Garbiñe Muguruza will not go down as the greatest player of her era, but she did rather well against her.
“Three for her, three for me,” Muguruza said quite rightly of her head-to-head record against Serena Williams.
That alone is something to tell the children one day with pride around the dinner table in Spain or Venezuela.
Muguruza, who made her retirement official this weekend at age 30 after a long layoff, was not a steady flame. She flickered, which sometimes frustrated and mystified her fans. She could and often did stumble early: losing 20 times in the first or second round of a major. In Madrid, the most important tournament in Spain, she never made it past the third round in eight appearances.
But when her head was right and her very big game was clicking, she could be an irresistible force, as Williams and her elder sister discovered late in their formidable careers.
Muguruza beat Serena to win the French Open in 2016, then defeated Venus to win Wimbledon the following year, the same season that Muguruza rose briefly to No. 1 in the rankings.
Both victories came in straight sets, and both are well worth rewatching as a reminder of just how good Muguruza could be under great pressure.
With her innate poise and punch, she was a grand-occasion player, able to match the sisters blow for blow from the baseline without retreat. She had ample opportunity to crack in both those major finals and yet had the talent and stage presence to hold firm. With her chin held high, she shrugged off four unconverted match points against Serena before holding at love for the Roland Garros title.
At Wimbledon, she fought off two set points against Venus before taking total command and sweeping the final nine games to win 7-5, 6-0. The narrative downside of her brilliance was that it deprived the 37-year-old Venus of a perfect ending to her sentimental journey.
“But we want new names and new faces, so come on!” said Muguruza, then 23, as she grinned and tapped her hand on the dais for emphasis at her post-final news conference.
Muguruza was indeed a fresh face, dimple included. Born in Caracas to a Venezuelan mother and a Spanish father with Venezuelan roots, she moved to the Spanish Basque country in her early childhood. She could have happily represented both nations but definitively chose to play for Spain in 2014 only because the upcoming Rio Olympics required her to make a call. Her rise to the top of the rankings gave Spain two No. 1s with Rafael Nadal already occupying the top spot in 2017.
But Muguruza, unlike her compatriot, would not have staying power.
“I have been me,” she told Alejandro Ciriza of El Pais in an exit interview this weekend. “Nadal’s example? You can’t compare. Don’t even mention it to me, because it’s not normal. The normal thing is to have ups and downs, win, lose.”
Nadal, to be clear, has certainly ridden a few rollercoasters of his own. But it is true that this century’s tennis superstars have endured and excelled far beyond expectations, maybe even beyond reason. Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Serena all won twenty or more Grand Slam singles titles and played or are playing into their late thirties or very early forties.
That group effort, based in part on emulation, certainly changes the equation and perception for the rest of the pack. But Muguruza is right to stand tall; right to emphasize that in her youth she would have happily signed on for two major singles titles, a stint at No. 1 and a title at the season-ending WTA Finals.
That body of work, which included seven other tour singles titles and 42 top 10 wins, made her the most successful Spanish women’s player since Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and should put her into the International Tennis Hall of Fame alongside Sanchez and Conchita Martinez, the other great Spanish women’s player of that era, who was also Muguruza’s coach.
Muguruza, it should be noted, played little like her Spanish predecessors, who were physically unimposing masters of spin and carefully-managed risk. Muguruza, who is 6-feet tall, relied on relatively flat power, a big though inconsistent serve and a go-for-broke mentality worthy of a Monte Carlo roulette wheel that meant the winners and unforced errors piled up.
She could hit you off the court or hit herself off the court.
In her early years, the Spanish media sometimes referred to her as a Russian player disguised as a Spanish player: an allusion to the grip-it-and-rip-it approach of Maria Sharapova.
Muguruza watched lots of Sharapova, but Serena was the biggest inspiration with her next-level power and athleticism and ability to dictate terms.
In their first meeting, in the second round of the Australian Open, Serena routed the teenage Muguruza 6-2 6-0. But the following year, when they played again in the second round of the French Open, Muguruza was ready, flipping the script with a stunning 6-2, 6-2 victory of her own at age 20.
“If I change my style to take on Serena I won’t have any chance,” Muguruza said. “I need to have faith in my game and go on court and say, ‘I can beat you, too.’”
They split their two major finals with Serena winning the first at Wimbledon in 2015 in the most dominant late phase of her career. But Serena was not quite the same after missing her best chance at the true Grand Slam at the 2015 US Open with a shock semifinal defeat against the unseeded Italian Roberta Vinci.
Serena was a stupendous 21-4 in major singles finals at that stage. But she went 2-6 after that, and she struggled with her nerves and serve in the 2016 Roland Garros defeat to Muguruza.
It was a breakthrough for the Spaniard and her French coach Sam Sumyk, whose previous pupil Victoria Azarenka had never won the big one against Serena.
“Garbiñe didn’t shrink from the pressure; she embraced it,” said Martina Navratilova. “Serena lost to somebody who stood up to her and did not play not to lose. Garbiñe played to win.”
