American tennis had some of its biggest stars during the 1990s and 2000s. Names like Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Serena Williams, Venus Williams, and Lindsay Davenport often come to mind, but countless other players also made their mark.
One of them was Corina Morariu, who built a highly successful doubles career despite facing a serious illness at age 23. She recovered, returned to the tour, and came close to winning her third Grand Slam title.
Born in Detroit on January 26, 1978, Morariu developed a passion for tennis at a young age. She turned professional in 1994 and always planned to compete in both singles and doubles. While doubles became her specialty, she also found success in singles, winning a WTA title and reaching a career-high ranking of No. 29 in the world.
Wimbledon, World No. 1, and Australian Open success
Paired with Lindsay Davenport, Morariu showcased her best tennis. The duo won Wimbledon in 1999, defeating Mariaan de Swardt and Elena Tatarkova in the final, and also reached the Australian Open finals in 2001 and 2005, falling just short in both matches.
Morariu reached the No. 1 spot in the world doubles rankings in 2000. Over her career, she captured 13 doubles titles. In mixed doubles, she won the 2001 Australian Open alongside Ellis Ferreira.
A life-changing illness
In 2001, at just 23 years old and coming off a mixed doubles Australian Open title and a women’s doubles final, Corina Morariu faced one of the toughest moments of her life when she was diagnosed with leukemia.
She understandably had to step away from the tour, undergo treatment, and, fortunately, she beat the disease and eventually returned to professional competition.
Retirement and ambassador role
After overcoming leukemia, Morariu still had much to contribute to the tennis world. She continued competing in doubles with notable success: between 2004 and 2006, she won six titles—three of them alongside her longtime partner Lindsay Davenport—and even reached the Australian Open final in 2005, though she and her partner fell to Svetlana Kuznetsova and Alicia Molik. Morariu officially retired in 2007 and became an international ambassador for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
Life after tennis: Commentator and author
After retiring from professional tennis in 2007, Corina Morariu worked as a tennis commentator for Tennis Channel and also wrote a memoir sharing her story, titled Living Through the Racket: How I Survived Leukemia…and Rediscovered Myself.
Reflecting on the book in an interview with Tennis.com, Morariu said, “Cancer was the wake-up call, the catalyst to the rest. I almost feel like before I got sick I was just living with blinders on. I had a life that had so many privileges, so that made it easy to kind of just keep along that path. Then all of a sudden I get sick and that’s all taken from me. The blinders are off and all of a sudden I’m like blinded. I don’t know how to make sense of all these things”.
She added, “A big part of your innocence is taken from you when you go through something like that. Coming to terms with all of it—the fallout and how I lived my life before cancer, how I wanted to live my life after—I mean, you can’t discount how difficult the process of fighting cancer was, but it was the emotional impact that was the most difficult to deal with”.