Mardy Fish’s documentary Untold: Breaking Point was released on Netflix recently. One of the central threads was the pressure put on the American male players to fill the shoes of Sampras, Agassi, Courier, and the other greats of the 90s. Fish and Andy Roddick established themselves as the best hopes for the American ATP in the early 2000s. After spending years in the shadow of Roddick, Fish decided to fully commit himself to improving. He got fitter through exhausting training sessions and monitored his diet, and in 2011 was rewarded with a career-high ranking of #7 and the completion of his long-held goal: a berth at the World Tour Finals.

Backing up a string of personal-best results is hard. Novak Djokovic, who also enjoyed his career-best year (at the time) in 2011, didn’t come close to defending everything in 2012. But Fish wasn’t yet at the point in the 2012 season where he had to defend the bulk of his points when the grind of the tour caught up. Worn down by early-year trips to Australia, Switzerland, Marseille, and Dubai, Fish lost heavily in the Miami quarterfinals to Juan Monaco.

Fish and Roddick explained throughout the documentary the extent to which mental toughness was baked into their rigorous training. They were told to show no weakness, even when things are going badly.

This is a brutally tough thing to do. It would be very hard even for players who faced next to no adversity (and who are we kidding, even the GOATs Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic have had losses that surely keep them up at night. Off court adversity is often even more menacing). So Fish, like many other players, was expected to have toughness mode switched on all the time, regardless of circumstances. Again, this would be tough even if the tennis world were perfectly calibrated to players’ wants and needs. To put it lightly, the tennis world is not.

After Fish’s loss to Monaco, in the locker room, Fish heard Patrick McEnroe say on a television broadcast “Mardy Fish…there’s just no other way to say it. Just a horrendous performance.” McEnroe was technically correct, as Fish would later acknowledge in the documentary. But McEnroe was the American Davis Cup captain, and someone Fish thought of as a friend. To make matters worse, this critique came as Fish was under fire from all sides for not immediately living up to his 2011 season, therefore disappointing American men’s tennis. The criticism struck the then-world-number-eight severely, sending him into a downward mental spiral. Fish later learned that he had severe anxiety disorder. And tennis was a relentless trigger in 2012.

There are things that can be learned from this. A significant portion of tennis coverage is written or spoken with the implicit yet confident assumption that players will not be listening. It’s difficult not to think that players would be covered much more positively if the press were told that said players would be reading everything they wrote. I’m confident my writing would be different. And since players do see some of the negative things said about them, this is not good.

Fandom, I think, is far more of a weight on players than the press is. It is no wonder barely any professional tennis players (or other athletes) tweet frequently. Imagining the cesspool of abusive, profanity-laced insults and threats in their replies lessens one’s faith in humanity. Players suffer this hatred, seemingly, simply because they are playing tennis on a wide-reaching stage. Fame and riches — though not all tennis players get those things, not even close — come with the implied responsibility of using one’s platform for good. But they are not an excuse to treat a player terribly.

Back to the press — facts are facts, and omitting facts from coverage can take away from said coverage. But facts can often be presented in a way that is less damaging. Patrick McEnroe was correct in that Fish had played very badly, but some other relevant facts were that:

1. Fish had lived up to his seeding as the 8th seed by making the quarterfinals
2. Fish had endured a rigorous travel schedule at the start of 2012, making burnout and sleep deprivation easy explainers for the one-sided loss
3. The majority of the year still lay ahead (for what it’s worth, Fish would go on to make runs to the fourth round at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open despite battling physical and mental distress)

Saying these things in conjunction with the “horrendous performance” line could well have helped Mardy Fish avoid an awful chapter in his tennis career and life, or at the least made things a bit easier.

Being blunt is an effective method in writing about tennis. It’s one of my favorite techniques to read, actually. Sometimes nothing is more informative than a short, simple sentence that doesn’t hold back. But “a horrendous performance” lies dangerously close to the realm of the brutal, where players’ minds can be negatively affected.

Too often, athletes are dismissed for bringing up the very real strain of the public eye, not to mention the dumpster fire of social media. “Facts don’t care about your feelings” is a common sentiment these days. But as tennis fans, we would do well to state facts that are mindful of players’ feelings. Maybe it should be a responsibility of the press to support players as well as simply covering them. After all, we would have nothing to write about without the players.

So let’s not make it more difficult for these players who already have a world of things to block out mentally. Let’s avoid strictly negative takes — everything has duality, which shouldn’t even make it a tough task. Let’s try to thank the players for giving us fans extra purpose in life, through cheers or words or support of other kinds. And let’s not assume that players don’t listen to what we say, because often enough, they do.

Thanks for speaking out, Mardy Fish.