MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — The moment Danielle Collins let Elena Rybakina and the 14,000 fans at Hard Rock Stadium and everyone else in tennis know what was happening Saturday happened when she was one point away to win the first set and face perhaps the most dangerous serve. in the game.
Rybakina did what she usually does, using the trebuchet in her right arm to launch one of her missiles into the middle of the field. And that’s when Collins, one of tennis’ great grip-and-rip talents, stepped back and ripped a swing that took both of her feet off the ground, launching a ball that did not return and taking a lead that it would keep on its path. to a victory that could very well be the cornerstone of his tennis life.
About an hour later, she stood on a stage, holding the large glass trophy for winning one of the sport’s greatest titles at the tournament she watched as a child, on the other side from Florida. Collins won 7-5, 6-4 against a Wimbledon champion who is one of the most feared players in the sport. And she got there just in time, because here is undoubtedly the strangest detail of these two magical weeks a few hours’ drive from the public courts where it began: at the end of the season, she is absent.
Collins, who is 30, only eight years into her professional career and playing the best tennis of her life, swears she will quit no matter what happens the rest of the year.
Never mind that the 2022 Australian Open finalist, two-time NCAA champion and player renowned in the locker room as one of the most dangerous in the game, can get into her rhythm well. Thanks for the memories, this one and everything else that happens over the next seven months.
She’s done, exhausted, tired of trying to compete at the highest level while managing endometriosis and rheumatoid arthritis and the chronic pain that both illnesses can bring. Plus the loneliness of the road and the game itself. And she wants to start a family, which doctors tell her would be good to start as soon as possible, given her medical history.
Few people dispute all this. At the very least, Collins is telling the truth like few others in sports. This has always been the case.
Yet his plans have confused many people around the sport. As she proved on Saturday and over the past two weeks, when healthy and locked in, she’s downright better than most women. They know it, and so does she.
Collins also brings a quality to a tennis court, a fire, an energy and an ability to take with her thousands of people gathered in a stadium anywhere in the world. Andy Murray does it. Rafael Nadal too. Serena Williams did it. Bianca Andreescu, the talented Canadian who won the US Open in 2019 at age 19 but has since struggled with injuries, can do it too.
Watching these players and a handful of others is like riding shotgun with them. And what an adventure it can be, especially on a day like Saturday, when Collins was just pumping her fist and screaming and getting going, and the 14,000 people in the temporary arena at Hard Rock Stadium were there with her, especially in that moment of fear, when a final iconic crosscourt backhand crossed the court.
Rybakina watched him pass. Collins screamed, bent to her knees and crouched for quite a while, letting all the noise fall on her.
“I felt like I was playing in front of thousands of my best friends,” Collins said.
From the outside, Collins’ run to the final in Miami looks ridiculous.
She is ranked 53rd in the world, the lowest-ranked player to win the Miami Open, which has been held since 1985. Last month, she was playing qualifiers just to enter tournaments like this, which is the level just below the Grand Slam. She had never reached a final at this level of tournament before. She injured her back in Austin, Texas, last month and had to withdraw midway through her quarterfinal.
She also committed to taking some time off from the wheel of professional tennis during this final world tour. She took a 10-day trip to Tasmania after losing in the second round of the Australian Open, thinking she might not return to that part of the world for a while.
Since then, she has traveled without a coach. She enlisted the help of a college coach from her hometown of St. Petersburg who has worked with her on and off since 2015 to get her through this tournament, a guy named Ben Maxwell, the men’s and women’s coach at Eckerd College. He was with her here last weekend, then spent most of the week coaching at Eckerd, then returned Thursday for the semifinals.
Jimmy Arias, the American star of the 1980s who heads tennis development at the IMG Academy and has been one of her tennis gurus since childhood, also showed up in her dressing room on Saturday to help her.
So, what exactly happened here to make all this unfold like never before?
Did he see anything different this week?
“She was just very resilient and really had fun,” Maxwell said Saturday night. “Off the field we are having a good time. I played golf the last two nights and just kept quiet off the tennis court. I think it’s super important. Everyone is so stuck in tennis, tennis, tennis and training and training. And I think sometimes it’s good to step back and do non-tennis related activities and let the mind rest and she knows what to do. She is a talented, talented player and one of the best in the world. I am a strong advocate of this balance off the tennis court. I think it helps the mentality.
About golf. She plays on her days off. Nothing too serious. A little time on the stand then a few holes. She’s not very good at all that, she says. (Maxwell didn’t dispute that assessment.) But that’s why she loves acting. It’s okay to be bad at something and try to improve. It keeps his brain sharp and makes him think about things other than tennis. And then she comes back to tennis and feels completely awesome.
She surfs a lot for the same reason. But the waves aren’t very good around Miami, nor near the big tennis tournaments, so the golf is. Plus, it allows her to live her best Florida life — a little golf, a little tennis, maybe a dip in a pool at the resort where she’s staying.
“Living the dream,” she said the other day.
And then there’s Quincy, her poodle mix who accompanied her to the tournament and kept her on an even keel like a service dog. “MQ” she calls him.
She stuck “Mr.”. Q.” at the doggie daycare during her games and has some videos of him watching her play. Quincy is apparently very confused by the whole thing, she said. He sees his mother. He sees a bullet. He doesn’t seem to understand why he’s not there and involved.
But he was never far from his thoughts. Maybe that’s why she was so effective in Miami. She played seven matches and won 14 of 15 sets, then often excused herself from post-match discussions by telling people she had to get to daycare before it was too late.
MQ, however, was not in her right mind as she desperately tried to win the biggest title of her career, with Rybakina stubbornly trying to quell the party that so many had been sparking all day.
Everywhere she walked Saturday, on the court and in every corner of the tennis court, Collins heard the voices.
Let’s go to Washington.
You can do it.
We love you.
She had never experienced anything like this before, except perhaps during the final in Australia two years ago, when everyone gave the same treatment to her local hero, Ash Barty. But this time, it was all for her.
“It was just surreal,” she said. “I will never forget this day because of this.”
From the start of the day, she told herself to keep the emotions in the locker room, to wait until the end of the match to let them out. As one match point, then another, ticked away, she returned to the between-point routines she had been working on. Return to breathing, as in his yoga practice. Hop, skip, hop from foot to foot to keep the legs alive and let the nervous energy dissipate so it wouldn’t get in the way of the things she knew she would need.
Then came one final heartbreaking setback.
“There were so many thoughts going through my head,” she said. “At the end, I was like, ‘Thank God, thank you, I overcame this obstacle.’”
Of course, there was another question. Are you still going to stop?
Yeah.
No reconsideration?
No.
The questions come from the right place, she said. They make her feel wanted. There are just other things she wants. Good product. Great stuff. And she’s not going to let anything stop her from trying to get that.
Once again, Collins was telling the truth.
(Frey/TPN/Getty Images)