Is it time?
That’s got to be one of the hardest decisions a professional athlete has to make.
Ryan Harrison knew last January.
After 16 years playing professional tennis, the Shreveport native knew he had a decision to make. It had been a couple of years since he was able to play on the level he knew he could, so he decided to give it one more year.
“Basically, I said I was going to put all of my resources into last year’s season,” Harrison explained on a recent phone call from his home in Florida.
Putting all of his resources together meant trying to get through a season on the ATP Tour injury-free, which is something Harrison had been battling throughout his career. It was a career that began at the young age of 15, when the phenom from the courts at Pierremont Oaks played in his first ATP tournament at the 2008 Houston Open.
After battling through the qualifying to make it into the main draw, Harrison won his first-round match but fell to James Blake, one of America’s top men’s players at the time, in the second round. To this day, he remembers the words Blake shared with him when they shook hands at the net.
“I’ll never forget it,” Harrison recalls. “He said, ‘You’re gonna have a great, long career. Enjoy it.’ I didn’t understand the magnitude of those words at that point.”
At that point, Harrison was just a young kid getting to do what he always wanted to do – play professional tennis.
“That was the start,” he says. “It was lights on.”
The lights were on. And they were bright.
As Andre Agassi was closing out his Hall of Fame career, Harrison was the one expected to carry the mantel as the next great American men’s tennis player. After all, when he won his first round in the Houston Open, Harrison had become the youngest player to win an ATP Tour debut since Raphael Nadal in 2002.
Imagine carrying that load on your shoulders when you’re not even old enough to get into an R-rated movie.
While success would follow, so would injuries.
By 2017, Harrison had cracked the Top 40 in singles and reached a career-high No. 16 doubles ranking after winning the French Open with Michael Venus. That was also the year he won the Memphis Open – a special victory because that is where he had watched his first professional match at the age of 7.
He also helped the United States make it to the semifinals of the Davis Cup twice (in 2012 and 2018) and represented America at the 2012 London Olympics.
The expectations took their toll.
“What you don’t realize back then is that it’s impossible to get there without peaks and valleys,” says Harrison. “I tried to meet those expectations, but at times I thought they were unfair.”
For a young kid, they were.
A fiery competitor who, admittedly, wore his heart on his sleeve, Harrison had to battle more than just injuries. More painful was when the media misread his competitive edge as a selfish attitude on the court.
It was that competitive edge that led to Harrison’s success on the ATP Tour. And it was that competitive edge that wanted to give it one more year.
After a couple of setbacks in February – when his back acted up and kept him out of competition for a couple of weeks – Harrison battled back.
“Three different times last year, I’d spend four to six weeks getting in shape, but my body wouldn’t hold up,” he says. “By the summer, I had pushed the gas pedal as long as I could.”
It was time.
The realization hit Harrison as he stood on the court at this past U.S. Open as he and Danielle Collins were playing mixed doubles. Right before match point, the youngster who grew up on the courts at Pierremont Oaks – the one who always wanted to “represent my country, my community, my family, and Shreveport” — took a moment and looked at the crowd.
“I knew at that moment that it was time,” he says. “And what a fun environment to have that moment.”
One year after he decided to give it one more season, Harrison announced his retirement in an Instagram post on Jan. 9 at the age of 31.
But he’s not finished giving everything he has to the game of tennis.
In addition to running the Harrison Tennis Performance Academy in Bradenton, Fla., with his father Pat, Ryan Harrison is looking into a career as a television commentator.
“May main goal now is I want to do everything I possibly can for as many people as I can in the game of tennis,” he says.
James Blake was right when he said Ryan Harrison would have a great, long career in tennis.