Shortly before he had planned to leave in February, Willis met Jennifer Bate, a dentist and a mother of two. Bate said she was out on the town with a cousin as each tried to shake off “wrong relationships” that had just ended.

“We just met, and honestly, it was a blur after that,” Bate said. “We went on a little walk to get some fresh air before we’d get a cab. He said, ‘I’m meant to be going to America soon,’ and I was like: ‘What? You can’t go to America.’ The night we met, I said, ‘You’ve just met me; you can’t just move to America.’ I said it jokingly, and then he told me he was a tennis player. I thought, ‘Yeah, right, whatever.’ ”

After experiencing what she called “love at first sight,” Bate rushed home to tell her mother she had met “the one,” and Willis postponed his plans to leave England. With Bate’s encouragement, Willis rededicated himself to tennis, despite having endured injuries and financial hardships in recent years. In 2014, struggling with touring expenses, Willis had started a crowdfunding campaign seeking support in getting to his “childhood dream” tournament.

In 2016, he had played only one event, a January tournament in Tunisia at the lowest rung of sanctioned professional tennis, earning just $356. But his falling ATP ranking was just high enough to get him the last direct entry into a Wimbledon qualifying wild-card playoffs for British players. Once there, he won three matches to reach the tournament’s main qualifying event.

Though British wild cards often prove to be overmatched cannon fodder in the qualifying tournament, Willis played with confidence. In his first match, against the 99th-ranked Yuichi Sugita, Willis came back from losing the first set, 6-1, to notch his first career victory over a top-100 opponent. With his unorthodox left-handed barrage of chunked slices and serve-and-volley, Willis continued his winning ways in the next two matches, beating the Russians Andrey Rublev and Daniil Medvedev and becoming the first British player to reach the Wimbledon singles main draw through qualifying since 2008. By doing so, he guaranteed himself prize money of at least 30,000 British pounds.