Simona Halep Calls Time

The two-time major champion and former No. 1 ends a stellar career that ended with considerable challenges and complications.

Simona Halep announced that her career—blessed with many past highs and laden with more recent lows—had ended Tuesday after a loss in the first round of the Transylvania Open in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Halep’s longtime communications manager, Katie Spellman, confirmed to Bounces that Halep intends the 6-1, 6-1 loss to Lucia Bronzetti to be the last match of her career.

Though there had been no formal forewarning that a retirement announcement was imminent from Halep this week, the 33-year-old had been blunt and bleak about her prospects for continuing on tour in recent comments, citing her inability to recover from a knee injury.

“Of course I think about retirement, and it crosses my mind very often,” Halep, whose ranking had dipped to 870th, told Golazo.ro in an interview published Saturday. “I’m old. I have injuries that I can't recover from. The knee is not recovering.”

Halep lingered on court after her loss to Bronzetti on Tuesday at WTA 250 Cluj-Napoca, the only Romanian WTA tournament on the tour calendar, and made her decision official in on-court remarks in front of a packed crowd that included many friends and family.

Halep began her remarks by thanking the crowd and saying that she “always had a lot of love” and “felt the best” playing in Romania. It was the first WTA match Halep had played in front of a home crowd since winning a tournament in Bucharest in 2016.

“From a sporting point of view, I am a very fulfilled person and what I have achieved in tennis, I can say that I did not even dream when I was a child,” Halep said in Romanian as she finished her opening remarks.

The on-court interviewer then nudged Halep by asking if she had “anything you’d like to tell us tonight?”

“I don't know if it's with sadness or joy—I think both feelings are trying me—but I make this decision with a peaceful soul,” Halep said. “I have always been realistic with myself: My body can no longer take me so much to get to where I was. It is very difficult to get there and I know what it means to get there.

“That is why I wanted to come here, today, in Cluj, to play in front of you and say goodbye on the tennis court. Even if my performance was not very good, it was with all my heart and I am very glad that you came. Who knows if I will come back. But for now, this is the last time I played here, and I don’t want to cry. It is a beautiful thing that I became World Number One. I won Grand Slams. It is everything I wanted.

“Life goes on—there is life after tennis, too,” Halep added. “And I hope to see you again as often as possible. I will come to tennis, of course—I will continue to play tennis. But to be competitive, it requires much more, and at this moment it is no longer possible.”

Halep then addressed young people who might be hearing her.

“I want to wish the children a lot of ambition, a lot of desire to reach the top,” Halep said. “Because it's wonderful. I played there for many years. It’s tiring, it’s exhausting, but it’s the most beautiful, and the adrenaline of those moments you don't find anywhere else. So, kids: trust yourself, fight, work—because everything is worth it in the end.”

That positive ultimate assessment from Halep would have required a lot of tallying highs and lows along the way.

[For a deeper look at the highs and lows of Simona Halep’s long career, please become a Bounces subscriber to read the rest of this 2,500-word post. -Ben]