He knows what it’s like to challenge Roger Federer on the big tennis stages and he reached number 73 in the world ranking, but his life today is different: he is a powerful financial broker who thinks less and less about the Swiss and more about Javier Milei, the ultra-liberal president of Argentina.
‘In my case, tennis was not a real passion. If it had been, I would still be playing or coaching someone,’ admits Argentine Diego Hartfield in an interview with CLAY.
‘And it didn’t cost me anything to get out of tennis at the age of 30,’ adds Hartfield, who is amazed by the case of Mexican Santiago González: ’He is at the top level of doubles, and on the circuit he was like my brother. We travelled all the time together, we trained together, we did thousands of tours together. And he’s still there, while I feel like I played tennis in another life…’.
‘I have ten years of finance and 13 years as a former tennis player,’ adds Milei’s admirer: ’We’re going in the right direction.’
Hartfield, 43, was ranked 73rd in the world in the 2007, 2009 and 2010 seasons, although in those years there were so many quality Argentine players that he was unable to fulfil his dream of playing in the Davis Cup.
In 2006, the draw handed him Roger Federer in the first round at Roland Garros, and two years later the same thing happened at the Australian Open. In neither match did he manage to snatch a set from the Swiss, who was in the best years of his career, although he did take him to a tie break in two sets in Paris.
Today, settled in his office in Oberá, in the heat of Misiones, in the tropical north of Argentina, he looks back and reflects.
‘You tend to normalise things when you’re there, you see? You tend to believe that what is happening to you is normal. Then you get to the top 100 and well, you worked all your life to be there and everything is so progressive that it’s hard to say ‘wow, look where I am’.
‘Maybe now it’s easier to say, ‘wow, look where I’ve been’. Although one never stops comparing oneself, because in my best moment I was number 8 in the country and at that time we were 13 top 100. But today I’m number 8 in the world of finance in Argentina? No, no, not even close.’
The young Hartfield, nicknamed ‘Gato’ in his playing days, had the same experience as Milei: a major Argentinean crisis, in this case that of 2001, triggered his interest in economics and finance.
‘I don’t know whether to use the word poverty, but I knew how to live with scarcity. In bad times I knew how to be there and nothing happened to me. That’s why I have a certain capacity to take risks. Even if I consider myself a conservative guy, my position is that life goes on. I’ve lost money, I’ve won. In tennis matches I’ve lost money and I’ve won. So, I like money a lot, but I’m not crazy about it.
Being a successful professional tennis player in the early years of the new century allowed Hartfield to help his family as Argentina emerged from the severe crisis.
“I paid for the 15th birthday of one of my sisters, and I had a house here in Buenos Aires and they lived with me when they went to school.’
‘We were a struggling middle-class family in the 2001 crisis. And I, honestly, with tennis I saw a chance to earn money, to have a job. And I liked that idea. Now… What would have happened if I had studied economics instead of being a tennis player? Today, with 20 years in the profession, it would be a different story. We don’t know.’
He would not, he is sure, be Milei’s minister of economics, Hartfield says with a laugh.
“I don’t think so. I’m not a very technical guy. But then again… When I played tennis I wasn’t a very technical guy either. I tried to be more on the side of common sense and perception.”
Hartfield identifies with Argentina’s finance minister, Luis Caputo, because he is also ‘a trader’.
‘I am a stockbroker, I open accounts for individuals and companies in brokerage firms and help them manage their finances through the capital market,’ he explains.
After years as a partner at Net Finance, Hartfield returned to working on his own, and says he is not doing badly: ‘I have about $20 million in my portfolio for about 100 clients. Mostly Argentinean, but I also open accounts in Uruguay and the United States.
Effort is the hallmark of his life, much more than talent, he says.
‘Tennis didn’t come easy for me at all, I did everything with a lot of effort, I didn’t have the facilities that guys of my level had,’ he recalls.
‘I think my strength came from my head, from a very big effort, from a very big conviction and from a constant search for improvement. But I didn’t have shots to save me. And that also helped me to make the decision to retire. I retired after an injury that sent me to the thousandth position in the ranking, and I didn’t have the shots, the game to come back as quickly as Willy Cañas, Juan Chela or even Guillermo Coria did after their doping cases’.
Tennis was not Hartfield’s passion, but that does not mean that his memories of those years are bad.
‘I have very good memories. I don’t have any great friends. Yes, very good acquaintances and good contacts. At the time we were a lot of players and we were super supportive on the trips. You could have disagreements like with anyone else, but we often clashed on the pitch with friends. And many times we even had to warm up with the player you had to play against afterwards.
‘Sharing a hotel in times of poverty or lack of wealth, we can say. We learned from
We learned from the bottom, we valued the things of each match. I have great memories of my time as a tennis player’.
As a passionate fan of the world of finance, Hartfield has a particular focus on the Milei government.
‘They are doing everything they had to do to correct very serious macroeconomic mistakes and save a tremendous crisis, they managed a country that was practically bankrupt,’ he said.
‘The great challenge is always in the social sphere, because we are still paying the price for many years of mismanagement. All these transformations take time, we have to see how much political support there will be in the medium term, but we are heading in the right direction,’ added the former tennis player.
Milei has something very special, Hartfield believes.
‘The president is an economist, and there are very few cases in the history of the world where an economist became president. An economist doesn’t give so much priority to politics, and that’s good for making the necessary adjustments. Then, obviously, there are a lot of things I don’t like about Milei, but the emphasis on the fiscal surplus is very positive’.
‘I’m very optimistic, very. If I had chosen a way of doing things today, it would be this way. I always said. You have to be a very strong communicator with high popular conviction, someone who is able to stick the knife blade in for surgery and have people say ‘ok, I’m going to hold on’. Otherwise it was very difficult.
But for all his love of economics and finance, Hartfield is a former top tennis player. He has memories and he has an opinion.
Rafael Nadal’s thwarted attempt to return to tennis in 2024 is a source of both curiosity and amazement to the Argentine.
‘You know what’s on my mind? Maybe he is much more passionate than I was. For me, my passion was to be able to challenge myself to do something completely different outside of tennis. That’s my achievement for me. And a lot of times I see tennis players insisting. And I wonder if they don’t have the courage to do something else.
When he has to choose between Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, the Argentine does not hesitate.
‘I was always for Djokovic. Always. I always said he was going to be the greatest of them all. I liked him a lot, I still like the way he plays. If I have to watch a tennis match today, I watch Djokovic. And he’s a histrionic guy as well, he has his past, he lived through the war as a kid’.
Is Djokovic the greatest ever?
‘The number of titles is what defines. I think there is no doubt, and the vast majority of the titles, Diokovic won them competing against Nadal and Federer. Federer, in his early years, had much less stiff competition’.
The gradual disappearance of the one-handed backhand is something that seems natural and even desirable to Hartfield.
‘Tennis evolved a lot from the two-handed backhand. And today players are becoming much weaker on the drive side than on the backhand side, they are more attackable on the forehand side’.
The growing Saudi power in tennis is accepted by Hartfield as the financial broker that he is: ‘I’m one of those who believe that you have to go with the waves. If you go against it too much, you end up losing.
Hartfield does not believe in ethical qualms.
‘There are a lot of very unfair things in the world. You like to drink tea, but in the tea plantations people are exploited…. I don’t know what conditions some people in China work in, and yet we are consumers of a lot of things that are produced in China’.
