Pamela Laufer-Ukeles returns to tennis after 20 years and a battle with breast cancer

She did it for 20 years.

She also knows what it feels like to question whether you can trust your body.

And she knows what it feels like to discover, slowly and deliberately, that perhaps you can.

The lessons she received from playing tennis and from surviving breast cancer now intersect on the courts of Ra’anana, where the 50-year-old law professor and competitive tennis player is preparing for Sharsheret’s upcoming tennis tournament – an event that brings together two parts of her life that once seemed completely separate.

One is the sport she first discovered when she was an eight-year-old girl.

The other is the cancer diagnosis that changed how she viewed her health, her priorities, and her own vulnerability.

The result is a story that involves more than simply winning a tennis match.

Although Laufer-Ukeles would certainly like to win.

“I’ll train, and I’ll show up and give it my best shot,” she said. “That’s all I can do.”

That attitude has served her well.

Laufer-Ukeles first picked up a racket at age eight at a summer day camp. She had never played before, but the instructor immediately noticed something.

“Have you ever played before?” she was asked.

She hadn’t.

Soon, tennis became a major part of her life.

She played junior tennis from ages eight through 14, competed regularly, and earned Eastern Tennis Association rankings. She trained three or four times a week and sometimes played tournaments every weekend. Her parents invested heavily in her development, and the sport gave her an early education in competition, discipline, and perseverance.

She even played some tournaments in Europe, making the semifinals in a particularly juniors tournament in France.

Her game was built around a strong forehand and serve. At just 5-foot-3, she learned early that the net could be a difficult place for her against taller opponents, so she became primarily a baseline player.

By the time she reached Columbia University, tennis was still a major part of her identity, although for the past few years she had quit playing juniors and now was only playing for her high school team, which still involved training but with less pressure. She walked onto the college team and practiced with it for about a year, but ultimately decided to leave.

She wanted to concentrate on studies.

The decision made sense at the time. She watched student-athletes balance demanding schedules and felt that the limitations placed on her academic choices were not worth the trade-off.

So she put down the racket.

And largely left it there.

For approximately two decades, tennis gave way to school, career, marriage, and children.

She tried coming back intermittently, but the results were frustrating. Her instincts still belonged to an athlete, while her body was no longer conditioned like one. She suffered injuries, including a knee injury that left her unable to walk normally for months, and each setback made it easier to stop again.

Looking back, she has no hesitation about what she would tell her younger self, who barely hesitated before stopping regular play.

“Big mistake,” she said with a laugh. “Shouldn’t have done it.”

In February 2019, at age 43, Laufer-Ukeles discovered that life had another lesson waiting.

She had asked her primary-care physician for a mammogram simply because she had heard about friends in the United States who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. In Israel, women are only referred to get mammograms at age 50 without a specific request.

She had never had one before.

She did not feel sick.

She did not have a reason to think something was wrong.

But the mammogram led to an ultrasound, which led to the discovery of triple-negative breast cancer.

The diagnosis was traumatic in more ways than one.

During the ultrasound, she recalled, the radiologist discussed the possibility of cancer with an intern before properly explaining the situation to her. The doctor eventually told her that she had a medium-sized cancer and would likely lose her hair.

She had come in for a routine screening.

Suddenly, she was thinking about cancer, chemotherapy, and what would happen to her family.

“I was very scared,” she said.

She underwent extensive treatment, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

And when it was over, the physical treatment was not the only thing she had to recover from.

There was the emotional aftermath.

There was the vulnerability.

And there was the unsettling realization that the body she had always depended on could suddenly betray her without warning.

For years, she had been a cerebral person – an academic who spends much of her professional life thinking, writing, and teaching. But cancer made her realize that she needed something else, too.

She needed to move.

She needed to be outside.

She needed to feel physically capable again.

She needed to regain trust in her body.

She needed to focus on her physicality and her health.

She needed tennis.

The timing was almost strange enough to seem scripted.

Laufer-Ukeles began returning to tennis around the time COVID-19 was arriving in 2020. When courts were open, tennis offered a way to get out of the house without being in close proximity to other people.

At first, she played casually with local friends.

Then she saw tournaments.

And she remembered the player she had once been.

“I remember when I used to do that,” she thought.

So she started training.

Three or four times a week became normal. She hired a coach. She began competing in Masters tournaments. She started running and lifting weights, recognizing that simply playing tennis was no longer enough to prepare her body for the demands of the sport.

This time, she approached the game differently.

She stretched. She strengthened. She took care of her body.

And gradually, something returned that cancer had taken away.

Trust.

“When you have cancer, you’re not necessarily sick when you’re diagnosed,” she explained. “So, you doubt your health.”

