On the final weekend of the 2015 BNP Paribas Open, the players’ dining hall was deserted. Virtually all of the 200 or so players who had entered the event 10 days earlier were gone. It was another picture-perfect day in Indian Wells, but the cafeteria workers, with little to do, sat and stared at their phones. The TVs were silently tuned to Roger Federer’s match, but no one looked up to watch. That included the two women who sat across from each other at a table in the corner.

For the better part of an hour, their low chatter was the only sound in the room. One was 28-year-old Indian pro Sania Mirza. The other was—could it be?—16-time Grand Slam champion Martina Hingis.

Why was the former No. 1, with $22 million in prize money to her name, killing time in a half-empty dining room? Hingis may have wondered that herself.

Two decades after becoming the WTA’s brightest new star as a 15-year-old, here she was, at 35, living the distinctly less glamorous life of a doubles specialist.

After splitting with former partner Flavia Pennetta the previous month, she was playing her first tournament with Mirza in Southern California. Before it began, they had practiced together just once; by all accounts, their get-to-know-each-other workout hadn’t been an auspicious one.

“We had the worst first practice ever,” Mirza said with a laugh. “We played, and we were like, ‘Oh my God, we cannot play together.’ We won one game, I think, out of 12 [against their practice opponents]. That’s how much practice means.”

Chances are, even Hingis, the most congenitally confident of athletes, didn’t realize that she was about to launch her third tennis career, one that would take her back to the same heights that she had scaled as a teenager.

A few minutes after ending their cafeteria conversation, Hingis and Mirza walked out and upset No. 2 seeds Ekaterina Makarova and Elena Vesnina in straight sets to win the title. The stands were half full and the ESPN cameras were long gone, but when it was over Hingis leapt into Mirza’s arms and celebrated as exuberantly as she had as a teenager.

Hingis, for one, knew that her and Mirza had something special right away.

“I mean, after this week we know we can beat the best teams out there in the world,” she said.

Hingis has never been known for modest or cautious words, but this time there was no need for them. Two weeks later, she and Mirza would win the Miami Open without dropping a set. By the end of the year, they had won Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the WTA Finals, and finished the season No. 1.

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Renaissance Woman

Renaissance Woman

That’s not all Hingis won in 2015: With Leander Paes, she also took home mixed-doubles titles at the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Of the 20 events played at the Grand Slams last year, a quarter of them were won by Hingis.

In 2016, Hingis and Mirza picked up where they left off. They won their third straight Slam at the Australian Open, and extended a winning streak that had begun the previous year to 41 matches before it ended in February.

“We just happened,” Mirza said of their sudden and unlikely rise up the ranks.

By February, Hingis’ stock had risen so far that, in the Swiss Fed Cup team’s first-round tie against Germany, she served as a secret weapon in the fifth and deciding rubber. Partnered with her friend and protégé, Belinda Bencic, Hingis put on a clinic in pre-power tennis with cleverly angled returns, aggressive net coverage and an incomparable court sense. It was a style of play her younger teammates had heard about, but rarely seen.

“She did all the great volleys and all the doubles stuff,” said Bencic, who was born in 1997, the same year that Hingis won three major singles titles. “I was happy that I could play with her. I’m not a doubles specialist.”

Once upon a time, Hingis wasn’t a doubles specialist, either. Three tennis lifetimes ago, she spent 203 weeks at the top of the WTA’s singles rankings, won five Grand Slam singles titles and fell one match short of completing a calendar-year Slam. Her only loss at a major in 1997 came in the French Open final, to unheralded Iva Majoli.

Tennis connoisseurs marveled at Hingis’ talent. Her anticipation, her shot selection, her touch, her ability to absorb pace and improvise: Many compared Hingis’ artistry with a racquet to John McEnroe’s.

Like McEnroe, Hingis’ talent wasn’t limited to the singles court. The following year, she did complete a calendar-year Grand Slam, in doubles, with Mirjana Lucic and Jana Novotna. At the Australian Open in 1999, Hingis won her fifth straight doubles major, with Anna Kournikova. During their run, Hingis proclaimed them the “Spice Girls of tennis.”

Maybe she could see her future a little too well. While Hingis would also win the singles title in Melbourne, she would make more news for referring to the woman she beat in the final, Amelie Mauresmo, as “half a man.” Much like her fellow natural, McEnroe, Hingis’ career has been as notable for its plunging lows as it has been for its stratospheric highs.

