As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the US Open, we look back at the 50 champions who have left an indelible mark on this inimitable event.
To fully comprehend Justine Henin’s competitive drive, just cue up a replay of the Belgian’s epic US Open semifinal against Jennifer Capriati circa 2003. In a gripping, seesaw affair that played out over three hours and lingered past midnight in New York, Capriati was two points from victory on no less than 11 occasions. The American was up, 6-4, 5-3, but couldn’t close it out. She surged ahead again in the third, 5-2, but Henin kept battling back.
When she fell to her knees at 12:27 a.m., her miraculous 4-6, 7-5, 7-6 comeback an instant classic, Henin clasped the top of her adidas-capped head with both hands, as if trying to come to terms with all that had just occurred. So punishing was the tennis that, wrote Clive White in The Telegraph, “it was hard to distinguish the winner from the loser – rather like one of those Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fights.”
How tight was the win? Both players won a total of 127 points.
A severely dehydrated Henin never made her post-match presser. But the Liege-born all-courter – just 5-foot-6 but, pound-for-pound, one of the fiercest competitors the sport has ever known – would recover in time to claim a 7-5, 6-1 victory over Kim Clijsters in an all-Belgian final, her second Grand Slam title of the year after Roland Garros.
Blessed with flawless footwork and a lethal one-handed backhand, Henin would again win the US Open (defeating Svetlana Kuznetsova, 6-1, 6-3) in 2007, a record-setting year that saw her claim 10 of 14 events and become the first woman to surpass the $5-million prize-money mark in a single season. The following year, battling fatigue, the player fans had dubbed “Juju” stunned the tennisphere by announcing her retirement, the first No. 1-ranked player to do so.
Though she would briefly return to the sport in 2010, she never won another major, finishing her career with 43 singles titles, seven Slams and an impressive weeks-at-No. 1 total of 117. She was an Olympic gold medalist at the Athens Games of 2004. A multi-surface performer, she reached the finals of all four majors, a Wimbledon crown away from a career Grand Slam.
“I learned how to keep my head up, even when it was really difficult, because there are tough times during your career,” said Henin, who became the first Belgian enshrined in the International Tennis Hall of Fame. “I learned how to keep fighting. I wasn't the tallest, I wasn't the strongest. But I did that campaign for a sponsor that was called ‘Impossible is nothing.’ People thought I was crazy, but I was just chasing my goals.”
50 Fact: Henin is the only woman to reach the final of all four Grand Slams at least twice in the decade between 2000 and 2009.
