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- Lleyton Hewitt of Australia leaves the court after practice during previews ahea... © Clive Brunskill/Getty Images
The big blonde basketballer sat at the right hand of team boss Nick Green at the morning media conference and on the left side was Lleyton Hewitt, tennis player extraordinaire.
Hewitt doesn’t do many press conferences where he is not the centre of attention – well, he didn’t used to when he was the world’s best player, winning Wimbledon and the US Open and bringing the Davis Cup back to Australia – but he had to patiently wait his turn while Jackson continued to luxuriate in the well-deserved glory of her appointment to carry the flag at the opening ceremony.
It made for an interesting comparison. Jackson is considered to be at the top of her enormous game, still the best female hoops player in Australia and possibly the world, in the eyes of many. Hewitt has been just as big a star in a sport that probably carries more international clout than basketball but is clearly well past his best now, although, as he was quick to point out, he continues to apply himself assiduously to being as professional as possible.
It is easy to imagine there is a bit of a generation gap in place and yet they are almost exactly the same age, both 31, with Hewitt born 76 days earlier.
Hewitt doesn’t much enjoy dealing with the perception that he is a has-been, and who could blame him for that. It was on the agenda again today.
A reporter told him, rather than asked him, that this would be his last Olympics – which is probably but not necessarily true – and fished for a hint about when the dreaded R-word, retirement, might raise its ugly head. A day or so earlier Hewitt had already put that one to bed, at least in the context of the immediate future, saying he would play next year’s Australian Open and beyond. So unsurprisingly, he didn’t respond directly other than to say the same speculation, the same question, has been following him around for the last 20 Grand Slams, or five years in other words. He didn’t quite sigh in exasperation but he didn’t have to.
“I’m still focussed on what I’ve got to do,” Hewitt said.
“Once you get clouded by other thoughts you’re not going to perform at your best. So I’ve done everything in my power to get as fit as possible since the operation (on his left foot, a problem that kept him off-court for 12 weeks) in February. I’m grateful to be able to play here.”
It is good to see him in the green and gold. His powerful sense of patriotism is well-known and highly respected, and it fits the Olympic dynamic very comfortably. There might be questions about whether tennis is entitled to be an Olympic sport but Hewitt’s attitudes are a potent antidote to that particular line in negativity. He is and always has been, through two previous Games, extremely proud to be a part of it.
A gold medal, he said, would “top off” what is already one of the finest careers in the history of Australian tennis.
For him, it is all the more uplifting that this is all happening at Wimbledon, the cathedral of the sport and the scene of his greatest moment, when he defeated Argentina’s David Nalbandian in the final in 2001.
“I couldn’t think of a better place to play the Olympic Games than Wimbledon, the All-England Club. It feels so different to be able to wear the green and gold instead of all-white,” he said.
“The tradition of the place is second to none so every tennis player who plays this week is pretty fortunate.”
He was also pleased to find, in a hit-up with Roger Federer, that the courts are playing exceptionally fast, which he says will suit his game, and team-mate Bernard Tomic’s, too.
Ranked 158, these days, he concedes that he will be an underdog but the surface, the three-set matches and the unique atmosphere of the Olympics means that anything could happen. “We’ll see,” he said.
His first opponent is little-known Ukrainian Sergiy Stakhovsky.
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