She had decided to walk away from tennis, and then she won one of its biggest titles. This is the true story of Erin Routliffe, the greatest New Zealand tennis player you’ve never heard of.
Distraught after losing her first-round doubles match at Wimbledon last year, Erin Routliffe slumped onto a bench at the side of the court, burst into tears and had a “full mental breakdown”.
She wondered what she was doing with her life.
She thought maybe it was time to quit tennis altogether.
2022 had been the best year of her career. She’d won a WTA tour title with Jessica Pegula, reached three finals with regular partner Alicja Rosolska, made the quarter-finals at Wimbledon and got her doubles ranking into the top 30.
But in February last year, she and Rosolska split (“different goals, different stages of our career”) and she teamed up with Alexa Guarachi, one of her best friends and an exceptional doubles player who had been ranked as high as 11 in the world a year earlier.
They looked like a perfect match. They were a disaster.
Over the course of nine tournaments from April to July, they got past the first round only once, and that was in a 125-level event – five levels below the grand slams and not somewhere top players spend any time if they can avoid it.
By the time they arrived for her first-round match at Wimbledon in July, she’d lost seven matches in a row (including one tournament where she played with a different partner).
Her hopes were so low that her ambition was not to win the tournament, or even to have a good run.
“I just wanted one win to remember what it felt like again.”
She and Guarachi won the first set and nearly won the second, but they failed to convert a match point, lost that game, then that set, then the next set, and that was that.
Suddenly, there she was, in tears on a bench on court nine at the world’s most prestigious tournament, not knowing whether she even wanted to keep playing tennis, let alone whether she’d ever win another match.
In September that year, with new partner Gaby Dabrowski, she won six matches in a row at the US Open, including the final, and became a grand slam champion, the most sought-after title in tennis.
The nearly $700,000 in prizemoney was more than she’d made from her previous 54 tournaments combined.
If you’ve ever wondered how long it takes to go from rock bottom to the top of the world, Erin Routliffe can tell you: nine weeks.
Her Canadian parents were on a round-the-world sailing adventure when her mother fell pregnant with Erin in 1994. She was born in New Zealand in April 1995, spending the first year of her life on the boat and the next three living in Auckland, before the family returned to Canada to bring up their growing family.
She was in her mid-teens when she realised she had a gift for tennis (“I was a late bloomer”) and was quickly moved into the Canadian junior tennis development system.
Although she represented the country internationally at junior level, she never felt fully supported there. When she finished her degree in communications at the University of Alabama in 2017, her parents got in touch with Tennis New Zealand to see if they might do better.
They couldn’t have been more welcoming. Routliffe permanently changed her allegiance to New Zealand, and moved to Auckland.
For Routliffe, as for most pro tennis players, life on tour featured neither the glamour nor the megabucks we associate with the sport’s big names.
“The grind” as Routliffe calls it, involves an endless slog from city to city and country to country, with few spectators, fewer big paycheques and no respite.
She had enjoyed a relatively glorious junior career, winning big tournaments in the US and gaining a ranking in the junior top 20 and being told over and over about her potential.
But on tour, she quickly learned, potential counts for nothing. She slogged her way around the world, getting beaten again and again and feeling the full weight of all that potential and what she saw as her inability to fulfil it.
Furthermore, because pro events are mostly in Europe and the Americas, the travel burden from New Zealand was overwhelming.
After 18 months spent living in Mt Eden, she moved back to Canada, although she continued to represent New Zealand.
It didn’t help with the tennis. She wasn’t enjoying it and wasn’t playing well.
She felt she’d lost direction.
So, in the middle of 2019, she told her family: “I think I’m done with tennis”, and walked away.
She moved to a family cottage outside Toronto, where she lived with her sister and started looking for a job.
She started out dog walking and sitting, then started shopping her CV around town and ended up at the local tanning salon. When asked why she wanted to work there, she said she just needed some money. She was hired on the spot.
Through the autumn and early winter of that year, she worked there three days a week, from 12pm to 8pm, for minimum wage. She loved it.
She says the clients were mostly older women who had been tanning for decades.
She became friends with many of them, getting to know a lot about their grandchildren.
But after a few months, she started missing tennis, and eventually her sister said, “Why don’t we just go and I’ll feed you some balls on the court and see if you like it or hate it”.
On court, she again felt the satisfaction of the ball coming out of the racket’s sweet spot and started to regret the fact she’d left the sport with such a bad taste in her mouth.
She wanted to enjoy it again, and to feel like when she finally left for good, it would be on her own terms.
But the pandemic was just getting started and although she played some tiny tournaments early in 2020, it was August that year before she really started again.
The next month, she met Bruce Lipka and her life changed.
Coaches have been critical to her throughout her career. She says there are many she could name that have changed the direction of her career, such as Neil Carter, who she still works with and who supported and encouraged her when she thought she’d never play again.
But there’s something different about Lipka.
He has a tendency to sound less like a coach and more like a guru.
He has a penchant for aphorisms like: “Tennis players tend to promise according to their hopes but perform according to their fears” and “How we do one thing is how we do everything”.
Although she was initially sceptical of his methods, Lipka turned out to be exactly what she needed. For one thing, he never spoke about potential. To him, the future isn’t important. The only thing that matters is the present moment.
