The end of a journey both difficult and extraordinary (Part I)
A time-lapse of one of the most beautiful stories in the Romanian sports.
First of all, thanks to each and every one of you who subscribed to The Drop Shot! Seeing you are over 70 fueled me to put this out there in the world (it also made me extremely nervous).
“Let us be persistent and believe. If we don’t believe, we don’t stand a chance. That doesn’t mean that just because I believe I’ll win a Grand Slam, it will happen. But I must believe so that I can hold on to hope. In life, I think hope is one of the most important things.”
I chose this quote first for myself, then for you, and then for everyone we know. Persistence, belief, and showing up – these themes appear constantly in my thoughts and daily life.
Starting this newsletter was a battle with insecurities and a lot of sabotaging thoughts. For the past two weeks, I kept questioning this: “What do I have to offer when there’s already so much information, so much writing, so many voices out there?”.
But then, I opened the document and started writing. Because I do this for me. As a way of honoring this passion for tennis.
That quote belongs to Simona Halep, shared during an interview with Andreea Giuclea for DoR in 2017, at a time when she was on the brink of becoming the No. 1 player in the world and winning her first Grand Slam title.
Over her 17-year career in professional tennis, Simona Halep experienced the highest praises and the harshest criticisms. She was celebrated for her victories and criticized for her defeats – whether it was losing matches, Grand Slam finals, facing accusations of doping, or retiring from her tennis career. Looking back at her journey and the heights she achieved, I feel humbled. We often project our perfectionistic desires, hopes, and dreams onto these athletes, forgetting they are only human – just like you and me.
Yet, isn’t it this very ebb and flow that captivates us? The crack in their game and their imperfect journeys – that makes their stories so compelling.
Simona first picked up a racket when she was four with her brother in the small city of Constanța. Her father, Stere Halep, recognised her talent early and, when Simona was just seven years old, her father used to say to his friends, “I’m going to take this girl to Roland Garros. In life, you have to be a little crazy.” As a junior, she dominated local competitions, and in 2008, she won the French Open Junior Title, proving her court sense and tactical intelligence.
Five years later, in May 2013, she was ranked 64th in the world and unseeded when she arrived at the Internazionali BNL d’Italia tournament in Rome. That week, something shifted in her game and mentality: she played more aggressively and fearlessly. She defeated four top-20 players: Agnieszka Radwanska, Jelena Jankovic, Roberta Vinci, and Svetlana Kuznetsova. After her victory with Radwanska, reporters asked Halep what changed. “I started to believe”, she said. “I finally trust my game.”
Following her success in Rome, she went on to have a remarkable season in 2013, winning six WTA titles – more than any other player that year except Serena Williams. Her victories came on all surfaces: clay (Budapest, Nürnberg), grass (’s-Hertogenbosch), and hard-court (New Heaven, Moscow, Sofia). At the end of the year, she climbed from World No. 64 to No. 11, a rise that earned her the prestigious WTA Most Improved Player of the Year Award.
It wasn’t just the titles, but the way she played, “I found my rhythm”, she told reporters. “I am strong now, mentally and physically.”
For the next two years, she maintained her level at a plateau. She broke into the Top 10, but with that success came new expectations. The world was watching, waiting for her next big achievement: winning a Grand Slam. She was so close to winning the French Open in 2014 in one of the most intense and beautiful matches from that year against the powerful and loud-grunter, Maria Sharapova. She lost it.
In those years, she reached a US Open semifinal and made quarterfinals at Wimbledon and the US Open again in 2016.
That’s when the critiques started to question her mental toughness, labelling her as a player who couldn’t handle pressure on the biggest stages. She admitted she struggles with nerves and self-doubt, especially in high-stakes matches. “I felt the pressure,” she confessed. “I wanted it so much that sometimes I couldn’t control my emotions.”
That's the nature of this sport: it's relentless. One day, you're celebrating the biggest achievement of your career by winning a 250 tournament. The next day, a 500 or 1000 tournament begins, and yesterday's victory is already a distant memory. There’s no time to rest on your laurels – you have to shift your focus to the next challenge. While the world is waiting.
This morning, I was talking to someone dear with whom I frequently have the most nuanced and complex conversations about why my generation seems to be so sensitive when it comes to criticism and feedback. I agreed at first, but as I started writing this and going deeper into Simona’s story, I realized that the issue isn’t really about the younger generation or about receiving feedback or criticism for a specific task or for not performing at work.
Instead, this sensitivity, which we all experience to some extent, is deeply rooted in our historical and social Eastern European backgrounds – in our families, schools, and the environments that shaped us. Environments that, in general, equate every misstep with a question of personal worth.
It’s not that setbacks are exclusive to Eastern Europeans – every athlete faces obstacles. But players from the U.S., Spain, France, Italy, or Australia, countries that dominate tennis, grow up in systems and environments that generally allow more room for errors without questioning their intrinsic value and have access to more resources. These nations consistently produce a high number of top-ranked players because of their well-established infrastructures and cultural emphasis on sports in general. In contrast, countries like Romania have produced exceptional talents, but these are often rare exceptions rather than a consistent pattern.
Darren Cahill, who coached Simona on and off from 2015 to 2021 and had one of the biggest impacts on her attitude, said in an interview at the beginning of their collaboration that “she becomes her worst enemy quite often. She fought more than one opponent – there was the player across the net, the people in her coaching box, and herself.”
Tennis is such a psychologically taxing sport. It’s one of the loneliest in the world. You enter the court, and it’s only you and your opponent. If you miss a point, you might lose the match. What I believe propelled Simona to push her limits was that sense that, every time she lost, every time she came short or lost her temper, she came one step closer to the person she knew she could be – to the person she wanted to become.
This is what makes Simona’s journey even more fascinating to me: a five-foot-six tennis player from Constanța, rising from a context where the system is not designed to consistently support champions, has maintained her position among the best players in the world in the Top 10 for 373 consecutive weeks, 7 straight years – a streak ranked the eighth-longest in WTA history.
There will be more about Simona Halep’s becoming in the next edition.
Until then, enjoy the first sunny days of spring and hold onto hope as much as you can.
Theodora
“Simona first picked up a racket when she was four with her brother in the small city of Constanța.”
In the 90s when she started playing, Constanta was the second largest city in Romania , and a mid-sized city by European standards.