.
Then there were the ‘mentally fragile’ and ‘distracted’ suggestions, that Raducanu has enjoyed life off the court just a little too much since her US Open triumph, calling to mind Eddie Jones’s observation: “There’s a reason why the girl who won the US Open hasn’t done so well afterwards. What have you seen her on? The front page of Vogue, the front page of Harper’s Bazaar, whatever it is, wearing Christian Dior clothes.”
Mind you, not too many teenage girls would turn down the front page of Vogue, the front page of Harper’s Bazaar, whatever it is, or wearing Christian Dior clothes, and if she’s no longer having fun on the court at least she’s having some off it.
I’m going to drop down the rankings. Climb my way back up. The target will be off my back slightly. I just have another chance to claw my way back up there
For all the questioning of Raducanu’s maturity, though, and the analysis of where her career is now, few have assessed it as sensibly as herself.
“In a way I’m happy because it’s a clean slate,” she said after her defeat to Cornet. “I’m going to drop down the rankings. Climb my way back up. The target will be off my back slightly. I just have another chance to claw my way back up there.”
And it must have felt like that target has been peppered the last year, in a ‘from heroine to has-been’ kind of way.
As she pointed out, going in to the US Open she was one of just four teenagers in the world top 100, along with the United States’ Coco Gauff, China’s Qinwen Zheng and Denmark’s Clara Tauson. And even if her ranking ‘plummets’, as is the preferred description of her trajectory, from the high of 10 in the world to below 70, it will still be a lofty enough position for someone who won’t be 20 until November.
Her ‘mistake’, of course, was to win the US Open when she was just 18, nothing less than matching that level of achievement thereafter would have silenced her ‘where did it all go wrong?’ critics.
Now, she can build again, and see where that process takes her. But all that matters, ultimately, is that she finds that joy again, that tennis once again becomes fun rather than a trial. As Jaeger would attest, for all the rewards the sport might offer, life’s way too short for it to be joyless.
