A smiling Simona Halep entered the Armeec Arena in Sofia for the last final of 2013. It was early November and she was playing in the WTA Tournament of Champions opposite Samantha Stosur, whom she had defeated two weeks before, in Moscow. It had been the best year of her career, during which she had won the first five WTA titles and had climbed 36 positions in the women’s ranking, from No. 47 to No. 11.

A little tired after the nearly two-hour long semifinal played the day before against former champion Ana Ivanović and with a strained left thigh, covered in a wide bandage, Halep had trouble finding her rhythm and energy. She moved with more difficulty, had problems with her serve, made unforced errors and lost the first set. Surrendering the second one would have meant losing her first final in 2013.

But she kept her cool, and started over. She took off her bandage and, shoulders tense and eyes on the ball, like a cat on the prowl, she fought for each point, she ran from one corner of the pomegranate-colored court to the other, wearing out the 1.75-meter tall Australian with well-placed corner shots, tying the score and pushing the match into the decisive set.

It wasn’t the first time the Romanian made a spectacular comeback. “Simona Halep has shone in recent months through her ability to come back and not give up the fight,” said the match’s British commentator. He also referred to her as the revelation of 2013, the year she went from a struggling player to a rising star. Halep described it differently – climbing the ranks, winning the trophies was nice – but the most important thing was that 2013 was the year she rediscovered the pleasure and the joy of tennis.

This joy was apparent in the third set, when she gave herself to the game completely. She played each point as if it were her last, swooshing her racquet through the air with every fault. Towards the end of the game she managed to regain confidence, the highly praised leg movements, the incisive shots and the clenched fist she pumps to celebrate a successful long backhand – her favorite shot – or a sharp volley to the net.

The win came after a long forehand, sent far from where Stosur waited. Halep let her red racquet fall heavily on the court and covered her face with her hands, then sat on the bench, placed her elbows against her knees and rubbed her eyes. There was a moment of silence before she greeted her team and family sitting in the stand behind her, before the award ceremony, before autographs and interviews. A moment where she was all alone, as she always is on the court.

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Tennis is the loneliest sport, Andre Agassi writes in his autobiography. „There’s nowhere to hide when things go wrong. No dugout, no sideline, no neutral corner. It’s just you out there, naked.”

Tennis is a sport that requires total balance and many coaches, experts and close friends see that in Simona Halep. The fact that she won all six finals played in 2013 tells physical trainer Teo Cercel, who has known her since she was little and with whom he started working again last fall, that “she has a fantastic mental strength”. The emotional load of a final is nothing like any other match, he explains. In 2013, only Serena Williams won more titles than the Romanian – 11, but not even Williams triumphed on all court surfaces, as Halep did: on clay, her favorite, in Nuremberg (June) and Budapest (July), on grass in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands (June), on hard outdoor in New Haven (August) and on hard indoor in Moscow (October) and Sofia (November).

Her adaptability to any surface shows she is a complete player, says Nicuşor Ene, one of her first coaches. “A super-talent adapts to anything, not just play surfaces but also climates, audiences, time zones,” and he saw in Halep a gifted child, even at the tender age of six.

Besides physical potential, a player needs hard work, health, mental strength and the ability to cope with a pressure that comes with switching to seniors, where many players dwindle. And financial support, because tennis is one of the most expensive sports and a player’s family often bears the financial burden alone.

Halep had it all.

Her family, with whom she is very close, supported her all the way. They guided her towards tennis but didn’t push her. “We offered her a ramp, but it was her choice,” says Stere Halep, a 52 year-old man with a keen sense of humor. He admits, however, that his “ambition to make a tennis player out of her” helped tip the scales. In fact, Halep Senior wanted any of his kids to grow up to be an athlete, as he himself had failed to become a professional football player; he only played for Săgeata Stejarul, a fourth division team. So he took his eldest son, Nicuşor, to tennis practice, but the boy quit when he was 11 and focused on school work. Halep sometimes joined him and the coach, Ioan Stan, noticed her on the sidelines, running swiftly to retrieve balls. He liked the way she moved so he gave her a tennis racquet and called her in for lessons, twice a week. Little more than a year later, when he thought it was time to move on to the next level, he recommended she continued with Nicuşor Ene, a former student of his. Although tiny and skinny, she moved well on the court, she was fast, spry and a very fast learner, says Ene. By the time she was seven she could hit all the shots and at eight she started competing, playing her first finals and winning her first tournaments.

