RICHARD KRAJICEK PUTS THE RACQUETS IN THE BAG

Few players could consistently beat former Wimbledon champion Richard Krajicek on grass, but in the end a nagging elbow injury proved to be the unbeatable foe as the Dutchman called it a career this week at the ATP grasscourt stop in 's-Hertogenbosch, just days before the start of The Championships at the All-England Club.

"I want to have the feeling that I can win," Krajicek said, holding back tears not long after suffering through the familiar elbow pain in a loss to the unheralded Olivier Mutis. "But if my arm starts to hurt after a few service games, that's not realistic. That's why I've decided to stop. I achieved more and reached higher in the world ranks than I had ever dreamed as a child."

Krajicek has planned to retire at the end of the year, taking one last crack on the lawns of his lone grand slam title, and playing his last US Open before winding up the year with a few indoor events, segueing into the next phase of his career as 2004 tournament director for the ATP event in Rotterdam.

"Tennis is all I ever wanted to do," said the lanky 6'5" Dutchman, a fixture on the ATP Tour since 1991 when he finished at No. 40 in his first full year of play with his first title in Hong Kong. The following year he permanently established himself among the upper echelon of players, but immediately set the standard for what would become a career fraught with injuries, reaching the Australian Open semifinals in 1992 then withdrawing before the match with a shoulder injury. In 1994 he sat out the first quarter of the year with tendinitis in both knees, in 1996 he underwent right knee surgery, in 1998 he had the same surgery on the left knee, in 2000 he had left knee surgery again, and in 2001 he missed the entire season after undergoing surgery to repair a damaged tendon in his right elbow, the injury that would eventually lead to his demise.

"I went to the doctor of course and he told us that it was a bad injury, 'Goldfish Elbow' it is called," said Krajicek, speaking earlier this year about the original injury. "You get it from throwing or from serving and he said he said it takes three to 12 months, and then after five months of just rehab I didn't feel it was getting better. I talked to a doctor in the States and he said it is so serious, such a progressed injury, that I should get an operation and the idea was that after six months I would be playing."

After the operation, six months of rehabilitation stretched into 15 months and the frustration mounted. Every time he would step on the court for a hit, the pain would return.

"You do easy rehab and a little bit of weights and you try to build up with your weights, and then you try to build up with your tennis, and building to then 70-80 percent is going fine, and then as soon as you make the next step to about 90 percent and you play a few points, then the pain came back again and I had to take a couple of weeks off again," he said. "Then again back to square one, every time it was always the same story and every time I had to fall back for two, three weeks, you cannot work too hard, so it is all so frustrating."

Realizing his limitations, the Dutchman decided to lay the groundwork for a move into tournament directing, staying involved in the game while making the 2003 year a "farewell tour" of sorts. While he looks forward to running the ATP event in his birthplace of Rotterdam, he also knows the frustration of giving up the sport he excelled at.

"I will not be able to do anything where I am as good as I am at tennis," he said. "I was No. 4 in the world, Top 10 for a while, so I don't think in anything that I do I will be a Top 10 performer. Now that I am a father and have a family, that maybe makes it a lot easier now. I have also had some very good results, so maybe that all makes it OK, but my body has given me so many signs with the injuries that my body is not made forever for top sports."

One of the fond memories Krajicek will retain is not only winning Wimbledon, but dominating against perhaps the greatest grasscourt player ever in Pete Sampras.

"I beat him most times and yes I somehow played very good tennis against him," said Krajicek, who lost to Pete in their first meeting at Key Biscayne in 1993, but went on to post key Wimbledon and Davis Cup wins over the seven-time Wimbledon champ, and finished out front with a 6-4 win-loss record. "He didn't like my game because he likes to dominate, dictate the play, and I was coming in on him all the time so I was forcing him to come up with some good shots, and he did not have time to play the way he wanted to play. The nice thing about Pete, because he was No. 1 or around No. 1 all the time, was that he always played on the show courts so it was always a good atmosphere. And on top of that, I beat him more than he beat me so that is always nice."

With Krajicek now retired, Sampras pseudo-retired, Goran Ivanisevic and Todd Martin on the verge, and Wimbledon officials making the grasscourt surface resemble the US Open, the Dutchman sees the end of an era for serve and volley tennis. Can aggressive net players develop in today's climate of super-racquets and baseline bashers?

"I don't know, it is very difficult," he said. "In general it takes longer for a player to develop the position in volleying, and I just see a lot of the players are too good on the baseline. If you have to decide if you want to break through at 18 years old or 23, then I guess a lot of guys, they'd prefer to be on the baseline and try to break through at 18 years old. I guess that is the reason, I don't know, but the way it is being coached now and also the role models like (Lleyton) Hewitt of course, they are all runners. They run like rabbits on the baseline and they hit everything deep and counter punch, so I think they start to copy that and you are getting more guys who play like Hewitt."

The 2000 recipient of the ATP Arthur Ashe Humanitarian of the Year award for his contributions to youth in The Netherlands, Krajicek says he also looks forward to devoting more time to his foundation at home.

"I have my own foundation to promote and finance sport in inner-city neighborhoods so we are doing very good with that," said Krajicek, who in 1993 established the Richard Krajicek Foundation to make sports accessible to underprivileged youth. "We are going to more and more cities in Holland, building playgrounds and organizing games for the kids and we are really growing a lot."

Also on the retirement agenda is development of his real home-grown talent, five-year-old daughter Emma and three-year-old son Alec.

"My son is actually pretty good," said Krajicek, who in 1999 married Daphne Deckers, who played a "Bond Girl" in the 1997 film 'Tomorrow Never Dies.' "He loves it, he just loves to hit it, I mean everything he has in his right hand he hits with, with a little hammer he ruined a wall already. But he just likes to hit so when you throw a ball and he has a racquet in his hand he hits the ball, so he is pretty keen. My daughter, she likes it a little bit but she is not too interested, but if my son likes it then I will play with him. I leave it pretty open and free if they want to. If they are eight, 10 or 12 and they are very good then I might get fanatic about it, if they are really good, but at the moment if they want to play some tennis you play some tennis, if you want to do football, or anything. How it is going to be in a couple of years I have no idea."

Like his approach to parenting, Krajicek will take it as it comes in his post-playing career. With a game that could produce winning results on any surface, Krajicek was a sure bet to challenge Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras for the No. 1 spot throughout the 1990s, were it not for the slew of injuries and the frustration of the stop-start play that prevented any real career momentum. The versatile Dutchman's career surface results included two grasscourt titles at Wimbledon and Rosmalen; a claycourt title at Barcelona, a runner-up effort at the TMS-Rome, and a quarterfinal at Roland Garros; six hardcourt titles, and a semifinal effort at the Australian Open; and five indoor carpet titles, including the Tennis Masters Series-Stuttgart (now played in Madrid).

Richard Krajicek will be remembered for many things: winning Wimbledon; in 1992 telling Dutch radio "Eighty percent of the women playing at Wimbledon are lazy, fat pigs and shouldn't be allowed on the show courts"; an inexplicable 7-8 win-loss record in Davis Cup play; his contribution to underprivileged youth; and his booming serve, which accounted for a record 49 aces in one match in a loss to Yevgeny Kafelnikov at the 1999 US Open.

But among hardcore tennis fans, Krajicek will be remembered as the player who could have been, if unencumbered by injury, and the exciting net-rusher who provided a contrast to the dominant baseline style of play.Richard Vach is a writer/editor for Tennis-X.com. He can be reached at rvach@tennis-x.com.