Ah, how fickle is the marketplace and how shallow it's players: when the teenage Capriati went off the rails, what followed was one of the most risible acts of mass cowardice I've ever seen. Those who, not long before, were queuing up to be part of the aura of success, quickly abandoned Capriati's sinking sponsor-ship, and the ones who had writ her large for general consumption, under the influence of the profiteers who run the game of numbers, had soon downgraded her to a mug shot and a cautionary tale, as if they weren't so much the root of the problem but a million times removed from it.

Like Seles (but with obvious differences), Jennifer Capriati was never quite the same after her very public mauling, in her case by a pack of hyenas. I mean, she had no trouble walking out on court, because it was the only life she properly knew, and her tennis talent was finally fulfilled at the Australian and French Open: she came, she played, she conquered.
But Capriati acquired an instinctive distrust of the fake smiles and the plankton that lives in and around the tennis fish bowl, and she was wary of being mauled a second time.

What was most galling was the scale of the ire and sanctimonious piffle, which was heaped upon one who is allowed to make mistakes: a child.
Unlike the footballers wives and fame wannabees, who have nothing to declare but their overriding need to declare it, Capriati was an unwitting recipient of celebrity, and the media had been courted for her by proxy, and without her full understanding of the Faustian consequences.
Oh, and that stink of hypocrisy and double standards: what for Capriati was fodder for a public flogging was for Agassi the PR cornerstone of a marketing campaign to sell a book. Different strokes indeed...

Reading about Capriati's recent skirmish with a prescription bottle, I came across the quote without tennis, who am I?, which Capriati apparently asked of a friend and fellow player.
Free is what it makes you.
Your strings are cut.
The court confines you no more.
The possibilities are now as endless as the view beyond the baseline.

Of course you are free not to be free, so to speak; to make yourself a slave of navel-gazing therapy and pharmaceuticals, or to look forever backwards and spend your second life taking bows and curtain calls for the first one.
Or you can find out what you might have been if you hadn't been doing something else. And the stories of those who have had the courage to begin again are always a good place to start.