You might've heard of a legendary singer, born just across the river from New York City in Hoboken, N.J., whose signature song is about doing things his way. Well, the words made famous by Frank Sinatra have likewise rung true for Danielle Collins throughout her professional tennis career—and they still do in 2024, as she gets ready to hang up her racquets.
She always will be able to say, "I did it my way.”
Collins shook the tennis world when, after a hard-fought three-set loss to world No. 1 Iga Swiatek in the second round of January’s Australian Open (a match that lasted more than three hours and one in which Collins led 4-1 in the final set before losing the last five games), she announced that this year would be her last as a professional tennis player.
“I feel like I’ve had a pretty good career,” Collins said at the time. “There have certainly been ups and downs to it, and the travel and some of the things away from the court with scheduling and all of that, this is a really tough sport. I have other things that I’d kind of like to accomplish in my life outside of tennis, and I would like to be able to have the time to be able to do that.”
The news raised eyebrows for many reasons—and even prompted her fellow American and Billie Jean King Cup teammate, Sloane Stephens, to wonder, when she was asked by reporters later, if Collins’ frustration about failing to close out a big win was the impetus for an off-the-cuff declaration. After all, just two years earlier, Collins had reached her first Grand Slam singles final in Melbourne (losing to Ashleigh Barty), becoming a Top 10 player and the top-ranked American woman. In fact, by that July, Collins was ranked a career-best No. 7.
“It’s always sad to see players go, obviously, especially someone my age who is still playing well and playing great tennis,” Stephens, the 2017 US Open champion, said.
Yes, in an era where players are playing well into their 30s—and beyond, in some cases—Collins choosing to walk away having just hit the big 3-0 is particularly surprising. That said, no one familiar with Collins’ career arc would’ve expected the end of it to be conventional, after her odds-defying road to the top of women’s tennis over the last decade.
Born to a mother who taught preschool for 30 years and a father who owned a landscaping business, Collins started playing the game in public parks near her hometown of St. Petersburg, Fla.—figuratively, a world away from the private lessons and personal coaching that many of her peers were able to afford from their earliest days, though literally just down the Florida Turnpike from such opportunities. Collins played only 15 matches on the junior circuit in her career, all in the U.S., and never went higher than No. 430 in the world 18-and-under rankings.
In her formative years, as she once recalled in a WTA video feature, Collins earned money babysitting and teaching ad-hoc tennis lessons to kids and adults. She’d squirrel away the funds and put them toward the cost of tickets on Amtrak and Greyhound buses, on which she shuttled herself to low-level tennis tournaments. A scholarship to play college tennis, first at the University of Florida and then at the University of Virginia, was game-changing for Collins in more ways than one.
“Growing up with two parents who were so hard-working and living paycheck to paycheck, I think definitely helped” shape her mentality, she said in that video. Her circumstances made her strong-willed, tenacious and purposeful—all qualities that have shone through brightly in every match she plays, no matter the stage. But putting your heart into some- thing so fully and deeply also requires a superhuman amount of energy and effort. And with her health challenges—she went public with a diagnosis of rheu- matoid arthritis in 2019 and underwent surgery for persistent endometriosis two years later—plus being a self-described “homebody” who sometimes finds it difficult living out of a suitcase on tour, Collins is worn beyond her years.
"I have other things that I’d kind of like to accomplish in my life outside of tennis, and I would like to be able to have the time to be able to do that.” -
“At this point, I feel like I’m ready for the next chapter, and I’m really excited about it,” Collins said in February. She wants to have a family, she says, and is looking forward to “stepping away from the public eye” and enjoying a “quiet lifestyle.” (She joked this spring that most people in her inner circle would call her “boring,” and that she sometimes feels like “an 80-year-old woman inside.”)
While she disputes the idea that revealing her decision to the world resulted in a burden lifted (“I don’t really know what that means, as a 30-year-old woman who has a lot of freedom in her life,” she said at Roland Garros), Collins certainly played this year like a woman who’s never felt more free. This spring, she went on a world-beating 15-match winning streak that saw her capture consecutive titles in Miami (her first WTA 1000 crown, beating five seeded players along the way) and Charleston before her run ended in Madrid. Winning both Miami and Charleston made her the first player to take those two events in the same year since Serena Williams in 2013. Ahead of Roland Garros, she returned to the Top 10 in the world rankings. All of that secured her a first-ever berth on the U.S. Olympic team—something she called “a bucket list item.”
But the US Open is special to Collins, too, and her ninth and final Flushing appearance is a full-circle farewell to Grand Slam tennis. Ten years ago, with her name still etched on scoreboards and draw sheets by her full name “Danielle Rose Collins,” the right-hander first showed the world what she could do. The US Open was her WTA main draw debut, attained thanks to a wild card she earned as the 2014 NCAA singles champion while at Virginia. Collins— who had not yet turned professional, and wouldn’t for another two years—took a set from then-world No. 2 Simona Halep before falling in three sets. Despite the match being playing in the sweltering heat of an August afternoon in Arthur Ashe Stadium’s roof-less era, the New York crowd quickly took to the underdog Collins and her flat ball striking, ebullient celebrations and emphatic shouts of “Come on!” and remained solidly behind her in the nearly two-hour match.
“I have never played in a stadium like that,” the then-20-year-old said afterward. “It was amazing ... I could get used to that.”
And she certainly did. Collins’ passion for her craft made her well-known across the world, and her performances in the heat of battle became both the source of some of the sport’s most viral moments, and headline fodder.
But in the end, Collins stayed true to herself—and she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
“I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I’m someone who’s not afraid to be myself,” Collins said at this year’s Wimbledon, where she made the fourth round for the first time in her All England Club farewell. “As women, we should really embrace that, support each other and use that to fire us up.
“We get framed as emotional and frustrated, this and that, and I just say, ‘Eff it. I’m going for it.’ I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve and I’m always going to bring the passion.
“That’s one thing, throughout my entire career, whether it was from the start, graduating from college or at the end of my career here now, I’m always bringing the passion. Trying to keep everyone entertained as much as I can.”
While Collins’ stay in singles at her final US Open ended in the first round at the hands of fellow American Caroline Dolehide (she will play doubles with France's Caroline Garcia), and while it's unclear just when her career will officially end this fall, one thing remains certain: She did it all her way.
A version of this story appears in the 2024 US Open program.
