Rolling With the Punches

Justine Henin-Hardenne has taken emotional upset, enough to turn must of us in to basket cases, and used it to make her a tennis player of extraordinary excellence. It should surprise no one if she wins her second grand-slam title of 2003 on Saturday week.

Of course, the absence through injury of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, who have dominated the tournament for the past four years, makes her task easier, but Henin has never needed the smoothing of the path ahead to help her progress. It is even possible to believe that the 21-year-old Belgian resents the fact that the Williamses have pulled out, Serena after knee surgery and Venus with a stomach-muscle injury that has affected her since April.

Henin's background is almost unimaginably dismal. Her much-loved mother, Françoise, died of intestinal cancer when she was 12, the daughter of a close friend and comforter was murdered in 1996, she lost a nephew from cot death in 2001, and later that year her maternal grandfather, George Rosiere, in whom she confided, died on the morning of the Wimbledon final, in which she lost to Venus Williams. And the one person she might have been expected to turn to through all of this, her father Jose, whom she once said she admired for his sense of humour, became her bitterest enemy.

After she won the French Open 11 weeks ago, she said how happy she was that her father and two brothers had not been in Paris to see her triumph. At last they were giving her the space to lead her life the way she wanted after refusing 'to understand my ambitions and determination to become a top tennis player'.

The support that her father denied her has come instead from her Argentine coach, Carlos Rodriguez, and Pierre-Yves Hardenne, the young man from a neighbouring village to whom she presented a trophy at a minor tournament, fell in love with and married last November.

The effect has been to make her face the world with a mask-like gaze that discourages intrusion - she lists 'hangers on' in the tennis world as a pet peeve in the women's tour handbook - and to seek fulfilment from remorseless commitment to a sport for which she has shown an unusual aptitude from a young age.

She dislikes holidays and her trainer, Pat Etcheberry, compares her work ethic to that of Jim Courier and Thomas Muster, two legendary believers in punishing themselves in the gym. On and off court, she is unfazable. She was impervious to bad publicity she received at the French Open in June when she failed to intervene on Serena Williams's behalf, even though she knew the American was entitled to replay her first serve at a crucial moment of their semi-final. The mask had also stayed firmly in place when, after she completed a three-set win, she was accused by Williams of 'lying and fabricating'.

At Wimbledon, Williams, without a hint of irony, called Henin 'a nice girl', but that was after she had taken her revenge on the Belgian with a straight sets win.

Now, with the Williamses out of the way, Henin starts the US Open tomorrow as second seed behind her compatriot Kim Clijsters.

Clijsters may be the new number one - only the twelfth player to reach this pinnacle since computer rankings were introduced in 1975 - but Henin is the form player having trounced Lina Krasnoroutskaya in the Toronto final last Sunday after the young Russian beat Clijsters in the third round.

A Henin victory in New York would be reward for an uncommon resilience. And if she does win, don't expect her to get carried away.