By Giri Nathan
One cruelty of sports is how injury can fade a name from collective memory. Once upon a time, a 26-year-old American called Jen Brady had possibly the heaviest forehand on the WTA and was en route to becoming one of its most dangerous hard-court players. This was during the wonky days of pandemic tennis, with crowdless matches and pre-tournament quarantines. Brady came up in the 2020 season, breaking into the top 50, then the top 25, and making a shocking run to the US Open semifinal (loss to Naomi Osaka). In 2021, she emerged from two weeks of “hard” quarantine in a Melbourne hotel room—no access to tennis courts, just stationary bike workouts and hitting tennis balls into an upturned mattress—to make the Australian Open final (another loss to Naomi Osaka). Brady made it to No. 13 in the world, and it seemed like she could keep rising. Instead, she fell into nearly two years of knee and foot misery, which finally concluded in her return to the WTA last week in D.C., and, this week in Montreal, her first tour-level win in more than two years.
If you like a gnarly injury comeback story, Brady has all the goods. Pain plagued her last few months on tour before her layoff. As she told the Times, the plantar fasciitis and nerve compression in her left foot meant that walking around “was like stepping on a porcupine every step, and I was so sensitive that I would have to take my shoe and sock off because my foot would be so hot. It felt like somebody was lighting a match on my skin.” Compensation for the foot caused pain “everywhere.” Eventually, in her last match of 2021, she abruptly felt a sensation in her left heel like an “explosion” and retired from the match. The diagnoses: a partial tear in her left plantar fascia and a stress fracture in her right knee. Over the ensuing recovery, she occasionally found herself looking at her left foot and wishing she could “just chop it off.” In tennis, there’s no team to continue paying out salary or footing the bills for rehabilitation; Brady, who had only briefly sampled the payouts at the top of the game, wondered when she’d be able to stop blowing through her savings and go to work again.