Paolo Ghisoni

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.Paolo Ghisoni.

Steffi Graf, who is considered by many the strongest tennis player of all time, has ended her agonistic career at 30. With this decision she took almost everybody by surprise, in a moment when she seemed ready again to compete with those terrible teenagers like Hingis and Williams sisters.
This year, the German champion had managed to cancel with two extraordinary performances a generation gap heightened by the unavoidable strain deriving from the fact of playing in many seasons always at maximum levels. The final won in Paris would have certainly deserved another victory at Wimbledon if Graf had not been once again stopped by a physical problem. Indeed, a muscular pain was the classical feather that breaks the camel's back. Fraulein Graf lost the “Championships” to a renowned rival (Davenport) who was expected to be frightened by Stefi's personality. At this point Stefi decided to end with a flourish, in a year when she came back to extraordinary success, a success she built up by winning a number of slam titles, exactly twenty-two. But Graf also suffered from too many accidents and she had a lot of difficulty in recovering all times, not to mention the fact that her physique was now really exhausted after all the matches played on tennis courts all over the world.

Graf was worn out by fourteen years of tennis, but also by the psychological problems she had to deal with and which everybody knows. First of all, her omnipresent father, whom she discovered to be an adulterer and then a tax evader. Then the notorious list of pains in her back, knees, and a foot, which forced her to keep on turning to famous surgeons and physiotherapists all over the world.
But Steffi was able to resist, wait patiently and then start again. She seemed ready to leave already by the middle of May soon after the Berlin tournament, when she was defeated by the French Halard.
Steffi has never been a great thinker or a strategist, but her instinct and her extraordinary athletic qualities always helped her to win. But it would be a limiting thing, as someone maintains, to consider Graf a very great athlete with some evident psychological gaps.

She was undoubtedly blocked and influenced by fear in some important matches, but not everyone is able to reconstruct himself, criticizing himself and forgetting his greatness. Maybe Graf's secret, other than her extraordinary prize record, is her typically German fighting spirit that helped her to react in adversities. In fact, when she lost her determination and will to fight with misfortune, she preferred to give up. Miss tennis left when everybody expected some other exploit from her, after that she had proved of being able to win once again a great tournament like Roland Garros.