Perfection in sport, as in life, is pretty much impossible. But there are days when athletes get as close to it as can reasonably be expected.

For Simona Halep, that day came six years ago in the 2019 Wimbledon final, when she beat Serena Williams 6-2, 6-2 in just 56 minutes. It was the most comprehensive defeat Williams ever suffered in a Grand Slam final.

But there was another statistic that stood out and may never be beaten. Halep made just three unforced errors, the least ever by a player in a major final. She was a few shots away from a flawless performance against the greatest women’s player of all time and one of the best ever on a grass court. Williams was the heavy favorite going into the match, in search of an eighth Wimbledon title and a 24th Grand Slam title overall, to equal Margaret Court’s tally.

Halep had other ideas, hitting 14 winners alongside those three misses.

By the time she sent a mistimed crosscourt forehand into the net, Halep was already up 5-1, having maneuvered Williams all over Centre Court. Attempting another shaped angle into the American’s forehand corner, Halep didn’t quite clear the tape.

The second came from the aggressive change of direction off a relatively neutral ball that was one of her trademarks, this time hit slightly too flat. The preceding shot, returning a ball from Williams that came close to clipping the baseline just as deep, typified her excellence in defense.

The third and final one of the match came straight off a powerful but slightly short second-serve return, right on the edge of being forced. The “unforced error” is one of the harder statistics to parse in tennis — some believe that it doesn’t really exist at all — but Halep’s consistency in the final was such that even a shot like this stands out as errant. All three shots are signals of the confidence in her game that took her to the top of the sport, which was flowing unrestricted for 56 minutes that Saturday.

Williams was 37 when they played that final, which would be her penultimate at a Grand Slam. Tuesday night in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Halep announced her retirement from tennis at 33, ending a career that also saw her rise to world No. 1 and win the French Open. This was not a long drawn-out goodbye on a grand stage like those of Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray, but rather a low-key shuffle off the tennis coil. Halep had spoken about the impact of a debilitating knee injury on the eve of the Transylvania Open, and she said her goodbyes in her home country after a 6-1, 6-1 thrashing from the world No. 72, Lucia Bronzetti.

The Transylvania Open is a WTA 250 event, the lowest rung of the tour and not the kind of venue one would expect for the retirement of a multiple Grand Slam champion. Halep has had a difficult few years after a doping ban saw her miss almost 18 months after a provisional suspension and original ban of four years was reduced to nine months on appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

“I don’t know if it’s with sadness or joy, I think both,” Halep, who won 24 WTA titles in total, said on court on Tuesday night. “I’ve always been realistic with myself, my body. Even though my performance wasn’t very good, it was still my soul. I’m very glad that you came and I wonder if I will come back again, but for now it’s the last time I’ve played. I don’t want to cry. It’s a beautiful thing that I became world No. 1. I won Grand Slams. It’s all I wanted. Life goes on. There is life after tennis. I hope we will see each other again.”

Those three unforced errors are a revealing prism through which to reflect on a career that for a few years saw the Romanian become one of the sport’s dominant players and most compelling stories.

That memorable afternoon in south west London was a high watermark even by Halep’s standards, but her career had been built around a spectacular solidity. Standing at only 5ft 6in (1.68m), Halep was never going to blast opponents off the court. Her superpowers were her speed and her ability to absorb and redirect power. Andrea Petkovic, the big-hitting German and former world No.9, told in a recent interview that her 1-7 record against Halep was down to the latter’s ability to keep changing the direction of a rally, which meant Petkovic was constantly off-balance.

Against Williams, Halep delivered an exhibition of counter-punching tennis, chasing everything down and fizzing passing shots beyond her helpless opponent. At one point in the first set, Williams could only applaud after Halep sent a crosscourt backhand pass flying past her. “There’s so many impressive things about her,” Williams said afterwards. “Her tenacity, her ability to improve every time. Her ability to find power. You can’t underestimate her.”

Halep was so locked in that she won the last five games of the match and only faced one break point in its entirety. Williams, who had returned to the sport the previous year after childbirth, had the crowd on her side, including her good friend Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, who was watching on from the Royal Box.

Halep did not have that kind of superstardom. Nor, for a long time, did she have anything like Williams’ killer instinct. Halep became world No. 1 in October 2017, having just turned 26, but she lost her first three major finals, all three of them in three sets.

Maria Sharapova overpowered a 22-year-old Halep at the 2014 French Open, but three years later, Halep was the huge favorite at the same tournament against an unseeded 20-year-old, Jelena Ostapenko. The Romanian lost against an opponent whose all-or-nothing approach was in sharp contrast to her own, and the following January, she again fell short to a player going for a first major. This time, Caroline Wozniacki took the 2018 Australian Open title in an epic that lasted almost three hours.

When Halep went 3-6, 2-4 down to Sloane Stephens in the final of that year’s French Open, yet more devastation loomed. But Halep turned it around to finally win the Roland Garros title that had always seemed the most hospitable Grand Slam for her physically demanding brand of tennis. Much more so than Wimbledon, where the quick courts seemed to favour big servers and heavy hitters, making her win against Williams the following year all the more remarkable.

Halep was a hugely popular first-time Grand Slam champion, well-liked in the dressing room and within the sport in general for her groundedness and apparent lack of ego. Her desperation to win a major was well known and after Halep won in Paris, Martina Navratilova joked: “It wasn’t a monkey off her back; this was an 800lb gorilla.”

Halep eventually overcame her difficulties on the biggest stages by being more “chill” — a word she used a lot during that Wimbledon title run. Halep had been known to get down on herself when losing matches and got so ratty with coach Darren Cahill, now working with men’s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner, during some of their on-court exchanges that the Australian briefly ended the pair’s partnership in 2017 until she accepted that things needed to change.

Halep never again hit the heights she did in that masterclass against Williams, reaching the Australian Open semis the following year and then the last four at Wimbledon in 2022, but never again reaching a major final.

Just as it looked like she was having a resurgence under new coach Patrick Mouratoglou (who had been in Williams’ box for the 2019 Wimbledon final), Halep was provisionally suspended after testing positive for the banned substance roxadustat at the U.S. Open a couple of months earlier.

Halep later argued that she had ingested the roxadustat with a contaminated batch of a supplement that Mouratoglou had recommended she begin using. But she was provisionally suspended in October 2022 and then given a four-year ban in September 2023 after anti-doping officials ruled that a blood test showed signs of intentional doping. She also neglected to mention using the supplement during initial questioning.

Halep’s appeals, ultimately to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), took nearly a year and a half to work their way through the system. CAS cut the suspension to nine months in March 2024, ruling that Halep “bore no significant fault or negligence.”

Halep received a wild card entry into the Miami Open last March, just after CAS’s verdict, but none of the four majors offered a similar route back to tennis’ biggest stage, aside from one for qualifiers from the Australian Open in January that she had to miss because of injury. By Tuesday night’s retirement, she’d played a total of six matches since her comeback, winning just once.

As she demonstrated against Williams, Halep’s game relied on athleticism and rhythm. And so as knee and shoulder injuries took hold in the latter part of her career, alongside the lack of matches, she was unable to be competitive, let alone dominant like she had been before.

But to understand how someone so small and slight could rise to the top of such a physical sport, watch those 56 minutes and three unforced errors against Williams. A masterclass in the high-energy, counterpunching game that for a few years made Halep an unlikely but irresistible force at the top of women’s tennis.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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