Mardy Fish overcoming physical and mental problems

New York: For Mardy Fish, there are not yet easy explanations for his uneasy, prolonged absence from the men’s tennis tour with physical and mental health problems.

Fish spoke in largely veiled terms on Tuesday about his problems, which included a heart irregularity.

“As far as the heart condition is concerned, I haven’t had any issues with this,” he said. “It has been a scary thing. So that’s behind me. And, you know, you’re just trying to get in the best possible mental state. You can’t play this game without being fit, and without being mentally fit and ready.”

Of his troubles overall, he said: “A lot of them are mental, a lot of them are physical. Some of them are other sorts of things that are out of our control. I know that it doesn’t help that I’m sort of dancing around the question, but it’s been very hard.”

The first signs of trouble for Fish began in Miami last year when, after losing at the Sony Open, he began to experience heart irregularities. He had corrective heart surgery in May and returned for most of the summer season. But he pulled out of the US Open shortly before his fourth-round match against Roger Federer and did not return to the tour for the next six months, staying mostly at his home in Los Angeles.

“We will come out eventually with exactly what’s been going on,” Fish said. “And there’s some calculated things that I want to do to help other people that have been in my position and that have gone through what I’ve gone through, and people that will go through what I’ve gone through, to help.

“Some days are better than others, some weeks are better than others. But I’ve sort of turned a corner.”

Fish started his year by driving across Southern California to the Indian Wells tournament in March, when he lost in the second round. He then flew to a Challenger event in Savannah, Georgia, in April, losing his first match, but he did not play again until this week at a World TeamTennis event in Sacramento. His first scheduled tour event will be in Atlanta later this month, followed by the Citi Open in Washington in July.

Fish said the decision to withdraw from Wimbledon, which is on his favourite surface, grass, was particularly difficult, especially after he saw how the draw opened up to allow the No 24 seed Jerzy Janowicz to make the semi-finals.

“Being that far away from home, going to Wimbledon, was going to be extremely hard,” said Fish, the top-ranked American before his problems developed. “And I need faces that I’m comfortable with around me kind of at all times right now, and there were some scenarios that that wasn’t able to happen in Wimbledon, and we decided not to go there.”

For the first time since 1912, no American men reached Wimbledon’s third round.