Halep gave up and that’s why she won
A RELIEVED WORLD NO. 1 SAYS SHE IS HAPPY THE JINX ENDED
The rather tortured global odyssey of No. 1 ranked Simona Halep finally wound its way on Saturday to a patch of clay just behind a Roland Garros baseline, where the small Romanian with the big guts dropped her racket and stood amazed, hands on forehead. By the second when Sloane Stephens’s last servicereturn bid had fluttered rightward and struck the net, Halep had freed herself from goblins loitering from three prior Grand Slam finals that went both long and glum.
Beyond even that, Halep’s 3-6, 6-4, 6-1 win in the French Open women’s final against the blazing American, a match full of long rallies and long, long rallies, had forced Halep to stare at fresh goblins. As Stephens looked airtight through a first-set win and a 2-0 lead in the second, and as the day began to look like a towering reinforcement of Stephens’s 2017 US Open title, Halep came across a novel tactic.
She decided she had lost, that another chance had fizzled. “I did, yes,” she said. “I felt that and I said, ‘It’s not going to happen again, but it’s OK. I just have to play.’ And then when I started to win games, I said that last year, I said that last year happened to me, same thing, I was set and a break up and I lost the match. So I said there is a chance to come back and win it. So I believed in that, and my game was more relaxed.”
Old-fashioned pessimism had struck again, mixed with the maturity of accepting a non-existent defeat, even given the fear of the news-conference questions of which she would say, “Honestly, that was the toughest thing.” Her shots began to take on more height and depth while Stephens’s replies began to exhibit more fatigue and error.
Change of game
Within moments, Halep had won 15 of 18 points. By the end, she had won 12 of the last 15 games. Near the end of that, she had felt unable to breathe in some final moments alongside the last, stirring ghosts from her losses in the 2014 French Open (to Maria Sharapova, in three sets), in the 2017 French Open (to upstart Jelena Ostapenko, in three sets and uncommon anguish) and in the 2018 Australian Open (to Caroline Wozniacki, in three sets and the respect-winning detail of having to undergo treatment after the match).
And by the end of that, when she reminded herself to go point by point because the ruthless tennis life had taught her that, she had reduced Stephens’s sterling record in WTA Tour finals to 6-1. And then by the end of that, humans around the world, none unbeaten in life, felt happy for her.