Marion Bartoli reveals she may return to tennis
Frenchwoman announced her retirement earlier this month as the game was punishing her body, but she is now having a rethink
From the two-handed groundstrokes on each side, to that out-of-nowhere victory at Wimbledon this year to her equally surprising retirement less than two months after that, Marion Bartoli has put her unique spin on a career that's always kept people guessing.
So, maybe it shouldn't have come as a surprise when she said on Sunday: "It's pretty hard to say I would never come back."
The 28-year-old Frenchwoman, who retired suddenly after a loss at Cincinnati on August 14, left the door open ever so slightly during a news conference in Manhattan. Now she's getting ready to head to the US Open, not as a player this time, but as a TV analyst.
"I think it will have to come from me, my desire," she said. "At the end of the day, you're the only one who knows everything you have to go through as a tennis player. It's hard for someone from outside to understand, starting from six years old and when you have to hit, probably, two million balls before being a pro tennis player. I'm the only one who can make the call."
When Bartoli said she was calling it quits, she explained that her body could no longer take the day-to-day pounding it had been enduring over her 14 years as a pro. With 11 days of rest behind her, she said she was slowly feeling better, but every time she tries to do something physically, "my body starts to hurt again".
Perfectly happy in her early stages of retirement, she's seeing museums and parts of New York she never had time to visit during her 11 trips to the US Open, where her best finish was a trip to the quarter-finals last year.