One year removed from her great coming-out party in London, Eugenie Bouchard is now in search of somewhere to hide.
She lost on Tuesday. Again. That's long past sounding familiar.
This latest humiliation came at the hands of China's Ying-Ying Duan, a comprehensive 7-6 (7-3), 6-4 defeat in her opening match at the All England Club.
Duan is 25 – middle-aged in terms of the women's game. She'd never played at Wimbledon before. She'd never won a match at a grand slam. She'd never beaten anyone ranked higher than 75th in the world. Duan is the chum of professional tennis.
Against Bouchard, she looked like Steffi Graf time-warped in from 1988.
Technically, Duan didn't beat Bouchard. She waited for Bouchard to beat herself. As the match slipped away, Bouchard began to spray shots about like she was operating a T-shirt cannon. Afterward, she said she is suffering from an abdominal tear and had been advised against playing, but this was something more than a physical limitation.
You could see it in the way she stabbed at balls, spun about after lost points, and spent most of the match staring forlornly at the ground a foot in front of her. Aged only 21, Bouchard no longer gets defeated. Rather, she is defeated. It's become a permanent state.
Eight months ago, she was ranked fifth in the world. After Tuesday's loss, she'll fall out of the top 20. Based on her recent form (12 losses in 14 singles matches – many of them to players no one has ever heard of), her descent is only beginning to pick up speed.
"Probably wasn't a smart decision," Bouchard said of her choice to play, adopting her increasingly familiar look of vapid defiance. "But I had to do it."
No, she didn't. She isn't going to play her way out of this. Not in her current mental state. And she has no one she can trust to tell her that.
A year ago, she couldn't put a foot wrong. Maybe that was the problem. Bouchard had begun to believe she was solely responsible for her good fortune.
That's not how sports work. It takes a village to build a modern tennis player. It takes a pretty sizable town to maintain one. When things are going well, you don't look around and say to yourself, "You know what I need to do now? Change everything."
That's what Bouchard did. After last season, she fired her long-time coach, Nick Saviano.
During the 2014 U.S. Open, you could tell Saviano already knew he was in for the chop. He had the look. I suppose you or I would be more than a little put out as well if we'd taken someone from an anonymous grade-schooler to a Wimbledon finalist and been thanked for it with a pink slip.
She replaced Saviano with Sam Sumyk, who coached Victoria Azarenka when she was world No. 1. Sumyk ditched the Belarussian when she was beset by pernicious injury problems. You can see how this new match was karmically doomed.
During Tuesday's match, Sumyk was sitting courtside. As it went steadily sideways, he dipped lower and lower in his seat behind the front-row hoarding. By the end, he looked as if he were peeking over the lip of a trench. Sumyk's professional reputation is taking steady fire. This was another direct hit.
Bouchard made a point of saying she's sticking with him, which sounds like the kiss of death. She also said she isn't strong enough, and needs a new trainer. What wonderful news for the old trainer.
While she was dumping Saviano, Bouchard also switched agents. She torpedoed the boutique Washington, D.C., sports agency that discovered her and specializes in tennis. She replaced them with the monolithic entertainment industrial complex, William Morris Endeavour-International Management Group (WME-IMG). It's like deciding to partner your after-work knitting business with Apple, but still hoping for the personal touch.
WME-IMG is not interested in developing players. It constructs brands. A lot has been snidely made of Bouchard's sudden obsession with having her picture taken, but the problem isn't vanity.
It's hiring a vast group of people who don't make money when you're out on the practice court at 6 a.m. They get rich when you're on the road schilling energy drinks in Beijing or sneakers in Dubai. Those people don't care if you win. Until you don't. And then they don't care about you at all.
That must suddenly be on her mind now. After Bouchard's humiliating run through 2015, who wouldn't think to themselves, "Is this it?"
It isn't. Not even close.
But every successive loss adds another layer to her mental scar tissue. Eventually, she could become so beaten down, no motivator will be able to rescue her confidence.
That's why she should call it a season. Right now. Abandon the game, the photo shoots, the professional junkets and the corrosive doubt for a few months. For God's sake, get off Instagram. Stop worrying about what other people think. Have a long ponder about what you really want. I'm presuming it begins and ends with winning major championships; put your sole focus on that idea.
Lie about an injury if you have to. Fire more people if you have to. Just escape. What Bouchard needs now is the anonymity of a practice court, and the protection of a few reliable lieutenants who can begin to rebuild her.
"If I have people who don't agree with what I do – haters – I think that means I've at least achieved something in life. I've done something," Bouchard told CBC prior to the tournament.
She's right. We build them up to tear them down. Athletes are the viewing public's sandcastles. People take malevolent joy in kicking them apart.
Unless Bouchard takes immediate and drastic action, she soon won't have to worry about people feeling any particular way about her at all. She'll be on the way to forgetting herself, and being forgotten in turn.
Cathal Kelly