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Britain's best ever losing semi-finalist:

He won about 64% of his career total matches.
Pretty impressive even for a non-Brit.

So Henman retires from playing tennis. To be honest, I hadn't noticed he'd started!

The curse of the Demon of sport advertising,
He never won Wimbledon.
But the advertising guys paid him like he could
and low and behold his incentive was lost,
Goodbye Tim we wont be buying your shirts.

Even when he was at his peak he was a boring player.He never was anything approaching one of the 'greats'.He made a good living fair enough and was a hero to many middle class schoolgirls who liked to shriek around the centre court.To me he was a Brit who reminded me how dire we are at tennis in this country.Read McEnroes book to understand how far Henman was away from being a 'star'.

Elton Dong wrote:
> Wimbledon..... his incentive was lost,

Sampras and Federer might argue that he lost noit because he wasn't
trying hard enough but because they were superior players.

jj wrote:

>>>


Henman was unfortunate that his peak time coincided with Sampras' domination of Wimbledon.

And don't forget that he actually beat Federer in the Wimbledon quarters one year (I think it was the year he lost to Ivanisevic in the semis).

I take your point though - he was always good, but not quite good enough. He was never realistically going to win Wimbledon. I always felt he just lacked that extra edge in aggression and determination that a player needs to win Slams.

If he'd had that mental edge, the much-interrupted semi with Ivanisevic would have gone Henman's way, I feel. And maybe probably he'd then have beaten Rafter in the final.

But he didn't, and so he remained the "nearly man". Made a nice few bob along the way though - at least he'll never have to worry about cashflow.

- Eric