End of the Road Comes Early for Marion Bartoli

Marion Bartoli created what looked like the surprise of the tennis season by winning Wimbledon, but the French player saved the bigger surprise for Wednesday in Cincinnati: tearfully announcing her retirement from the sport — effective immediately — just 39 days after radiating joy and fulfillment with the trophy in her grasp on Centre Court.

Patrick McEnroe, the American tennis coach and analyst, summed up the reaction quite nicely on Thursday: “Say what?”

Early retirement has become a recurring plot line in tennis, particularly in the women’s game, where stars like Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin and Martina Hingis have all left the game in their mid-twenties in recent years.

They all came back, at least for a little while, and Clijsters even went on to win more Grand Slam singles titles.

The odds are, of course, in favor of the 28-year-old Bartoli’s coming back herself after taking extended time away from the game to rest her mind and body. But Bartoli, citing recurring pain and injuries, insisted that she would not change her mind, and for those who know her proud, iconoclastic character, it is not unthinkable that she will stand by her plan.

“I’m not like that. I won’t come back. It’s done,” she said in an emotional interview in French with Eurosport and the sports newspaper L’Equipe.

Reminded that great players in the past had said the same and then come back, she shook her head, her eyes flashing.

“This will be my last one,” she said of her opening-round loss in Cincinnati to Simona Halep. “I will have won Wimbledon this year in 2013, and I will stop with that. It was magnificent. You will certainly see me at tournaments again, but not playing.”

It was pointed out that many women’s players have been doing great things on court into their 30s.

“Yes, but I did them at 28,” she said. “You know one doesn’t make a decision like this looking at what others do. It’s an extremely personal decision. It was the time and the hour for me. Perhaps for others it will be later or earlier. But I’m not doing this in relation to others.”

The truth is that tennis has never had a retirement story quite like Bartoli’s.

Bjorn Borg, then the sport’s biggest star, walked away without a word to the media after losing the 1981 U.S. Open final to John McEnroe and never played another Grand Slam tournament. But Borg did not retire officially until 1983 and eventually made an ineffectual comeback.

Pete Sampras never played on tour again after winning his final Grand Slam singles title at the U.S. Open in 2002. But Sampras waited nearly a year before confirming that he was retiring.

In 1999, Steffi Graf announced on court after winning the French Open that she would not be playing in Paris again, but she went on to play at Wimbledon before retiring later that season.

Even Henin’s first retirement shortly before the French Open in May 2008 — the most similar in mood and shock value to Bartoli’s — was different. Henin was atop the rankings at No. 1, but she had not won a Grand Slam title since the U.S. Open the previous year.

Henin was burned out in 2008, and Bartoli sounded the same on Wednesday: tired of fighting her body; tired of fighting the voice in her head.

“I can’t permit myself to do things halfway; I never was like that,” she said. “It becomes an ordeal when I can’t even really walk because I have so much pain in my Achilles tendon, or I have so much pain my shoulder or my rib or in my lower back that I can’t even serve after one set. It all means that at a certain point, the body has its limits and I went past them. I was obliged to do so many times to make it, and I achieved the most beautiful goal of my life, my career. And now it’s time to move on to other things.”

This is, of course, her right; just as it is her right to change her mind. But the jarring part is that she had given no public hint of retirement until Wednesday, happily making appearance after appearance in France after her Wimbledon victory; happily practicing with her favorite soccer team, Olympique de Marseille.

“I know I have huge room for improvement physically,” she said last month, looking ahead to the U.S. Open and the Grand Slam tournaments to come. “And that gives me good prospects for the future. I think this is just the start, and I can do much better.”

There clearly was room for improvement in conditioning. Bartoli was carrying more weight at Wimbledon than usual: perhaps because her string of injuries this year had made it more difficult for her to train off court.

But at least for now, she has decided that she, in fact, cannot do much better and that after scaling her personal Everest at Wimbledon, she has no real desire to spend time toiling in the valleys.

She was never a megastar, which is what made her victory all the more uplifting. But the fallout was both surprising and poignant to observe, particularly as she discussed the phone call she made Wednesday to Walter Bartoli, her father and longtime coach: a call that she said woke him up in the middle of the night, European time.

“He understood; he even sensed it,” Bartoli said in French “And he is just so proud of me: what I did to be able to make it and he will support me in all my projects. He was not at all telling me, ‘But no, you will continue.’ Quite the contrary. He is very happy for me, for all I did. He is very proud and that is the most important.”

The tears were falling hard at this stage. Her eyes looked swollen; her face drawn: such a different portrait from the one at the All England Club not even six weeks before.

But even if Bartoli bucks precedent and the odds and sticks by her retirement, she will always have that moment at Wimbledon; that moment when all the childhood sacrifices and practices through the pain made perfect sense.