James Blake - Breaking Back: How I Lost Everything and Won Back My Life

If you dont play or watch tennis, Ive included a short glossary of important words, terms, and information at the end. I hope these make the story equally approachable to tennis fans and not-yet-fans as well.

Thanks for reading.

During the summer and fall of 2004, I had a lot of impromptu parties in the living room of my house in Fairfield, Connecticut. The music was blaring on the stereo, beer, chicken wings, and burgers from nearby Archie Moores restaurant on the kitchen counter, and friends from every era of my life hanging outthe fact that they had work, other friends, other lives, didnt seem to matter much. In hindsight I remember those months as one long get-together, although the gatherings took different forms: sometimes wed all just hang and catch up, sometimes wed watch a ball game, and sometimes we played poker.

One Tuesday in September, it was a poker night and gathered around my dining room table were a bunch of guys Id known since high school, or earlier: Evan Paushter, my best friend and the gangs designated wise guy; Matt Daly, another old friend, his camouflage baseball cap turned backward, as it always is; J. P. Johnson; Andy Jorgensen; and my brother, Thomas, who often crashes at the house when hes in town.

The scene was typical of that summer, and even though it was a school night, poker chips and good-natured taunts were flying across the room late into the evening. As usual, we went around and around swapping unwanted cards for new ones, while seeing and upping each others bets until there was an Everest of chips in the center of the table. Eventually, when the mountain of chips looked ready to tumble, we called our bets and each player overturned his cards, moving clockwise around the group. There was nothing too impressivea lot of bluffing and wishing had been going onand we laughed as each lackluster hand was revealed.

Finally, we got to Matt, who had been sitting at the end of the circle with an impenetrable stare, not giving away a thing. With the realization that there was nobody left to fool, he couldnt contain his smile anymore, brightening like a Christmas tree as he turned over his cardsa straight flush.

We all laughed. Hard. It was such a superior hand that he had us all beat by a mile.

Fire it up one time! Bam! shouted Andy, employing our groups catchphrase, which he himself coined years ago, as Matt gathered his arms around the chips, pulling them in and arranging them into neat little stacks.

Still chuckling, I stood up to get some wings, but when I got to my feet, I began to wobble. Hoping that nobody noticed, I surreptitiously placed my hands on the table to steady myself.

It wasnt the beer. I hadnt even had a beer. It was the zoster, a virus that grabbed me back in July and hadnt let go. A vicious illness, zoster had paralyzed the left side of my face, distorted my sense of taste and hearing, and robbed me of my equilibrium. I was so comfortable with this crowd that I often forgot about the fact that I was sick, or that my face looked droopy and mangled. But anytime I tried to stand and walk, it became hard to ignore any longer.

On this Tuesdayjust like every other day when zoster ravaged my bodyI didnt want them to worry, and I didnt want to let those negative thoughts into the carefree air of the night, so I steadied myself on the table and walked to the kitchen as quickly as I could, before anybody noticed that I was fighting just to stay on my feet. That unsteadiness wasnt just normal for me at that time; it was how I lived every minute of the day during that summer and fall. If I had a normal job, I probably would have been back to work by then. But I didnt have a normal job. I was a professional tennis player, and I had put my career on hold to spend the rest of the year recuperating. The only catch was that the doctors told me that it could take years to recover, and so the question of whether or not I would ever play again continuously lingered in the air.

Zoster is often triggered by stress, so it made perfect sense that it hit me that summer, a season in which I had fractured and rehabbed my neck, then lost my father to a long, painful bout with stomach cancer. To say it was a stressful time would be a tremendous understatement; it was a devastating series of events. At that point, my friends and family were my one and only saving grace. I spent most days alone, while my friends were off at work, and with the silence of my house around me, I often wondered if my life had been irrevocably altered. It was only when the nights and weekends rolled around, when my friends and I were together, that I was able to lose my worries in the comfort of their company.

During those days in 2004, and the ones that followed in early 2005, my character was challenged as never before. I was at a major crossroads, a time in which my life and my career were largely in the hands of fate, despite all the efforts I was making to get better. Things could have gone either way for me then: I could have gotten back to my pro-tennis career in a matter of months, or I could have hung up my racket for good. I could have pursued a totally different, much more conventional, life, and I probably would have been very happy to do so.

But I didnt. Instead, I worked hard and turned my life around, managing to achieve a level of success that I never could have dreamed of when I was wobbling my way through my house that summer and fall.

Play tennis long enough, you realizemuch as I didthat your relationship with the ball is your relationship with life. Strokes, strategy, and stamina will only take you so far; how well you play depends on something much more idiosyncratic and much less definable. The strangest part of 2004 was not my injuries and illness but the aftermath of them, and the fact that my greatest professional successes occurred after I had faced my most daunting personal challenges. I used to think this was ironic; now I realize that my success flows directly from having cleared those hurdles.

This is the story of my relationship with life, and how I got through those dark days, arriving on the other side with a new understanding, and a new approach to everything I do, on the court, and off.

JAMES BLAKE

Fairfield, Connecticut
December 2006

For professional tennis players, December is an annual abyss.

The years competition is done, and everyone on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tour scatters around the planet to relax for the only month of our sports notoriously stingy off-season. Come January, those of us who arent nursing injuries will flock to Australia, or one of a handful of other destinations, for the first tournaments of the New Year. From there, we will continue to travel and play on and off for the better part of the next eleven months.

Success in professional sports is a funny thing. You might say that pro athletes live with three certainties looming over them: Death, taxes, and retirement. In the back of your mind, you know that no matter how good you are, what youve got is either fleeting or finiteat some point its going to end, either by choice or because your body will simply give out.