Little girl, found (好文！） - 網球

http://0rz.tw/392NH
Little girl, found
It's been Henin against the world, and she's winning

Who is the toughest cookie, the hardest case in sports today?

I'm not so sure that it is some 300-pound demon of a football player or some
death-defying racecar driver, but, instead, a little brittle bit of a woman,
who, in the old boxing parlance, is pound-for-pound the best, as good as she
is determined, as intriguing as she is distant.

The pounds only add up to 125 ... maybe. At 5-foot-5, she stands across the
net from women who tower over her. She has been a single-minded package of
torment.

For much of her life she has been a virtual orphan. Her mother, whom she
adored, died when she was 12, and soon she was estranged from the rest of her
family.

Each year she retreated deeper into her sport, but only as a competitor. She
would be alone in the crowded locker room -- however briefly she would stay
there. Some of her implacable actions upon the court -- selfish, they seemed;
even unsporting and certainly unladylike -- only added to the resentment from
her bigger rivals.

But if she would not mix with the other players, and if she did break with
her family, she did find love away from the game with an early marriage --
yet that too has now shredded.

So often has it been Justine Henin against the world, and most often the
world has been bested.

She now comes to Wimbledon after winning her third straight French Open. The
25-year-old has also won Grand Slams in the U.S. and Australia and an Olympic
gold medal. Four years ago, when she captured her U.S. Open, she did it only
a few hours after she won a long, excruciating, come-from-behind semifinal
that lasted well past midnight and forced her, in victory, into the hospital,
where she needed treatment for exhaustion and dehydration. It was the kind of
epic courage that many men would never credit a woman.

At a time when athletes, men and women alike, loom taller and more muscular,
the little Belgian is like some throwback to another time. So, too, in her
sport, in an age of two-handed backhands, her one-handed shot: She strikes it
with a power and glory that seem even to overwhelm the memory of backhands
past. It is as beautiful as it is devastating, even more classic than Roger
Federer's.

What makes Henin even more interesting right now is that she is trying to
open up and find a joy that her coach says he has not seen in her since she
was 11 -- before her mother died. Since the break-up of her marriage a few
months ago, Justine has turned back to her family, reunited with her father
and her brothers and sister.

Her game is not best-suited to grass, but she has twice gone three sets
before losing in the finals at Wimbledon -- the only major championship she
has not won. Now, contentment does not necessarily equate with victory. In
fact, all sorts of athletes with personal troubles have found sanctuary upon
the field of play. A whole heart doesn't necessarily make up for a weak
second serve.

Still, should Henin win Wimbledon and complete the cycle of Grand Slam
championships, it would not be so much a happy ending as it would be a new
chapter.

--
這篇文章寫的無敵好阿 尤其是說他的反拍甚至比費神還經典
真是心有戚戚焉 ~

--