Equals and Opposites

Tim Henman

Tim Henman looks the very opposite of a grim statistic. Lit by early summer sunshine, as he sits in the pleasant grounds of the Bisham Abbey sports center, he is a picture of wellbeing, despite not having played tennis since early December and having abandoned fitness training after two perfunctory sessions at the start of the year. He has played a great deal of golf - a seriously great deal - but says that, apart from this and a skiing holiday, 'I've done nothing, absolutely nothing'.

'I've just had no discipline whatsoever,' Henman, now 33, says. 'I've still got some gym equipment at home and in January I thought, "Monday morning, OK, I've got to start doing something." So I ran on the treadmill for about 20 minutes, did some free weights for another 20 minutes and then some core-stability exercises. I went back the next day and did exactly the same and then on the Wednesday I felt stiff and thought, "I'm not doing that any more" - and have done nothing since.'

Yet he remains, statistically at least, one of our leading tennis players. Although he retired last September after reminding us how good he still was in a winning Davis Cup performance against Croatia at Wimbledon, his name appears in the rankings issued each week by the Association of Tennis Professionals, the body that runs most of men's tennis. At the end of 2007, he was the fourth-highest Brit behind Andy Murray, Alex Bogdanovic and Jamie Baker, and by the middle of April he had been passed only by Josh Goodall. The posse of young men jostling to sweep past simply does not exist. Whether he likes it or not, his buoyancy in the rankings is a reason to be depressed about the state of the professional game in Britain.

But the resilience of Henman's ranking also has something to do with quite what a good player he was, one of the most accomplished British sportsmen of the start of this century. In 2004 he had an annus confoundus when he reached at least the last eight of three of the four grand slams, including the semi?finals of the US Open and the French Open. The latter is something many very good clay-court specialists, and Henman emphatically never was one of those, fail to achieve.

So reflecting on a career of which he can be justly proud must also have helped to fill his time since retirement? Well, no, actually. He has hardly looked back at all. 'I guess I did some reflecting on my career at that press conference after the Davis Cup win. But I remember on the Monday morning waking up, taking our dogs out for a long walk and thinking, "Wow, what now?" That's been my thought process, I've just been thinking ahead of all the things I've wanted to do. I've spent very little time looking back. I'm not the type to dwell on things, but if you ask me now what are the things that stand out, I would probably say how consistent I was in my ranking. I had eight consecutive years in the top 20 and five of those were in the top 10. That's something I'm very proud of. And the way that I played some of my matches at Wimbledon was also very special.'

Ah, Wimbledon - what a place of bright light and deep shadow that was for Henman. It was there, in 1996, at the age of 21, that he created the first Henmaniacs when he beat the fifth seed, Yevgeny Kafelnikov of Russia, after saving two match points at 5-3 down in the fifth set. 'That was pretty amazing. We played on Centre Court and it was the first time I experienced an atmosphere like that. It was incredible.'

Between 1996 and 2004 he made it to four semi-finals and four quarter-finals at Wimbledon as he became the face of all those high summers. In the end, though, each of his 14 Wimbledons ended in the darkness of defeat. The semi-final loss to Goran Ivanisevic in 2001 was 'my biggest disappointment, no question'. Bad weather meant the match was spread over three days. The cruelest interruption for Henman came on the evening of the first day, soon after he won the third set 6-0 to move ahead two sets to one. 'People forget that I was pretty lucky to be a set-all because he had dominated those first two sets. I remember sitting down and thinking that he must be pretty gutted that I was level - and then, 14 minutes later, it was pretty evident he was gutted because I had won the third set and the momentum was with me. But it rained, and as far as I'm concerned it wasn't meant to be.'

The memories are starting to flow now. There was the white-hot afternoon in Sydney in 1997 when he won his first tour title; Paris in October 2003, when he rolled past four players in the world's top 20, including Roger Federer, on the way to his only Masters title. 'That was some of the best tennis I ever played - over a whole week, and looking at the players I beat. That was special.' And then back in Paris, six months later, he had his remarkable run to the French semis. During that fortnight he showed a cussedness that he was given too little credit for possessing, but mainly it was a case of pure talent prevailing over the disadvantage of playing on a surface that did not suit him, either by instinct or inclination. 'I think in terms of how my game developed on clay that was amazing,' he says. To illustrate this, he recalls how at Monte Carlo in 1998 he lost heavily to Galo Blanco, an out-and-out clay-courter from Spain, and then hammered him on the terre battue of Roland Garros six years later.

Was never quite making it to a grand?slam final - there were six semi-finals - his greatest regret? 'I don't really have regrets; I have disappointments - and not reaching a final was one of those. Obviously I wasn't good enough, or maybe I was never in the right place at the right time. If you look at my generation, Thomas Johansson and Gaston Gaudio won slams [Johansson the 2002 Australian Open and Gaudio the 2004 French Open] and I was a better player than them.'

He delivers this line entirely without resentment. Maybe the sunshine has got to him, but he seems like a man very happily embracing the prospect of half a century of retirement. He says he stopped playing tennis at absolutely the right time and, thanks for wondering, but he does not want a role in British tennis, not yet, anyway. Instead, he will return to Wimbledon this summer to work as a commentator on the BBC's coverage - a perfect fit, in all respects. The only problem he has at the moment is that daughter number three is keeping him awake at night.

And, yes, he had noticed that he was still near the top of the British rankings. 'It is an unbelievably barren spell at the moment,' he says. Jon Henderson

Greg Rusedski

Greg Rusedski and Tim Henman - throughout their careers, you couldn't consider one without the other. Both in the world's top 10, they were very different in playing style and personality, and not always the best of friends.

Emotions mellow in retirement, though, and these days Rusedski feels grateful to his former rival and Davis Cup team-mate. 'It was good to have two players spurring each other on,' he says. 'I think it's always better than just having one. That competitiveness forced us to improve our game. At the time we were playing we wished there was even more depth - it would have been nice to have more than two. For [Andy] Murray, right now, that's the challenge he has; it's only him and there's nobody even close. That's the thing about playing tennis in England - it's big fish, small pond syndrome.'

There was always the suspicion that Henman and the hype that surrounded him got on Rusedski's nerves - the patriotic hysteria and whiter-than-white washing-powder adverts. But Rusedski insists he was never bitter. 'I didn't mind it at all. He's born and bred in Britain and we haven't had a Wimbledon champion on the men's side since Fred Perry. Tim's record at Wimbledon was outstanding.

'As characters we are completely opposite: I was outspoken and fiery, Tim was more reserved. We have similarities, too: we're born on the same day a year apart [Rusedski is the older], we both married Lucys, we both have little girls. But personality-wise, we're different.'

Since retirement, apart from donning his skates for ITV's Dancing on Ice, Rusedski is working with the Lawn Tennis Association in their talent-identification scheme to find Britain's next generation of tennis players. He sees a bright future. 'There have been a lot of positive changes in the past two years. Yes, they should have done it 10 years ago, but if I had retired in the old regime I don't think I would have been a part of it. Now we're going along the right path.'Anna Kessel