Chinese star Li Na announces her retirement, effective immediately
There will be an official press conference on Sunday in Wuhan, China as the WTA Tour event that comes to life for the first time in her hometown gets under way. But in the meantime, Chinese tennis superstar Li Na has announced her retirement, effective immediately, in a letter to her fans on her Facebook page.
Click here for photo galleries of Li's career, on and off the court
A season that began with her watershed victory at the Australian Open – which bills itself as the Grand Slam of Asia-Pacific – cannot even be completed.
"The task of finally making a decision to hang up my racquet felt a lot more difficult than winning seven matches in a row in the Australian heat. It took me several agonizing months to finally come to the decision that my chronic injuries will never again let me be the tennis player that I can be. Walking away from the sport, effective immediately, is the right decision for me and my family," Li wrote in the letter.
Over the last six years, Li had three surgeries on her right knee, which was never without its intricate black tape job on court. There were countless injections and treatments designed to try to manage the knee well enough to remain on court.
But after Wimbledon, where the 32-year-old lost in the third round to Barbora Zahlavova Strycova after losing in the first round at the French Open (the site of her other Grand Slam title in 2011), Li said in the letter that she underwent surgery on her left knee for the first time.
"While I’ve come back from surgery in the past, this time it felt different. One of my goals was to recover as fast as I could in order to be ready for the first WTA tournament in my hometown of Wuhan. As hard as I tried to get back to being 100 per cent, my body kept telling me that, at 32, I will not be able to compete at the top level ever again. The sport is just too competitive, too good, to not be 100 per cent," she wrote.
It's a great letter (click here to read it); at the end of it, she has a long list of people she thanks for making her career possible.
She is one of a kind, connecting with the English-speaking tennis world in a way no Asian player ever did before her, and having more success on court than anyone from her part of the world.
There will be no more golden trophy speeches like this one:
Media reports had her still in Germany (where she has been based for several years and where she has the medical team in place that has been managing her knee issues) on Thursday, but preparing to fly to Wuhan to hold a press conference there on Sunday.
For a player who actually retired from the game back in 2002, when she was just 20, Li's "second" career was beyond any expectations. And the fruits of her labor came late. Li won only nine titles in her career, but two of them were major ones: the 2011 French Open and, to start this season, the Australian Open.
She was a finalist in Australia in 2011 and 2013.
The best part of her later career was that she spent significant time and energy re-inventing her game – getting better, adding a net game, improving her serve under the tutelage of a hard-driving coach in Carlos Rodriguez.
That's something rarely seen in Tour in any player, young, medium or old. Many may fine-tune the game they turned professional with, but most are too afraid to lose any ground during the time it takes to institute major technical or tactical changes into a game at the pro level.
Rodriguez, previously known as the guru behind the success of future Hall of Famer Justine Henin, probably didn't need to take on another pupil – especially one in the twilight stages of her career as she turned 30. But it was a perfect partnership between student and master, until he had to leave her side early this summer.
Rodriguez was the star coach for a tennis academy in Beijing and the company's owners, who surely benefited from Rodriguez's association with the country's biggest star, reportedly insisted he resume his duties because his extended absences while he was on tour with Li were hurting the business. But in the end, it turns out Li was about to have surgery anyway; certainly her immediate – if not her long-term future – was in doubt.
As a result of that Australian Open title this year, Li reached a career-best No. 2 ranking, behind only Serena Williams. But with her poor results this spring and her injury absence since July, she retires ranked No. 6.
WTA chief Stacey Allaster told the New York Times that she considered Li the "Asian Billie Jean King," in that she was a trailblazer and a groundbreaker for women's tennis in that part of the world.
“When we look at the foundation of the WTA, it was about a women’s organization becoming commercially successful so that any girl, anywhere in the world, if she dreamt about playing women’s professional tennis, that she could. And it was about driving social change. Li Na has done all of those things, for herself and for her country, and for women.," Allaster told the Times.