That meant sticking to her aggressive style even after double faults and glaring errors.
“Most of all, she played well when she had to,” Navratilova said. “She was able to neutralize the power of Serena, which most cannot.”
She did the same at Wimbledon to Venus a year later, this time mentored by Martinez with Sumyk on paternity leave but in touch from afar. Martinez, the only other Spanish woman to win the Wimbledon singles title, turned out to be a touchstone for the sensitive Muguruza and would be her final coach on tour.
They had a couple of last hurrahs. The first ended in disappointment as Muguruza, back at full power and conviction, reached the 2020 Australian Open final and won the opening set against American newcomer Sofia Kenin. This felt like familiar territory: Muguruza smacking swing volleys and rising to the big occasion. But Kenin’s variety and pinpoint accuracy shifted the momentum. The moment of truth came with Kenin down 0-40 on her serve at 2-2 in the third set. Kenin hit five straight winners to hold, and Muguruza, reeling and increasingly befuddled, did not win another game.
That one hurt, and if she comes across video clips from that defeat, Muguruza cannot bear to watch. “I still think about it,” she told Ciriza. “Of course I could have achieved more, and I am left with the desire to have played well at least once in Madrid, to have won in Australia, where I came so close, and many other things. But in the end, everything happens for a reason, and I am happy.”
Muguruza’s last official match was in January 2023: a first-round loss to Czech teenager Linda Noskova that was Muguruza’s sixth consecutive defeat.
That was nearly 15 months ago, and though she called her break a sabbatical at first, it turned into retirement.
That term is, of course, far from definitive in tennis. Comebacks are all the rage (see Caroline Wozniacki, Angelique Kerber, Naomi Osaka, Simona Halep, et al), but Muguruza’s forced break during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 gave her a taste of a different life. Though she finished 2021 on a high note by winning the WTA Finals in Guadalajara, she could not sustain the melody and ultimately missed and preferred that different life.
“These months away from tennis have been key,” she said. “When I returned home, I welcomed the break with open arms and felt better with each passing day. I didn’t miss the discipline or the daily difficulty of tennis. The tournaments went by, and I realized that things had changed. We take everything to the max, and that’s why now I am enjoying that it’s not like that: not extreme. I want to look at the next chapter and not the tennis one, which is already in the past.”
She is not alone in that view. Ash Barty, the Australian icon with the complete game, retired on top of the pyramid at age 25 in 2022. Danielle Collins, who is also 30, is sticking for now to her plan to retire at the end of the season despite playing some of the best tennis of her career: winning back-to-back titles in Miami and Charleston.
Thirty, of course, was once a ripe old tennis age, the turning point when Steffi Graf and other luminaries called it a career.
But it seems young through today’s lens, particularly with the steady increase in the number of women returning to the tour after motherhood. Muguruza seems to have truly turned the page, however, and it is revealing to look back at the season-ending rankings in 2021: little more than two years ago.
Three of the top eight are now former players: Barty, Muguruza and Anett Kontaveit, the Estonian who played Muguruza in the Guadalajara final and retired last year at age 27 because of a degenerative back condition. Another top 8 player in 2021, Paula Badosa, is dealing with a chronic back problem that has contributed to her dropping outside the top 100.
Pro tennis can grind you down, and to watch Muguruza in her final year on tour was to see burnout in motion.
“I ended up very tired, with a lot of mental and physical wear as well, because I also have many physical problems,” Muguruza told Ciriza. “The discipline you have to have to maintain things is very hard, almost unsustainable.”
There is surely more to Muguruza’s story and hot-and-cold results than we know. Toni Nadal, still the most prominent Spanish tennis coach, suggested as much in his laudatory farewell column on Muguruza in El Pais on Saturday.
“When a tennis player demonstrates the brilliant level that she displayed in those two years, 2016 and 2017,” he wrote, “one must think that this lack of consistency was due more to possible internal contradictions than to purely tennis issues.”
Tennis remains perhaps the ultimate head game, and though your own head could build all kinds of logical scenarios about long-term domination when you saw Muguruza at her steely-eyed, groundstroke-smoking best, her heart was not quite in it.
She flickered, and there is zero shame in that. But when the flame was on high, she lit up Paris and London. And now it is time to wish her and her fiancé Arthur Borges fair winds and felicidad.
“...one must think that this lack of consistency was due more to possible internal contradictions than to purely tennis issues.” - Toni Nadal
Let us know paraphrase the great Yogi Berra:
"(Tennis) is 90 per cent mental. The other half is physical."
Thank you Christopher for this great review on Muguruza!
Quoting your piece: "We take everything to the max...". And if you get to the top, like Muguruza did, you reached the greatest sporting accomplishment, regardless if it is brief or sustained.
Tennis is physical and mental. Dealing with results and the lifestyle is an emotional challenge. How you manage it depends very much on personality.
As you wrote, Muguruza tasted a different life during the pandemic break. Most pro players end up sacrificing their teen years for tennis development. How many experienced their first "normal" young adulthood time during the pandemic?