Her parents went everywhere with her and kept close watch, remembers coach Radu Popescu, with whom she worked one summer. “Take her on, she’ll get you places,” he then told his colleague, Daniel Dragu, who trained her from 11 to 14. Popescu was impressed with the maturity and intelligence in Halep’s style. “At 11, even though she was barely taller than the net, she was a worthy opponent with a clear view of the game.”

During the first part of her junior career, her father, who owns a dairy factory, provided everything she needed: quality gear, personal trainers, the means to travel to competitions. It wasn’t always easy and there came a time when he had to borrow money. Since 15, Halep was also sponsored by Corneliu Idu, a local businessman who started a tennis school in Constanta in 2002, Tenis Club Idu. Over the next two years, Idu paid for all her travels and training.

With the moral support of her family, the financial support provided of Idu and trained by Liviu Panait from the tennis club, Halep started competing in Grand Slam tournaments. The best performance of her junior career came in June 2008, when she was just shy of 17: she won the French Open and become Junior World No.1.

“This girl will win the French Open one day,” her father bragged to friends when she was just seven. His own parents, who didn’t support his own footballing career, called him crazy when he travelled with her to tournaments and came back with “trinkets”. “You have to be a little crazy in life,” he says now, snickering.

He did all this because he believed in her. In the spring of 2013, everyone in the family wrote down the WTA rank they thought she would reach by the end of the season. They put the notes in an envelope, which they opened in December, when she had reached No.11. Halep and her mother had written 35, her brother 27, and her father 18. He had initially wanted to write down 10, but even he thought that was a bit daring, from 64, where she was at the time.

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In early December, more than 200 children crowded an indoor court at Club Idu between Constanţa and Mamaia, to see her up close, hit a few balls with her, get her autograph.

For four hours, Halep and two other Romanian players, Horia Tecău and Sorana Cîrstea, didn’t get a moment’s rest. They went from playing over an improvised net with five and six-year-olds, to longer exchanges with older children on the main court, to giving interviews ad signing autographs. All this to the incessant buzz of parents in the stalls, of the event MC, of children excitedly asking for autographs, even on their foreheads.

“Simona was this close to cracking,” remembers Claudia Vasilache, who has known Halep since she was little. “Compared to Horia and Sorana, who were all smiles throughout, Simona didn’t cope well with the stress.” Vasilache remembers making her way to the court at some point to find her cornered by TV cameras. As their eyes met, a wide-eyed Halep asked her for water and a pretzel. Eyes locked in a blank stare, compulsively hitting her red racquet against her leg, overwhelmed by the hordes of people surrounding her, journalists, organizers, parents, children, she didn’t know how to react.

Her winning streak in 2013 turned the introverted 22-year-old into a public figure. All of a sudden, she was the talk of the country, people were offering opinions, advice, asking for interviews, demanding higher performances.

“Small tournaments don’t matter much if you don’t do well in Grand Slams,” said former world no.1 Ilie Năstase, whose presence in the VIP stall in Sofia weighed heavy on Halep’s shoulders. “The size of the tournament is set by the value of those you defeat”, replied Romanian journalist Cristian Tudor Popescu in an opinion piece, adding that success in today’s tennis world entails a much tougher struggle, excruciating physical training, special psychological counseling and sophisticated nutrition and recovery techniques, whereas back in Năstase’s day all you needed was talent.

A private and discreet person, Halep has had a hard time getting used to her new status and she still thinks fondly of the quiet life she had just six months before, when no one knew who she was and she could walk down the street unnoticed. Now everyone recognizes her and asks something of her. One day, around Christmas, she stopped on her way to practice to a sports store. Inside, a man approached her and asked if she was the Simona Halep. She froze and said “no”; she still doesn’t know why she did it. “Like hell you aren’t!” he replied, annoyed, and Halep just left, not knowing how to react.

Of all the changes, her relationship with journalists, who show up at her practice, invite her to TV shows and interview her on the sidelines, seems the most exhausting, because it drains her energy. “And tennis”, she says, “requires all of it.”

