Operation Doubles Tennis: Player Profile: James Blake Part 2

Part 1

In 2004, Blake was hitting with Robby Ginepri in Rome after both men had lost in the first round of the Italian Open. Blake, as usual, going all out as fast as humanly possible, stumbled while rushing forward to collect a drop shot. Head first, right into the net post.

He’s alive and walking today only because, when he felt himself flying, he was able to turn his head a bit to the side so that the post hit his neck a glancing blow.

He had broken his neck, and his scoliosis made it hard to determine how severe the injury was. So, for a time, James didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over the freak accident.

Mike Wallace (for 60 Minutes): Two days after the accident, James was transferred to another hospital for tests, still wearing his tennis clothes because he was too injured for them to be removed. “I was still covered in clay," he says.

Blake: I stunk. It was a low point in my life. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I knew I was seriously hurt, but I also knew that I looked ridiculous. So, I decided to laugh. I was so fortunate. My coach, Brian Barker was there. He said, ‘We got two options. We can laugh about this or we can cry about this.' And I immediately said, 'Let’s laugh. Let’s just kind of joke about it and hope that everything turns out all right. But if it doesn’t, I’ve got to find a way to still be happy with it.

Barker: He said, ‘We might as well laugh because you know, it’s pretty funny that a tennis player of my level with his coach standing right in front of him could run and go head-first into a net post.’ He’s like, ‘There’s got to be something funny about this when we look back.’ And he said, ‘So right now we’ll just kind of suck it up and make the best of it.’

Well, yes, the picture of it is kinda funny when you look back on it now, knowing that he was on a tennis court again in six weeks.

James insists that it was a fortunate accident, however. His father had cancer, and James hadn’t been told how bad it was getting. He would have been playing in Europe. But, coming home to recover from his broken neck gave him quality time with his father in the end.

It also put him through what only those who have been through it can know.

The exhaustion on top of the serious injury that had weakened him brought down his immune system and left him open to an attack of shingles, which is caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox. James, who pushed it in getting back on the tennis court probably sooner than he should have, seems to have suffered a particularly severe case of shingles. It affected the nerves on his left side, paralyzing half his face, blurring his vision, and forcing him to shuffle along like an invalid. The paralysis could have been permanent.

When he got better, he again pushed it in an effort to get back on court and found that he could hardly hit the ball. “That was the first time when I really came to recognize the limits of willpower and resolve,” he writes in his book, Breaking Back.

But he did break back into the top 50 on the ATP Tour the following summer.

But where was the turning point in his career? He can’t pinpoint one.

When he grew 9 inches a matter of months during his junior year in high school, he suddenly became a high school player who went undefeated his last two years. AND from being a player who never made nationals to beating the best juniors and becoming the top 18-year old in the country. Then, during his first two seasons in college, he went from being the No. 2 at Havard to being the top college player in the country. On the pro tour, he got nowhere for several years. Then – boom – he’s getting into the later rounds of Grand Slam tournaments and beating Andre Agassi. Even the triple-blow of what happened to him in 2004 didn’t take away his mojo.

So, where is that cliche called a “breakthrough”? What made him rise above the pack?

Many like to theorize. But Blake himself doesn’t.

In the May 2003 issue of Tennis Magazine, we read:

In Cincinnati, shortly before the 2001 U.S. Open, Blake beat two Top 60 players before losing to Patrick Rafter in three sets.

“A lot of guys, their egos are pretty fragile, and if someone ranked way below them gives them a good match, it’s, ‘Oh, I played horribly,’” Blake says. “Rafter didn’t say that. He told me, ‘You could have beaten me today. You could beat me on any given day. It’s just that maybe you didn’t believe you could. You had your chances and you didn’t stick to your game.’ To hear him say that was a big boost to my confidence. Rafter is one of those guys who definitely had to earn it, and maybe he saw that I wasn’t one of those kids who thought the world owed him something. But until then, I didn’t feel that I belonged on the ATP tour at all. After that, I started thinking, ‘Maybe he’s right. Maybe I do belong out here.’”