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As she flailed away less gracefully than ever on Rod Laver Arena the other day, the thought that Serena Williams might have been playing her final ever match at the Australian Open began taking shape.
It was much the same in the first week when Andy Roddick couldn’t continue his match against Lleyton Hewitt.
And despite his courageous scramble to the fourth round, Hewitt himself is far from a certainty to return to the championship he has bled for but never won.
Already, the defending women’s champion Kim Clijsters has announced this will be her last season on the tour and several of her peers, as well as Williams, are on the verge of retirement.
And there are others, arguably, who ought to be.
Of all the women near the top level, it is Williams, described by John McEnroe during these championship as the greatest woman player of all-time, who will be missed the most.
Until a year-or-so ago the younger member of sport’s greatest ever sister act almost had ownership rights to the Australian Open.
She has won it five times, a record bettered by only two women players, and she has also won eight other grand slam singles titles.
Williams, who turns 31 this year, lost her fourth-round match in straight sets to the talented and unseeded Russian Ekaterina Makarova.
If the signs were discouraging during the match, the lack of the familiar fire and anger Williams usually shows after a loss was even moreso.
“I didn’t play well. I’m not physically 100 per cent,” Williams said.
“So it’s just like I cant be so angry at myself, even though I’m very unhappy.
“I know that I can play a hundred times better than I did this whole tournament.”
The equivalent in the men’s draw was Roddick.
A player who looked like he could do anything when he won the US Open in 2003, his third full year on the ATP Tour, Roddick seems certain to retire with that lone grand slam title to his credit, albeit with more than $US20 million ($A19.15 million) in prize money to console him.
After retiring with a hamstring injury when 1-2 down to Hewitt in the second round, it appeared he might not do anything much again.
“It’s a miserable, terrible thing being out there compromised like that. It really sucks,” Roddick said.
“It’s frustrating; it’s discouraging. Your sensible mind says to have a sense of perspective, you still have it pretty good.
“But the competitor in you feels terrible and wants to break stuff.”
The reality of an impending 30th birthday isn’t lost on the American, who was the 15th seed this year.
“I don’t think it’s coincidental that all of a sudden in the last year-and-a-half or two years that I’m getting hurt more,” Roddick said.
“It’s just frustrating because you can do all the right things and it might not matter.”
Hewitt, who will be 31 next month, has squeezed every drop of sweat from a career during which he became the world’s top ranked player and won two grand slam championships.
But the battle is catching up with him.
He played in the Open thanks to a wildcard and, with a ranking of No.181 at the start of the championship, so the chances are he will need another one next year – if he’s still playing.
At times during his fourth-round match against Novak Djokovic, he seemed to have difficulty even walking and another surgery to follow those recently on his groin and a big toe seems likely.
Hewitt and Roddick aren’t the only prominent players in the men’s draw whose careers are much closer to their end than beginning.
Eight of the 32 Australian Open seeds are in their 30s – not counting Roddick, who is 29 and Hewitt, who is unseeded.
It may be no coincidence that the two oldest of them, Radek Stepanek who is 33, and Ivan Ljubicic, 32, went out in the first round.
A few more once-prominent names seem likely to have leapt out from the Open draw for the last time in 2012.
Tommy Haas, once ranked No.2 in the world and four times a grand slam semi-finalist, is a few weeks away from his 34th birthday and is ranked in the 200s and Juan Carlos Ferrero, one of only seven grand slam singles champions still playing and a former world No.1 is 31 and was an unseeded first-round loser here.
As always, the production line keeps rolling, with players like Australia’s Bernard Tomic, Bulgarian 20-year-old Grigor Dimitrov, Open quarter-finalist Kei Nishikori, America’s Ryan Harrison and Milos Raonic from Canada ready to fill the empty places – if they’re good enough.
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