MIAMI GARDENS, FL — Danielle Collins wants to make one thing clear. She is serious about this whole thing to stop tennis.
Really.
The fiery 30-year-old Floridian – who has reached the semi-finals of the Miami Open, the closest thing she has to a home tournament in tennis – has listened to all the naysayers.
Sloane Stephens, the 2017 US Open champion who has known and played against Collins since childhood, played it down after the loss when Collins first made it clear she was done for the year following the heartbreaking three-set loss in January by Iga Swiatek in Australia. . Jared Jacobs, the coach who has been in Collins’ box for the last two Grand Slams, still doesn’t fully believe he will.
“We’ll see,” he says.
Other friends on the tour approach with a shrug and ask:Why?” – partly because they know, health permitting, how much better than they can be.
None of that matters. Not the fear that gave world No. 1 Swiatek in Melbourne. Not her semifinal run at a tournament just below the level of a Grand Slam, or the money she’s leaving on the table in potential future wins and sponsorships. It was all great, but it’s over, or at least it will be at the end of the season.
Collins says she will retire from tennis at the end of the year (Shi Tang/Getty Images)
“I’ve been doing this for a while,” he says, though in relative terms, he hasn’t. She has only played professionally two more seasons than Coco Gauff, who is 10 years her junior.
Whatever. It certainly feels like time has passed, and she has other goals, other things she wants to achieve, other ways she wants to spend her time besides traveling the world, living out of hotel rooms, obsessing over trajectory of a fuzzy yellow ball and whether her rheumatoid arthritis will even allow her to take the field the next day. She wants to start a family, sooner rather than later.
“I loved what I did and the opportunity and the doors that open, but it’s not easy and I’m familiar,” says Collins, an Australian Open finalist in 2022. “I’m a simple person. I like to water my plants and walk my dog and go for a coffee in the morning and make sure the bed is made. I got my special laundry detergent and I have my little cosmetics in the cupboards and gosh, if I had to be at home all the time, every day, I would never get sick of it. I like to read my book. It doesn’t take much to make me happy.”
Surfing and yoga help. More of these are on the way.
Now this is probably a good time to point out that it would be a terrible idea for any of Collins’ next opponents to mistake this for a lack of competitive fire right now or the rest of the season. She still tears the ball up with abandon, especially on the backhand, playing that gas-pedal-on-the-floor style that can crush opponents, as world No. 23 Caroline Garcia did in their quarter-final on Wednesday. Collins took her out in straight sets, 6-3, 6-2, just days after Garcia had beaten both Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff.
It was a set and a break down as Katie Volynets served for their match in Austin, Texas, last month. Her arthritis in her back was so bad that she had to make sure to throw the ball in front of her because she couldn’t curve back on her serve.
Does not matter. He stormed back to win the second-set tiebreak and the third set 6-0, deciding in what felt like moments that seemed to be already out there in the gray composure, he might as well ride the adrenaline out of the pain her and victory.
“There’s very little you can do when a strong player gets nervous,” Christo van Rensburg, Austin’s tournament director, said of Collins that day.
Collins, left, is in the quarterfinals of the Miami Open (Robert Prange/Getty Images)
On Monday, Collins spent 89 minutes dismantling Romania’s Sorana Cirstea in the round of 16, winning 6-3, 6-2 on the welcoming Butch Buchholz Family Court at Hard Rock Stadium. There was a rowdy crowd of Romanian fans sitting in the yard who cheered Cirstea and destroyed Collins all afternoon.
When Collins put away the final point of the hard-fought but ultimately lopsided victory, she put a finger to her lips to silence them as she walked to the net for the handshake. She grabbed her bag and walked out of the stadium alone for the rest of her evening. Her box was empty. Without parents. Without a coach. She flies alone. To keep it simple, even though it’s likely her last tournament on home soil, and her farewell season is certainly going a lot better at this point than other players (Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray) trying to get some glory in a finals campaign .
That’s kind of how the dynamic has always been in the Collins family. Tennis is something she does, not who she is, and her parents would be just as proud of her if she worked behind a cash register, she insists.
Her mother was a preschool teacher and her father owned a small landscaping business. Her father, who harvested laws to live on until he retired last year at 84, used to wake up and hit balls for her before school and have his friends tackle her at their local playgrounds in St. Petersburg, Florida.
But the family couldn’t afford the best coaches or travel across the country, much less internationally, during her teenage years. Tennis was all about education, which she did, graduating from the University of Virginia as a two-time NCAA champion.
When she told her parents she had a chance to become a professional, they suggested she get a master’s degree. She has won more than $7 million in prize money, although she never felt like she was playing for anyone but herself.
Their reaction to her planned retirement? Great, they want grandchildren.
“They’re probably saying, ‘It’s about friggin’ time,'” he says.
If she wasn’t a tennis player, this would probably be sooner, for reasons of lust and health. After years of doctors largely ignoring her complaints of heavy periods and severe menstrual cramps, she finally found someone who would listen and correctly diagnose endometriosis, a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus.
After undergoing surgery to remove the tissue, her doctor told her that pregnancy might also help suppress the symptoms – but that didn’t really work for her career and she continued to act. After October, this will no longer be a concern.
He still plans to travel and has already started. After she was eliminated from the Australian Open, she and her boyfriend went hiking in Tasmania among the giant gum trees. They are not as big as the redwoods, but they are not far off. A trip to South Africa is planned for December.
Will she miss tennis?
It can? She’s the kind of pro who might enjoy feeling her strings on the ball against a weekend warrior, but envies the baseball, basketball and football players who travel by private and charter jets and have home games and big away games. season. He wishes he had home games. She doesn’t, even though she has tennis courts at her house and more down the road.
“If the format of tennis was different, it would be a completely different story and I’d probably reconsider,” she said of her impending retirement. “But the way this sport works, it’s very difficult.”
(Top photo: Frey/TPN/Getty Images)
