Who’d have wanted to be an up and coming tennis player in the age of the Big 3?
Talented players, the best of their generation, such as Nishikori, Dimitrov, Raonic and Goffin never made it to No.1 or won a slam. Pre the Big 3 era, they’d have likely have achieved at least one of those things, if not both.
Thiem proved to be an exception. Certainly, timing came into it. By the time he was coming up, those afore-mentioned players were known and hyped quantities and the Big 3 were still at or near the top of their game.
Thiem came along when they were starting to derail a little. That isn’t to undermine his achievements–it’s just a fact that in a tennis career, timing is imperative, and unfortunately, it’s something players have no control over.
Thiem scored many a big win over Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. At slams, his victories at Roland Garros and the Australian Open were huge statements in which he brutalised the ball with his forehand and had the greatest of all time standing in the middle of the court, lost.
He won his slam, too, at the 2020 US Open. One of the strangest majors ever played in empty stadiums bar the player’s boxes where his colleagues dined on take out and looked on at Thiem playing out his destiny before them.
In that final, he came back from two sets and a break down versus a much hyped player from the generation below him, Zverev. This time, Thiem got a little luck. Unlike timing, that can be controlled to some extent. Thiem’s hard work, and we mean hard, hard, back breaking work out on the practice courts earned him that luck and that much elusive slam. It didn’t happen at Roland Garros where we thought the man who beat Nadal on Clay when 99% of the tour could only dream of winning sets would make history. But where it happened didn’t matter. What counted was the number one that would now be written next to his slam tally in the record books. A zero, quite simply, would have been pure cruelty on the part of the tennis Gods.
For the last few years, he’s not been a factor. Injury, the ender of most careers, had its way with him. He kept trying, of course. But he couldn’t come back. We could say that is bad luck, but for most pros, it is the inevitable, and painful, ending.
And now Thiem’s leaving us. I’ll miss his ground strokes and his passion as he took on the game’s best players, competing like a pro in the age of million dollar endorsements and prize money, and you felt the whole time you watched him that he’d have given his all back in the days of the amateur tour, too.
Good bye Mr. Thiem – we miss you already!
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