Everything he accomplished, he did it by outhitting his opponents from the baseline, no cheap points. And in time all the qualifiers fell away; he wasn’t just good on clay, he wasn’t just good for a short guy, he was just plain inarguably good, with an excellent résumé: the No. 8 ranking, four titles, and deep runs at the Slams (four quarterfinals, one semifinal). His most memorable match, for many fans, might even have been a loss. Back in 2018 he went up a set and a break on Rafael Nadal at Roland-Garros, looking as good as anyone ever had against Rafa on Court Philippe-Chatrier, putting him in a peril that very few players managed over a two-decade span. Then rain suspended play. Nadal came back the next day and won. But two years later, in Rome, Schwartzman did add his name to the prestigious list of players who managed to beat the king of clay. In one interview he told me that he could feel himself accumulating respect in the locker room with every big win he pulled off on the court.

Once you got to know Schwartzman’s backstory—his upbringing in poverty during Argentina’s economic depression—you could see that his success was statistically unlikely in ways beyond just the height. He’d had to work. But he bristled at having his success reduced to mere persistence. He was also, it bears reiterating, an otherworldly talent. Persistence alone won’t get you a first step that fiery, or a touch that soft. I liked how he put it in a recent first-person retirement essay: “Just being a fighter does not get you to the top. I was there because I was good at this sport. Nobody gave me a gift. I earned this.”

In that same essay, Schwartzman identified the precise moment of his decline. During a match at Hamburg in 2022, he felt an unfamiliar sensation, cramping and shaking. That feeling persisted and his results never recovered. He fell out of the top 100 the next season. Here was another reminder not to take any of your favorite players for granted. For a time, Diego and his close friend Dominic Thiem played brilliant matches against each other, and both men seemed like they’d be tour staples for years to come. As it turned out, their primes were stunning but brief. Neither man extended his success into his 30s, and both retired at ages that might as well be mid-career in the contemporary game.

Schwartzman announced that he would hang up his racquet, at age 32, at his home tournament in Buenos Aires. He’d won the title there in 2021 without dropping a set. Heading into last week, Schwartzman had barely played at all in the prior six months, just one Challenger match—a loss—to tune up for his last stand. There, Schwartzman produced one final miracle: a three-set defeat of the No. 40, the big-serving Nico Jarry, extending his career one more match. That was about as far as he could go. In the final points of his very last match, against Pedro Martinez, Schwartzman was cheered by the entire stadium. The umpire tactfully let them sing their hearts out before eventually cutting it off. There were tears in Schwartzman’s eyes during those last few rallies. His peers, too, sent him off in a chorus of praise. Holger Rune remembered the time, as a rookie short on cash, that Schwartzman walked up and paid for his food. We may never again see a top 10 player quite like him. The man known as El Peque can have the last word: “I have a small body, but it gave the biggest players in our history bad moments.”