Henman highlights the burnout factor

Let us all tip our sombreros in acknowledgement to Carlos Moya. By saving six match points and going on to beat Sebastien Grosjean at the Paris Masters on Thursday night, the Spaniard with the build of a bull amassed enough qualifying points to edge Tim Henman out of the eight-man field for next week's season-end classic, the Masters Cup in Shanghai.

Thus was the decision about playing injured removed from Henman's ailing shoulder. Now he could head home to London, spend time with his wife and their new daughter, recharge the batteries and, crucially, take the two-month break he clearly needs, and his medical advisers consider essential, to permit the shoulder to heal.

"I am not going to start playing again until it is 100 per cent," vowed the British No 1. "Even if you are 95 per cent fit it lessens your chances, because the standard is so high these days."

What a pity, then, that Henman's drive to keep motoring along the road to Shanghai after suffering the injury in Indianapolis at the beginning of August persuaded him to play with his serving arm crocked. Tim's game is constructed around serve and volley, and he has been able to do neither properly for three months. His winning appearance at the Davis Cup against Thailand in September was a wonderful, John Bull snarl of defiance. It was also a calculated risk, taken out of loyalty for his country and a love of that competition.

The urge to line up for what would have been only his second appearance (the other was in 1998) at the Masters Cup meant that, despite limited opportunities of late, he has played 66 singles matches this year, of which 48 were won and 18 lost.

This, as it happens, is one more than the game's "iron man" Yevgeny Kafelnikov managed, though in the past the Russian's desire to paper his various residences wall-to-wall with dollar bills has seen him take on more than 150 matches, singles and doubles, in one season. Now even Kafelnikov is hurting, and those who make it to Shanghai may have to be greeted by stretcher bearers rather than courtesy cars.

In his anguish on Thursday, Henman was seeking advice from anyone, your correspondent included, who shares his concern about that shoulder. "I did start playing again too early after I hurt it," he admitted. "But I didn't have an option because I wanted to play Davis Cup. Yes, I do fear for my future, but I don't think my problem is particularly serious. Seventy-five per cent of the people playing have tendinitis. It is just that mine has got more and more severe.

"I will go and see my specialist again in London. If he tells me it has deteriorated and there is a chance I could do some career-threatening damage, there is no way I am going to play. When I saw him before the Davis Cup he said there was no tear, no lesions, no evidence that I was going to jeopardise anything."

As for defending the title he captured in Adelaide last January, Henman was adamant: "It is a great tournament but I am not going to play like this." Nor, he admits, will he go for the Australian Open if all is not well by then. Or, by implication, the Davis Cup tie between Australia and Great Britain immediately after that.

At this fag-end of the tennis year, everyone is suffering, as Andre Agassi explained eloquently here on Friday. "It's an accumulation, no question. Guys are playing a lot of weeks. I try to make sense of my schedule [he has played just 14 events this year] and I have the luxury of being able to do that.

"But if you play 30 weeks a year it's going to take its toll. Plus it's the end of the season, everybody's fighting to get through. You put yourself through more than you might because the finish line is in sight."

Lleyton Hewitt is someone who puts himself on the line every time he plays. And, aged 21, he has been hobbled for the past two years by a debilitating virus condition which refuses to be cured.

"I just sort of keep wearing myself down," he acknowledged. "Flying is probably the worst thing for it and it's very easy to get run down after big tournaments. I felt like that this year after Wimbledon, where I ran myself into the ground. The day after Wimbledon I was a cactus. I just wanted to lie in bed for two weeks. It's a problem of not being able to get over one virus, you can't quite bounce back, and you become susceptible to picking up little things when you are travelling all the time."

Travelling all the time is what has worn down the genial Russian giant Marat Safin, though his place in the Shanghai field was confirmed over the past week and then there is the prospect of facing France in the Davis Cup final towards the end of the month. Safin confessed: "I am a little bit tired of tennis. It has been a really long year for me and I'm tired of being on the tour, going from tournament to tournament. Of course, it's my job. But I want to have my vacation, just like every other normal person."

Safin pointed out he has suffered three bad injuries in his three years in the top flight of the men's game: "First the elbow, then the back, then the back again. Just look around, you can see everybody has wrist problems, or ankle or back or shoulder. How many people have had operations this year? Even Kafelnikov has had ankle problems, he's suffering.

"If you don't want to get injured you need to spend hours and hours in the gym, take massages, recuperation, all these things. Then you get tired of doing all the time fitness, fitness, fitness. And in the end you start to hate your tennis."

Even, it seems, for the sake of million-dollar paydays.