'Tennis did only good things for me': Simona Halep philosophical over controversial end to career

Nine months ago, Simona Halep stepped on court at her home tournament in Cluj-Napoca, not knowing it would be the last match of her professional tennis career.

Some players publicly plan their retirement well in advance. They go on a farewell tour, saying goodbye to fans at each stop, making sure they played at their favourite tournaments one last time.

Others set an end date, but keep it to themselves. They know exactly where they’ll be competing for the last time and share the news after the fact.

For some, the decision to pull the plug is a spontaneous one. They are suddenly hit with overwhelming certainty that they should hang up their racquets and walk away.

That is what happened to Halep during her 59-minute defeat to Lucia Bronzetti at the Transylvania Open in Cluj last February.

“I thought about it for a while, but it was not decided when I entered the court that in that match I would retire. But I felt like my place is not there any more,” Halep told The National in an interview at the WTA Finals in Riyadh last week.

“I felt physically, I was injured with my knee and I was in pain. So after I lost the first set, I made up my mind and I said, ‘I'm going to stop after this’.

“And then I went to my parents and I told them that I want to stop. And they said, ‘OK, announce it’. So the story was like this. Nobody knew.”

A former world No 1 and two-time Grand Slam champion, Halep was playing her first match of the year, and just her sixth since returning to competition in March 2024 after her four-year doping ban due to a contaminated supplement was reduced to nine months.

The Romanian spent a year and a half on the sidelines waiting for the appeal process to run its course. When she was cleared to return to competition, her attempted comeback yielded just one victory – at the WTA 125 level – from six matches contested.

Shoulder and knee injuries hampered her return and she realised she can no longer compete to a standard she had been accustomed to.

Did she ever second-guess herself after taking the decision to retire? “No, never,” she assures. “So probably that means that, inside myself, it was the right decision. And now I feel it. I think it was the best thing.”

Halep first became world No 1 in October 2017 and she held on to that spot for a total of 64 weeks – a reign that was briefly interrupted for one month by Caroline Wozniacki.

Her impressive brand of counter-punching tennis, coupled with a never-say-die attitude and burning passion for the sport, helped her reach five Grand Slam finals, winning of two of them at Roland Garros in 2018 and Wimbledon in 2019.

Halep’s failed doping test came as a shock to her, and the tennis world, and her lengthy battle to clear her name cast a shadow over what had been otherwise a Hall-of-Fame career – one that came to an unceremonious end with an opening-round defeat at a small WTA tournament in Romania.

She told the Tennis Channel last year that when she first learnt of the failed test result, it was “like a truck hit you”. The 34-year-old has since navigated the entire emotional spectrum, from disbelief to pain to anger, but she insists, at no point did she stop loving the sport or develop any bitter feelings towards it.

“Tennis did nothing to me, nothing wrong. It did only good things,” she says. “What happened, it was just, for me, without doing any mistakes. So everything was proved. Tennis has nothing to do with that and I still keep the passion for it.”

Halep has not played much tennis since she retired, but has had the occasional hit with friends.

Her appearance at the WTA Finals last week was her first at a tennis tournament in an official capacity since she retired.

One of multiple WTA legends brought in to promote the tournament, Halep took part in various activities, including conducting the coin toss for one of the matches.

“I miss [tennis] a little bit and I had goosebumps when I entered the centre court, remembering everything that I was playing,” she admits. “But it's good also without the stress of playing matches.”

As a competitor, Halep wore her heart on her sleeve and had her fair share of emotional moments on court.

She says if there’s one thing she wished her younger self would have known, it would be figuring out a way to handle nerves and emotions.

“Less stomach pain before the matches because they killed me,” she said. “And being so emotional affected me on court as well, but it's part of me and I had to accept it.”

The word ‘accept’ was a familiar one throughout the conversation with Halep, who seemed joyful and at peace with where she ended up.

“I have no regrets and every mistake I did, I assume it and I accept it. And all the good things that I did, I'm proud of,” she declared.

“I can say I'm proud of many things, but the main thing is the way I managed all the failures and the successes. Because when you grow up from a little country, the big success, you don't really know all the time how to manage it. And I feel like I managed it very well and I didn't change much. So I think this, I'm the proudest of.”

She hopes to be remembered for “the love for tennis and the dedication”.

“Because now I realise that I dedicated my whole life to this. I have some emotional gaps on the normal life, but I don't regret. So these things were very important for me to just give myself to this sport,” she added.

Halep is still adjusting to retirement life and is “learning to be still”. She is not burdening herself by making any grand plans and is unsure what the future holds for her.

“I relax because I felt very tired when I took the decision. And I feel like my body has to just chill and do nothing. So I'm doing that,” she said.

She isn’t tempted to rejoin the tour as a coach, because she felt she was too self-critical as a player and worries she would project those same feelings to the person she would be coaching. So, for now, it’s not a path she is considering.

Several of Halep’s contemporaries, such as Roger Federer, Juan Martin del Potro and Svetlana Kuznetsova, are on the upcoming ballot for the International Tennis Hall of Fame and she hopes to be given that honour one day.

She smiles at the mention of Kuznetsova and reveals she voted for the Russian two-time major winner.

“It probably would be the best moment [if I am inducted to the Hall of Fame], I was talking to [my former coach] Darren [Cahill] about it and he said, ‘You will be there one day’. I said, ‘Well, I hope so’, because it's the cherry on top of the cake to be there. But we'll see,” she said.

As someone who has spent a significant time competing and training in the Middle East, Halep has witnessed the growth of tennis in the region, and its rise in popularity.

She feels Saudi Arabia will be fuelling that surge moving forward.

“Well, it's improving a lot more. And here, what they're doing, it's really, really nice and impressive,” she said in Riyadh.

“It's going to help the region to improve in tennis. And I'm sure that more kids will come and more kids will have the desire because they need to feel it to be a professional tennis player.

“It's not easy, but they have all the facilities and I feel like it's going to improve in 10 years. I was talking this morning that in 10 years, I feel like here is going to be huge.”