Romance may be in the air but too much rest and play is taking its toll on Wozilroy's day jobs His belle, meanwhile, has lost four of her past six matches and is without a WTA title in 10 months. From entering this season's Australian Open as the world No 1 in women's tennis, Wozniacki enters Wimbledon next Monday barely scraping a place in the top 10. She is prickly, though, to any notion of her work-play balance becoming distorted. Asked upon her Eastbourne exit if it was difficult to juggle her practice commitments with the semblance of a normal personal life, she replied sharply, "No." Why should we care? What business is it of ours that two precociously successful, fabulously wealthy twenty-something sports stars wish to scour the globe for each other's company? Perhaps none at all. As one fellow golf scribe sagely advised: "Young love beats practice any day of the week." It would be dispiriting to conclude that a career in top-level sport is inimical to anything extracurricular. But such a thesis could, sadly, be true. In the manacling of golf and tennis prodigies, from Sergio Garcia and Martina Hingis to Adam Scott and Ana Ivanovic, none has lasted. Ivanovic, a former French Open champion now ranked 14th in the world, even admitted her game had stalled due to the relationship. And little wonder, for sport at this rarefied plane can be a uniquely egocentric enterprise. In the limiting of all personal outlet, the tennis tour is every bit as brutal as golf's. While exotic and beguilingly glamorous, it is at heart a transcontinental circus. We treated Wozniacki's fourth-round exit at Wimbledon last year as a self-contained narrative, neglecting to note that she flew the following week to an event in Sweden. The perpetual travelling can breed a sense of solitude. Álvaro Quirós, in explaining why he could not take his card on the PGA Tour, said: "Inside the hotels, I'm too alone. It's a tough situation to manage. An equilibrium can be elusive, as McIlroy is discovering. In paring down his schedule to a bare minimum outside the majors, he avoids the loneliness of life on the road but finds the consistency of his golf ebbing away. With the convoy of private planes at his disposal, he can, logistically, squeeze in coffee chez Caro in Monte Carlo one moment and a pro-am at Wentworth the next, but cannot reasonably expect his form on the course to survive. By his own acknowledgment, McIlroy has taken his "eye off the ball" this summer. A romantic evening atop the Eiffel Tower has, quite understandably, been prized above an appearance at the Scandinavian Masters. One senses, too, that it is in these precious interludes, when he can swap his constant exposure in golf for relative anonymity on the fringes of another sport, that he is happiest. Amusing himself on an outside court at Rome's Foro Italico last month, he might as well have been invisible. McIlroy is no doubt conscious, too, that a golfer's longevity affords him another two decades of pursuing major trophies. Wozniacki, with a tennis player's truncated shelf life, does not enjoy that luxury. But such thoughts belong to the future. And two of sport's starlets are, refreshingly, embracing Einstein's logic that the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none.