Shoulder surgery ends Aleksandra Wozniak's 2014 season

NEW YORK – It was fairly clear, after Canadian Aleksandra Wozniak's desultory first-round loss at the U.S. Open to Japan's Kurumi Nara, that her shoulder woes had returned.

After returning to Montreal and having it evaluated, Wozniak announced on her Facebook page that not only would she not play the Coupe Banque Nationale in Quebec City next week, her season is over.

Wozniak will have surgery on her troublesome shoulder in the next few days. No further details were available in terms of when she hopes to return to the Tour, an impossible thing to gauge before the surgery and rehab are complete.

The Canadian missed the better part of a year and a half as she opted for rest and rehab for the ailing shoulder. For whatever reason, shoulders in tennis are dealt with a lot differently than in, say, baseball, where surgery is practically a rite of passage for pitchers and most come back better than they were before.

In tennis, surgery seems to be a last resort. But in the end, many end up having it after wasting precious years of their careers trying to avoid it. The number of shoulders that are taped to within an inch of their precious lives around the courts at any tennis tournament is evidence of that.

The notable example in the women's game is Maria Sharapova, who struggled with her right shoulder for much of 2008, said later she was originally misdiagnosed, tried rest and rehab, and ultimately had surgery in October, 2008.

And there's the rub; while the shoulder appears healthy, Sharapova's once powerful and effective serve has never returned to its original effectiveness; she has struggled with it ever since.