Past year has not been kind at all to Raonic, Bouchard
Tennis stars were in running for 2015 Lou Marsh Trophy, not even on the radar this time
In just over two weeks, once again we’ll gather to try to untangle a tricky puzzle and decide who will be the winner of the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s athlete of the year.
It will be the 73rd time the award has been given out, and it remains the most prestigious distinction for an athlete from the Great White North.
While individuals are free to say how they voted, the idea is we don’t say how others voted or give out details of the discussion. Last year, Olympic bobsledder Kaillie Humphries was our deserving winner. As noted, the details of the debate last December can’t be revealed in detail, but two of the finalists were tennis players Eugenie Bouchard and Milos Raonic. Perhaps they split the “tennis” vote, such that it was, and denied each other the Lou Marsh.
That’s where we were 12 months ago, wondering which young Canadian tennis star was better, and who was more likely to capture a Grand Slam title first, and how Canadian tennis was soaring. It seemed like one or the other was in the thick of a big event every week in some city or another around the world.
These days, those seem like distant times indeed, and neither will be part of this year’s Lou Marsh deliberations. Both Bouchard and Raonic are in the news, but instead of wondering about championships, we’re wondering which of the two will get healthy first, and if either can get back quite to where they were.
This matters, folks, because those of us who love this sport saw a massive uptick in tennis interest in Canada when Bouchard and Raonic started winning at the highest levels, and Tennis Canada began reporting all kinds of progress in developing players and encouraging kids to play, forecasting a day when Canada might be among the true tennis powers of the world.
Well, it’s not that Tennis Canada’s dream is dead by any means. There are some very good players on the horizon. But it would be easy to feel like 2014, not 2015, was a peak for Canadian tennis interest, one not likely to be matched in the foreseeable future.
Raonic, still just 24, parted ways with coach Ivan Ljubicic this week, a familiar story in the tennis world, that’s for sure. Ljubicic supervised the process of Raonic going from a top 25 player with a massive serve to a top 10 player, with all the hills and valleys entailed in that process, and now he’s left co-coach Ricardo Piatti in charge of what comes next for Raonic.
This past season was pretty much a write-off for the Maple Leaf Missile, mostly because of injuries, more of the same physical roadblocks that have set him back repeatedly during his career. He actually made it to No. 4 in the world at one point, but is now 14th after going 33-16 on the season, one wrecked by foot surgery that derailed his spring campaign and back problems that ultimately forced him to shut down his season in late October.
There were highlights, just not many, and when he did play, his game seemed stalled.
He just wasn’t a big part of the conversation most of the time, and that’s disappointing. It remains a very open question as to whether that lanky six-foot-five frame with it’s impossibly long levers will be able to stay healthy enough.
To my mind, his 2014 season was better than Bouchard’s even though she made it to three Grand Slam semifinals and a Wimbledon final. The difficulty of competition on the men’s tour is just so much greater than is currently on the women’s tour that Raonic had to accomplish more to be consistent quarterfinalist week after week.
In 2015, meanwhile, as troubled as was Raonic’s season, Bouchard’s was far worse. She went from starlet to punchline, floundering on court as she protested how mean people could be on social media and then taking a tumble in a darkened U.S. Open training room, a fall that left her with a head injury and demolishing the rest of her already lousy season.
She’s suing the United States Tennis Association, and the exchange of legal briefs in this dispute has created a very unhappy aura about Bouchard and her future. The USTA has all but accused her of making up a story to cover for her dreadful results, while Bouchard’s lawyers seem to suggest “negligence” on the part of the tennis body may have left her with a debilitating injury that she may or may not recover from.
She has plummeted to No. 48 in the world after being as high as No. 7, and no one seems to have the slightest idea what lies ahead. She doesn’t have a coach, and her decision-making raised a lot of eyebrows this year after essentially thumbing her nose at playing for Canada in the Fed Cup and then partnering with bad boy Nick Krygios at the U.S. Open in mixed doubles.
A year ago, she wasn’t just a finalist for the Lou Marsh; she was the “it” girl for women’s tennis, followed by Genie’s Army, pulled here and there by a tour that wanted to capitalize on her ability and her looks. Now, some are calling her the new Anna Kournikova, which is both premature and about the most vicious thing you can say about a female tennis player, for it supposes a preference for style over substance.
Genie and Milos aren’t at the exact same place, but they’ve been twinned in Canada’s tennis narrative because they essentially arrived on the big stage at the same time. How they survive this downturn in their respective careers will go a long way to defining those careers. We’ll see again in just over a month’s time where their games are, or aren’t, when the next tennis season begins at the Australian Open.
Both have definitely learned that sport has a terribly cold-hearted way of turning burgeoning stars into yesterday’s news. Damien Cox is a broadcaster with Rogers Sportsnet and a regular contributor to Hockey Night in Canada. He spent nearly 30 years covering a variety of sports for the Star, and his column appears here Saturdays. Follow him @DamoSpin.