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The lowest of those lows came at Roland Garros in May 1999. After leading the final by a set and 2–0 over Steffi Graf, a woman she had dismissed the year before as a has-been, Hingis came unglued. She stomped around the net to protest a call. She climbed on the chair umpire’s ladder to argue. Near the end, she tried an underhand serve. When certain victory had turned to mortifying defeat, Hingis walked straight out of the arena, followed by a storm of boos. Her mother pulled her back on court, sobbing, for the trophy ceremony.

“I think I lost my mind,” Hingis said.

Or was it her game? While her loss to Graf was mentally devastating, a physical shift in the sport was on the horizon. Soon, a new generation of power-first players, led by the Williams sisters and Lindsay Davenport, would sweep across the WTA and topple the 5'7", finesse-oriented Swiss from her perch at No. 1.

At 16, Hingis had been the youngest major champion in history; at 22, she may have been the youngest major champion to retire.

In 2006, Hingis came back and quickly returned to the Top 10. But by the end of 2007 she had retired again, after being suspended for two years when she tested positive for a metabolite of cocaine. Hingis tried coaching, but no partnership clicked for long.

Neither did her marriage to French equestrian Thibault Hutin, which ended with an acrimonious separation in 2013. That same year, she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I. It seemed her career was over.

Now Hingis is back for a third act. Why? It seems that there will always be a place at the top of the game for her kind of talent. It also seems that, in her mind, there will always be a sense of unfinished business about her career.

“Who would’ve thought I would have another opportunity to become No. 1 again?” Hingis said in January after becoming No. 1 in doubles, a position she first held 18 years earlier. “Of course I had my hopes and dreams. Now it’s a reality.”

Still, Hingis doesn’t act surprised about her latest renaissance. At 35, she still plays and speaks with the swagger, and occasional petulance, of an ex-wunderkind. When asked about the early stages of her partnership with Mirza, Hingis said, “Obviously the first three months, the first three tournaments, we were already, like, amazing.”

“It’s something that’s a priority,” Hingis said at the start of 2016. “When I was playing singles, singles was the priority. I became No. 1 there. Also, simultaneously, I was No. 1 in both. Now I put 100 percent into this, and I think that’s what makes us this great doubles [team].”

Yet Hingis understands what Mirza, with her lethal forehand, has given her: The power that she has always lacked. And she’s realistic enough now to admit that she needs the help.

“She was hitting bombs from the baseline,” Hingis said of Mirza at the U.S. Open last year. “I can manage the volleys at the net. She sets me up so greatly. When she puts some volleys in, [it’s] a bonus; when I hit some winners from the baseline, or I win some points, that’s an extra bonus.”

The fact that each player is devoted solely to doubles gives them an advantage in focus over those who also play singles.

“Even playing crosscourt forehands when we practice, we just constantly make each other better,” says Hingis.

But while Mirza brings the heat, it’s Hingis who brings the intuition. She’s the one who drapes herself over the net, follows the ball instinctively and cuts it off whenever she can. She’s the one who creates surprising angles on her return and takes over the net from a younger server who won’t leave the baseline. She’s the one who doesn’t make the wild, crucial error at the wrong time. And she’s one of the few players who can hit crisp volley winners with two hands on the racquet.

Hingis will forever be a transitional figure in tennis: the last teenage star of the 20th century; the last finesse champion before the power-game onslaught; the last great player to master singles and doubles.

Sixteen years into the 21st century, Hingis is like a former pitching ace who has become a closer later in his career: She’s no longer the best, but she’s still putting her unique skills to use. She still makes all of that “doubles stuff” worth watching. This summer, Hingis will try to fill a career void by winning her first Olympic medal; she’ll likely play with Bencic in doubles and her old friend, Federer, in the mixed event.

At Wimbledon this week, Hingis and Mirza moved comfortably into the third round. She's also entered in the mixed event with Paes (the two beat Mirza and Ivan Dodig in the final of last month's Roland Garros).

After all the Saturdays spent in empty dining halls, the bad practices, the highs and lows, and the retirements and returns, Hingis would have come full circle: the youngest now the oldest, the whiz kid turned survivor.