She started getting media attention in May 2013, at the Internazionali BNL d’Italia in Rome, where she had an unexpected performance: from the qualifiers, she made it all the way to the semifinals, where she was stopped by Serena Williams, winner of 17 single and 13 double Grand Slam titles, whom she believes she had no way of beating, no matter what she did. But on her way into the semifinals she took out three Top 20 players, including Poland’s Agnieszka Radwanska, one of the most awe-inspiring players on the circuit.

“That was the trigger,” she told me in December, after a practice session. “When I beat Radwanska, which I thought was impossible. That’s when I knew I could do even better.”

The first victories against top players do wonders for morale, believes journalist Carole Bouchard of L’Équipe, who was taken aback by Halep’s break last year. “You don’t see that every day, it’s hard to win six tournaments in one year, especially now, when tennis is at such a high level.” Bouchard has been watching Halep for a few years and always thought she had a special gift and good, clean shots. “But from a point on, it’s no longer about technique, it’s about courage, mentality and audacity.”

What Halep lacked before the spring of 2013 was confidence, thinks coach Andrei Mlendea, who was with her from April to early October. She played well before that too but was going through a rougher patch due to some back problems, Mlendea told Romanian newspaper ProSport. She got her mojo back a week before Rome, at the Mutua Madrid Open. Ion Ţiriac, the owner of the tournament, had given her a wild-card. She lost then, after more than three hours of play, but that was the game when she felt she was able to play again, finally liberated from the back pains that had been holding her back for months.

In Rome, she won her first major matches and with them came the confidence that sustained her as she won all six titles. Her game became more aggressive, and that aggressiveness on court was not just a consequence of her newfound confidence but a calculated step forward, which she believes was the most important decision she made last year. Over the past four years she had focused more on strengthening her defence. But she felt she was running and straining her body too much, risking injury, especially since it was around that time that she started having back pains.

At the end of 2012, she took some alone time to analyze her own game and decided she should go back to being aggressive, as she was during her junior days. This would allow her to finish points sooner and not wear herself out that quickly. Her parents and family friends had been telling her she should play more aggressively for a long time but Halep says she is the type of person who doesn’t do a thing until she feels she needs to.

Mlendea, whom she describes as just a training partner, joined her in April, and in August, coach Adrian Marcu joined her team and was with her up until Sofia, when she decided she needed some more alone time. “During the last part of the year I enjoyed being on my own and testing my strength.”

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Halep realized her psyche was the ultimate key back in high school, says Cătălin Spătaru, who taught her psychology. “She realized technique and training were useless if she encountered obstacles within herself.”

“We’ve had our work cut out for us with this one,” Halep’s father says about her childhood, adding she was always sensitive. When she was little, she used to cry before games and had trouble stepping out onto the court. By talking to Spătaru and others, she came to accept that she couldn’t change this about herself, but she could learn to control it. Her hands still get cold before every match, but as soon as she hits one or two balls, she relaxes.

Spătaru believes that last year she managed to play the way she wanted, not letting herself get overwhelmed by negativity, not being afraid to play. Halep’s tennis has been described by international experts and commentators as beautiful, smart, solid, spectacular and complex. They praised her technique, attitude and focus she puts into hitting each ball, following its trajectory with wide green eyes from under arched eyebrows; they praised her clean shots, her ability to turn defense into offense and her excellent moves, the dance of her white shoes on the red, blue or green court, drawing lines, triangles and zigzags – a slower dance, with flowing moves on clay, unpredictable moves on grass, fast and rhythmic moves on hard courts. “She is a world class player,” Robbie Koenig, former player turned commentator, said after a recent match; “She’s the one to watch, she’s on fire,” presenter Andrew Krasny, who interviews players on court after matches, told me at a tournament; “This girl, it’s like she has no lungs but two hearts, one on the right and one on the left,” said former Romanian player Ion Ţiriac on a TV show.

From the other side of the net, Halep’s tennis is perceived this way: “She makes you run a lot and you get tired,” says Monica Niculescu, another young Romanian player. “She hits to the left, she hits to the right and when you’re exhausted, she hits a winner on the other side.” Agnieszka Radwanska said after a second match lost to the Romanian: “She was making unbelievable shots from nowhere. I didn’t know what to do to end the point, because she was everywhere.”