As she sat in tears on Wimbledon court nine in 2023, having just lost eight matches in a row, literally having a mental breakdown, she wanted nothing to do with the present moment.
The present moment sucked.
She wanted to move on as quickly as possible to a different moment.
But Lipka wouldn’t let her. He told her to embrace it. He said there was a reason for what she was going through. He said: “Everything that’s happening is part of your process”.
In the movie of her life, this is when she stands up, wipes away the tears walks straight onto the training court and hits ball after ball, late into the night, beginning a musical montage that ends nine weeks later at the final of the US Open.
But that is not what happened.
“When someone says that to you when you’re going through it?” she says ... “You just want to hit them”.
The first thing she needed after Wimbledon was a new partner, but her terrible run of results and rapidly sinking ranking meant she wasn’t an attractive teammate, especially to the players she wanted to play with, who were all now ranked significantly higher than her.
When she reached out to her “dream partner”, Gaby Dabrowski, who was three years older than her, and ranked 30 or so places higher, and who she had been in awe of growing up in Canada, she was not hopeful.
But Dabrowski had just split up with her own regular partner and, Routliffe says, “You’ve got to shoot your shot”.
Dabrowski agreed to a video call.
They talked about their goals, flaws and strengths and what they looked for in a partner. The stars aligned.
They won their first match together, at a tournament in Montreal, but were knocked out in the second round and had the same result at the next tournament.
The following week was their final tournament before the US Open and although they won two matches there, the competition was well below the level of the previous two tournaments.
It was also the end of their honeymoon period.
Having spent the previous two tournaments on their best behaviour, this time they said what they felt, and some of it hurt.
“It was a rough week,” Routliffe says.
“When you’re close to someone, that’s the person that you take your anger out on.
“That’s just life. And also, when you’re trying to win a tennis match and you’re on the court in that intense environment, there’s sides of us that come out that we don’t even know.”
Afterwards they sat down and thrashed out a plan for how things would work if they were to carry on together. It was a difficult conversation. The US Open started two days later.
They were in trouble at times in both their first and second round matches, losing a set in each, but they ground out the wins, then they had a walkover in the third round and suddenly they were in the quarterfinals of a grand slam.
The quarter-final was played on the 14,000 capacity Louis Armstrong stadium, in front of a rabid crowd. Their opponents were the highly ranked Canadian Leylah Fernandez and American Taylor Townsend, who were also the overwhelming crowd favourites.
Routliffe says it was her, Dabrowski and their tiny box of supporters against everyone else.
“The whole crowd wanted us to lose,” she says. “They were against us like crazy.”
Routliffe and Dabrowski lost the first set, won the second and then the third went to a tiebreaker. The first to 10 points would win. The noise was unbelievable. Fernandez and Taylor dominated, taking a 7-2 lead, and Routliffe assumed that would be that.
“We were down and out,” she says.
The thought in her head was: “We’re screwed”.
“You’re not like, ‘Oh my God we can still do this!’ You’re literally, like, ‘We had a good run; what can you do?’.”
On how it’s possible to play good tennis in that situation, she says: “I don’t know. I think when the pressure is lifted, when you’re like, ‘Oh well, we’re going to lose anyway’, amazing things can happen”.
They won eight of the next nine points, winning the tiebreaker 10-8, and the match, and they were in the semifinals.
“It sounds so dramatic but it was a very traumatic experience,” she says.
“When we got through that match together, I think we were kind of like, ‘Ok, we can do this’.”
They won the tournament without losing another set.
The following week they reached the final of a high-level tournament in Mexico, suggesting their US Open win had been no fluke. But then they lost their first match at each of the next two tournaments, so maybe it had been a fluke.
Then they won their next tournament.
And so it goes. The grind never ends.
“You have to get really good at losing,” she says, “and then that’s how you stop losing. It literally makes no sense”.
As good as her 2023 was, 2024 was even better.
With Dabrowski, she reached the semifinals of the Australian Open, the final of Wimbledon, the quarter-finals of the US Open and the last 16 of the French Open.
In July this year, she became the world’s No 1 doubles player and in early November she and Dabrowski won the prestigious season-ending WTA Finals.
She has earned more money this year than in the rest of her career combined.
It could so easily have never happened. She might never have returned after quitting tennis in 2019; she might have quit after her breakdown at Wimbledon; Dabrowski might not taken a chance on her; they might not have sorted things out after their pre-US Open blowup; Taylor and Fernandez might have held on to win the tiebreaker in the US Open quarter-final.
“Confidence is so hard to gain and so easy to lose,” she says.
On the flipside, where might she have been without the hard times?
What if she hadn’t spent months working in a tanning salon for minimum wage?
What if she and Guarachi hadn’t gone through their terrible run of losses and split?
What if they had won that match point in their first-round match at Wimbledon?
What if she’d never had her breakdown?
As Bruce Lipka might say, it’s all part of the process.
She will turn 30 in April. She’s feeling the best she’s ever felt. She has dreams of winning more grand slams and of keeping her place at or near the top of the world doubles rankings. But for now she’s just trying to stay in the moment. Better than most, she understands how hard that is.
Erin Routliffe will compete at the women’s tournament of the ASB Classic, which runs from December 30 to January 5 at Auckland’s Manuka Doctor Arena.
Christmas festivities, art music and more things to do around town.