Eugenie Bouchard, of Canada, reacts after losing a point to Belinda Bencic, of Switzerland, during tennis action at Rogers Cup in Toronto on Tuesday.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Tracy Austin knows what a tennis slump feels like: the overthinking, the doubts, the losses, the feeling that she just needed more matches to work things out. Only you have to win to earn more matches.
So the former world No. 1 tennis player, now a broadcaster, can relate to the downturn that Canada's Eugenie Bouchard is experiencing right now – losing 12 of her past 14 matches, including a first-round loss to Belinda Bencic at the Rogers Cup on Tuesday.
After Austin became the youngest U.S. Open champion in 1979 at age 16, and then won again at 18, she lived in the spotlight. But a career in professional tennis rarely proceeds in a straight, upward line, and a slump by a top player doesn't go unnoticed. In 1979, for example, Austin beat both Martina Navratilova and then Chris Evert on her way to that U.S. Open title. A few years later, after suffering some injuries and sitting out a few months, she can remember periods when her confidence and control on court were missing.
So Bouchard, 21, is not the first young player to stumble after finding attention-grabbing success on the WTA Tour. Other current and former competitors in Toronto this week recalled what it was like for them to go from being the player of the moment and praised at every turn, to one who was losing under great scrutiny.
"When you're playing your best, you play on instinct and you're not thinking, you make the right shot selection and you're thinking clearly about strategy, you recognize situations, you just react," Austin said. "But when you're in a slump, you have these doubts as to what shots to try and when you go to pull the trigger; you're totally unsure where it's going to go. Instead of just playing, you have so many questions in your mind and it's very foggy."
No. 6-ranked Ana Ivanovic of Serbia knows the feeling, too. She won the 2008 French Open at age 20 and skyrocketed to the top ranking on the tour. But by July, 2010, she had plummeted to No. 65 and was cycling through various coaches. It was 2014 before Ivanovic, one of the most recognized faces on the tour, made it back inside the top 10.
"I really wasn't finding the purpose in working or playing," said Ivanovic, 27, who recalled being unaware of how low her ranking had slipped. "I tried to find fun in the small things, because I just felt like everything was about tennis and I just wanted to go to the cinema, to have dinner with my girlfriends on the tour and that I wasn't really allowed to do before. I was trying to find the balance and trying to actually learn what I needed as a person."
Germany's Andrea Petkovic can relate to the feeling of a slump. In 2011, she rose quickly to No. 9 in the world after reaching the quarter-finals at three Grand Slams that year. Injuries and a loss-riddled 2012 season sent her tumbling as low as No. 182.
"If you get into the spiral that you define yourself over your results and your ranking, you're in real trouble and it gets really tough to get out of there," said Petkovic, 27, who today is back to a ranking of No. 16. "My confidence was going down in all areas of my life. I was getting into the spiral of thinking, 'Why did this happen to me, why not anybody else?' Once I got over that part, once I started to leave the past in the past, it was much easier for me to build momentum and gain self-confidence, and then it was easier for me to be secure on court."
Austin said the good news for the now-25th-ranked Bouchard was that Tuesday's three-set loss to Bencic kept her on the court long enough to establish some improvement.
"It's difficult to go through a slump under a microscope with everyone critiquing your game, but I saw incremental improvements in Genie's game on Tuesday, and she needs to recognize that," Austin said. "She was lost in the first set because she has played so few matches in the past few months. But then she was striking the ball better and looking more comfortable during points. It should serve her well when she plays [next week] in Cincinnati."