Former world top ten Mardy Fish of United States revealed that he doesn’t have definite plans after the US Open 2013 Championships, stating that he had to deal with his health issues on top of other factors.
“I think there’s going to be some sort of assessment period, maybe after the U.S. Open, where I’ll kind of see how far — feel how far away I am to where I want to be,” he said during the Cincinnati Masters this week. “With all these problems that I had health-wise, I left the game in the Top 10 in the world, and that’s pretty hard to deal with. It was very, very hard to get there and to stay there for a while, and to make the World Tour Finals and to do all those cool things. So it’s been very hard and very challenging to know that I had really no control over it. And sort of here we sit 12 months out, 12 months away from playing really good tennis, some of the best tennis of my career, and doing well in most tournaments, and now I sit out in the first round in one of my favorite events, one of my best events, so that will challenge you mentally for sure.”
Fish lost his opening match in Cincinnati to Germany’s Philipp Kohlschreiber. The 31-year old has been struggling with heart-related medical issues since March of last year. His ranking has dropped to number 129 and is expected to drop further if he fails to defend his fourth round points at the US Open last year, where he had to pull out of the match against Roger Federer.
“It’s gotten miles and miles better than it was 12 months ago,” he said. “I’ll never forget it. I just can’t wait to sort of just forget, and five years down the road, whatever I’m doing at the time, I can’t even remember that. It’s never going to happen. I can’t ever forget what I went through.
“It’s been a very slow process. It’s very hard to come back.”
