As he retires at the Australian Open, Lleyton Hewitt's legacy takes a new turn

MELBOURNE, Australia – So few athletes get a chance to say goodbye to their sport the way they’d write the movie script, to the thunderous applause and love of their home-country fanatics.

Sports – and life – so rarely work that way. More often than not athletes just get injured and simply fade away, an announcement to come later when they’re already off a sporting radar that waits for no one.

For Lleyton Hewitt, who grew from a baleful young man from Adelaide with a massive chip on his shoulder into a respected elder statesman and family man in a sports-mad country that reveres its heroes, the script was just right.

Hewitt, just five months older than Roger Federer – still one of the favourites to win the Australian Open – has been done as a viable Grand Slam contender for years now. So many body parts have been reconstructed and the years have worn down the indefatigable legs, the foundation of his success.

The desire, the fight and the iron remain, but that’s not nearly enough. That he has still been around on a part-time basis is partly because of his hunger for the competition, but mostly because of the already-completed transition to the next stage of his tennis life as Australia’s Davis Cup captain.

As the story arc of Hewitt’s career is dissected, he’ll be remembered as a multiple Grand Slam winner and a former No. 1.

The evaluation of those accomplishments will be downplayed, as Hewitt often finds himself in a category with the likes of Spain’s Juan Carlos Ferrero and American Andy Roddick – very, very good players often blamed for peaking at the right time, in the era after Sampras and Agassi and before Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.

Whether that’s fair or unfair is a matter of opinion, of course. Anything subjective is ripe for debate. And certainly Hewitt had no control over when he was born.

But on Thursday night on Rod Laver Arena, as the still-feisty Aussie went down in straight sets to Spain’s David Ferrer – only a year younger but, astonishingly, still chugging along at No. 8 in the world on seemingly tireless pistons – the more subtle value of the legacy he is leaving behind was revealed.

It is an unexpected one; it turns out that he inspired an entire generation of grinders. And in that way, he had a huge impact on the way the game is played as tennis morphs from a game of skill to a lengthy marathon of consistency, fitness and desire. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is often debated, but in the end it points to the fact while that few are born with prodigious talent, hard work, tenaciousness and heart are qualities that anyone can aspire to.

The tributes on the large screen after the match was over reinforced that notion. Contemporary Federer remembered their on-court rivalry, because his game has little in common with Hewitt’s and there wasn’t necessarily a connection there even if they did practice and chat amiably on the same Rod Laver Arena court just before the Australian Open began.

But here was Andy Murray, who named his dog "Rusty" after Hewitt:

Here was Nadal:

And most of all there was his opponent, Ferrer, who might have been even more emotional than Hewitt when the match was over. What symmetry that the 33-year-old was to be his last opponent in singles. The two are cut from the same cloth even if the inspiration for the 150 percent effort comes from different sources; Ferrer’s seems to come from fear, Hewitt’s from anger. But in this era, Hewitt might have been Ferrer: good, not great, so close to No. 1 and yet so far.

A man of few words even in his native Spanish, the words didn’t come easily to him – especially in front of such a large crowd. But they were heartfelt.

“I never had idols, but Lleyton seemed an idol for me. I have signed T-shirt from him seven years ago. I have a museum in my house and one T-shirt of a tennis player, I have. And that’s Lleyton.”

Hewitt joked that he couldn’t understand Ferrer’s English at the net, but he thought the Spaniard was asking him to swap jerseys in the locker room.

The other part of Hewitt’s legacy is his enduring love for Davis Cup, the team competition become near-anachronism in today’s “all about me” game, struggling to find its place in the currently crowded tennis calendar.

Hewitt’s passion for it was always at odds with who you thought he was, much in the same way his predecessor in the “angry young man” department, John McEnroe, was never better than when he wore his country’s name on his back.

As he was winding things down over the last year, Hewitt was already transitioning to his new gig as the captain of an Australian team that hasn’t had this kind of young, powerhouse potential since the Rafter-Philippoussis era. That was an era when Hewitt was scrapping to crack the line-up, willing to pick up towels, practice for hours and wash socks, if that’s what they wanted him to do.

The new kids can’t, won’t do that, but they won’t have to. It’s all there on a platter for them if they want it.

In Montreal at the Rogers Cup last summer, Hewitt was playing doubles with one of the emerging young guns, Thanasi Kokkinakis. He was there first thing in the mornings, practicing as though he had 10 more years to go in his career with a group of countryman that also included James Duckworth, the young Aussie he defeated in the first round here.

In the hot sun, the kids would be sweating and straining even when they went two-on-one with their aging role model. Hewitt looked ready to hit another 100 balls in the rally, because he sure as heck wasn’t going to be the first man to falter.

He also found himself in early captaincy mode as 20-year-old Nick Kyrgios got himself into hot water with his on-court comments to Stan Wawrinka of Switzerland during their match. Hewitt’s cellphone began blowing up in the middle of the night – the following afternoon back home – as the suits at Tennis Australia pretty much told him, “You want to be Davis Cup captain? Handle this.”

Even before that, you could find him on a small outer court at the French Open – or even at Roehampton, site of the Wimbledon qualifying, a place he'd hardly ever seen as a player – rooting on his countrymen as it if were the most natural thing in the world.

Hewitt will be the bench boss for the first time during Australia’s first-round tie against the United States in March. And so, the second part of his legacy begins.

The grizzled, grownup Hewitt has little in common on the surface with the angry, rude, misunderstood punk who came on the scene as a 16-year-old. The morphing of his image is partly due to maturity, marriage, kids and the passage of time. It’s also partly due to the fact that since the last quality era in Australian men’s tennis, Hewitt was alone in carrying the torch and people wanted so much to love him.

(The next generation of Hewitts, 7-year-old Cruz, has got all of the mannerisms down pat, if not yet the tennis).

The new generation led by Bernard Tomic and Nick Kyrgios hit major speed bumps with the public (and the law) before they even left adolescence.

A few years ago, Tomic and all his youthful insouciance didn’t show Hewitt nearly the amount of respect he had earned. That has shifted organically; Kyrgios, cut of different cloth, has always understood it. Their growing pains will continue because the spotlight on any potential star is so much more to handle now, with the social media that wasn’t around in Hewitt’s day.

So beyond the hope that Hewitt can instil some of his God-given desire and heart into these entitled 21st century prodigies, there is certainly the expectation that he can help them with the same transition he himself made with time: from brat to role model.

Just as Hewitt inspired so many of the game’s current stars, so, too, he could well inspire the generation of future stars in his own country.

For an undersized kid from Adelaide, that’s a pretty special legacy.