Jelena Jankovic to play golf when her tennis career is over

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Wilson Blade 9

On a revamped website of the WTA Tour there is a new interview with Jelena Jankovic, who reveals she plans to find satisfaction in golf once her tennis days are over. Of course, it will be just for fun, but she already has a coach and is trying to improve her skills:

I play golf for fun here and there. I’m really not good at it. I might have some talent somewhere, but I haven’t played enough to be good at it. My coach is very good, so he’s been teaching me the techniques and how I’m supposed to hit it. I try to follow the instructions, but I still don’t know where my ball is going. I hit it but I don’t know where it’s going. I’m at the beginner stage but my goal is to do better when I stop playing tennis.

Jelena will do everything in her power to change her current state of slipping out of the tennis elite:

I was Top 10 and Top 5 for a long time, so I’m used to that – No.22 in the world is not where I want to be. I don’t want to keep playing the way I’m playing and be at this ranking. I need to find my game again. But I’ve made up my mind and want to give my best next year. Hopefully I can play a few more years. I want to try and come back to the Top 5. And then if I can’t do that, I guess I’ll play golf.

The interview was done in Luxembourg recently, where Kim Clijsters is having a farewell event today to officially mark the end of her career. Jankovic understands Clijsters’ wish to settle at home and enjoy a quiet life. Last month, Jankovic talked to a Serbian TV station and said that she would of course like to start a family and have children after her tennis career, ideally, at the age of 30. Also, she talked about the difficulties of maintaining a relationship of two athletes, not mentioning that she broke up with Mladjan Janovic, the news we heard in September. (photo: Ralf Reinecke)

7 COMMENTS

  1. Interesting choice in sports to pick up once tennis is done. But i can understand that golf is very easy on the body.

  2. Althea Gibson, who won 7 grand slam tennis titles and who was ranked #1 in 1957 and 1958, became the first African American woman to join the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour, in 1964.[8] Her best finish on the tour was a tie for second after a three-way playoff at the 1970 Len Immke Buick Open.[9] Gibson retired from professional golf at the end of the 1978 season. She retired from amateur tennis in 1958-there was no pro tennis at that time.
    Golf is easier on the body than tennis, but has its downsides- back problems, mostly. A number of current and former male tennis pros currently play golf. These include Mardy Fish, Nadal, Murray, Ivan Lendl,Todd Martin and Tim Henman.

  3. Top 5 is a big goal,a bit too big for her I’m afraid. I think she should be more realistic,it’d be a great achievement if she made it close to top 10. She will need some big results to do that next year though.

  4. Jeanius, nice insight into the golf-tennis correlation. Jelena can surely be great at many things, including golf.

    Marine, judging by the last few years, it’s hard to imagine Jelena returning to her peak or even near it. We’ve been waiting for that to happen for a long time.

  5. We’ve been waiting for Jankovic almost as long as for Ivanovic, who actually is doing a little better than Jelena.

  6. I enjoy tennis and Jelena is one of my favorite players. We ALL have hobbies and pursuits and it would be fun to see her excel in golf. I think that golf is much harder on the body than other posters think, but that is her choice. Jelena is a special person to have reached the height of the most popular women’s sport in the world. And she is still a young woman. Even if she were a freshman in college, she would be facing the most common condition: deciding what to do with one’s life. It’s hard. It’s OK not to be sure. Finding what one loves to do with one’s talent is not easy, and the price of a mistake in this search can be a lifetime of being in the wrong place. JJ, take your time. Find time to imagine and talk to people in different fields. And remember, the drive that got you to the highest level of tennis is something that you can bring to anything you do.

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