London, June 30 (IANS) Scotland’s Jamie Baker has announced his retirement from professional tennis at the age of 26.
Baker, who lost in the Wimbledon qualifiers, has struggled with injury and illness throughout his career, including an auto-immune disease in 2008 that left him in intensive care for three days.
“I was told at one point for about a 24-hour period literally not to hold my breath for too long, let alone move because if a bleed started in my head, there’s nothing they could do,” the Briton told BBC Saturday.
“Amazingly from that, by far the biggest achievement in my career has actually been from that point where I was really rising up the rankings very quickly. I had won consecutive tournaments, I had qualified for the Australian Open – from that setback I actually came back about four years later and reached my highest ranking again,” said Baker, whose best ranking in singles has been No.186.
“It’s probably hard to measure how much that process took out of me. It was incredible what I went through and the hardest time was actually afterwards and you just never know what sort of a toll that takes.”
