Dan Evans bid an emotional farewell to Wimbledon as his career came to an end after he and fellow Briton Henry Searle lost their men’s doubles match.<\/p>\n
The 36-year-old announced in June that he would retire after the Championships, but he did not play in the singles after missing out on a wildcard and then losing in qualifying. <\/p>\n
Evans was left holding back tears as he signed autographs for those who had packed on to court 15 to watch his and Searle’s 6-2 6-4 first-round loss to ninth seeds Hugo Nys and Edouard Roger-Vasselin.<\/p>\n
It was an understated ending to his 20-year career, during which he was part of the 2015 Davis Cup team that secured Great Britain’s first title in 79 years.<\/p>\n
Evans also won two ATP Tour-level titles and reached the Wimbledon third round three times in singles.<\/p>\n
“It is just emotional, isn’t it? You think of your family and all the sacrifices that we’ve made. You live out your dreams here,” Evans told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“This tournament is what I grew up watching. I remember getting home from school and watching Wimbledon, and I was one of the lucky few that got to play here in the end.<\/p>\n
“Everything was worth it. For anybody thinking twice about putting the effort in, I can tell you it is worth it.<\/p>\n
“I’ve enjoyed every minute I’ve played on these courts.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dan Evans bid an emotional farewell to Wimbledon as his career came to an end after he and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":737154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-737153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=737153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/737154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=737153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=737153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=737153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}