The rather tortured global odyssey of No. 1-ranked Simona Halep finally found its way on Saturday to a patch of Roland Garros clay just behind a baseline, where the slightly built Romanian with the considerable will dropped her racket and stood, amazed, hands on head. When Sloane Stephens’s last service-return bid had struck the net, Halep finally had freed herself of whatever goblins had come and lurked from three prior Grand Slam finals that went both long and melancholy.
Beyond even that, her 3-6, 6-4, 6-1 win in the French Open women’s final against the surging American Stephens, a match with a caliber that fluctuated between good and lofty and stunning, had presented Halep with a fresh set of goblins. As Stephens looked airtight through a first-set win and a 2-0 lead in the second, and through a whole bale of long rallies causing appreciative applause, it looked like a reinforcement of Stephens’s 2017 U.S. Open win, as well as the notion of Stephens as a top-five-caliber player.
She’ll reach the top five anyway next week, but what happened just after the 2-0 lead wound up ratifying the idea of Halep as a fighter, an idea cemented when she lost the 2018 Australian Open final to Caroline Wozniacki in three sets and wound up treated for dehydration.
Halep won 15 of the next 18 points on Saturday, and then 12 of the next 15 games with both strength and steadiness, and she did it against a big-point player who stood 6-0 in WTA Tour finals previously.
It all occurred in a Court Philippe Chatrier that felt sometimes like a Romanian village, with bouncing Romanian flags and chants of, “Simona! Simona!” All the Romanians knew Halep had played two of the past four French Open finals, losing in three sets to Maria Sharapova in 2014 and in three sets to upstart Jelena Ostapenko in 2017.
Eventually, Halep had dropped that racket, climbed the stands to hug and cry with her coach, Darren Cahill, and had said to the crowd that she told herself at 3-6, 0-2, “Okay, everything is gone. I just have to start to relax and enjoy the match.”
Stephens had told of “no one else in the world I’d rather lose to.”
And Halep, 26, had said, “I was dreaming for this moment since I started to play tennis.”