Tennis provided a way to challenge that doubt.

The rules were familiar.

Work hard. Prepare. Compete. See what your body can do.

The same lessons she had learned as a child were waiting for her decades later.

“If I trained and I worked hard, I would see the results on the court,” she said.

Only now, the stakes felt different.

Tennis was no longer simply about becoming a better player. It was about reconnecting with herself.

“It reminded me of my youth,” she said. “It reminded me of my ability to count on my body and have trust in my body.”

She thrived.

The competitiveness came rushing back. So did the joy.

And then came the Maccabiah.

Laufer-Ukeles’s first Maccabiah experience was almost entirely accidental.

After returning to competitive tennis, she searched online for Masters tournaments in Israel. The next tournament she found happened to be the Maccabiah.

Her reaction was essentially: There is no way I’m playing that.

Her husband disagreed.

He signed her up.

The organizers initially called to tell her she couldn’t participate. The Maccabiah, after all, was for highly competitive athletes, and she had only recently returned to the sport.

Then circumstances changed.

There were cancellations.

There weren’t enough women in her age group.

The organizers called again.

Did she want to play?

She did.

Before that Maccabiah, she had played only a tournament or two since returning to competitive tennis. She had managed to finish second in one of them, giving her enough of a ranking to justify her place.

Then, only about a year after completing cancer treatment, she went to the Maccabiah and won silver in singles and bronze in doubles.

The experience was transformative.

She trained specifically for the event, ran extensively, and pushed herself physically to prepare for the heat and the demands of the competition.

This time, she won bronze in her age group.

She has come to view the Maccabiah as one of the toughest tournaments she plays.

The competition is stronger because athletes arrive from around the world. The scheduling can be unpredictable. Matches can take place in the middle of Israel’s summer heat, sometimes twice in the same day.

There is no easy way through it.

Which is precisely why she loves it.

The Maccabiah gives her something to work toward. It gives her a reason to be in peak physical condition. And it has introduced her to people from around the world.

These days, she can play five days a week.

Tennis is no longer something she returned to.

It is simply part of who she is again.

The irony is that tennis also eventually helped Laufer-Ukeles find her voice about cancer.

When she was diagnosed, she did not want the entire community to know. Her close friends and family knew, but she was uncomfortable with the vulnerability that came with being identified as someone who had cancer.

She was scared.

She was worried about her children.

And she did not want to be defined by her illness.

She also felt profoundly isolated.

Through connections, she was introduced to Sharsheret, which provided access to women who had experienced breast cancer and could speak to her about what she was facing.

That support mattered enormously.

But even then, something was missing.

She did not have a regular in-person support group. She did not have a social worker she could meet with regularly. She wanted the opportunity to sit with women who understood exactly what she was experiencing and simply talk.

Years later, that circle has finally begun to close.

Sharsheret has invited her to participate in its support groups in Israel, and she has already attended two meetings.

For someone who once felt so isolated, the experience has been powerful.

She now finds herself sitting with other women discussing treatment, screening, preventative measures, diet and the challenges of survivorship.

It is something she wishes she had had when she was first diagnosed.

And that is why she is now willing to speak publicly.

“I want people who are diagnosed not to feel so isolated,” she said.

Her message is simple but powerful: breast cancer does not have to be the end of the story.

She is living proof.

For Laufer-Ukeles, the connection between Sharsheret, breast cancer, and tennis makes perfect sense.

The sport changes the conversation.

Rather than focusing exclusively on illness, it puts the emphasis on strength, perseverance and survivorship.

That matters as society can still instinctively associate sickness with weakness.

Laufer-Ukeles admits that she once did the same thing.

But cancer changed her perspective.

She does not pretend treatment was easy. It wasn’t. She went through an exhausting course of treatment and experienced the physical and emotional toll that comes with it.

But she also discovered that there can be strength on the other side of vulnerability.

Tennis became part of that process.

So can community.

So can mental-health support.

So can simply seeing another woman who has been through cancer and is now living a full, active life.

That, she believes, is one of the most important things Sharsheret can offer.

There is still a lack of awareness, she says, not only about how common breast cancer is but about how much support can mean to someone during treatment and after it.

The upcoming tournament in Ra’anana therefore represents more than a day of tennis.

It is an opportunity to bring women together, raise awareness, support Sharesheret’s work and demonstrate a different image of what survivorship can look like.

‘Everyone has a story,” notes Liora Tannenbaum, Sharesheret’s Israel Regional Director. “Where they are coming from or what they are dealing with isn’t always known to the people around them, even those they are close to. The first time I met Pamela, all the roads converged in one sitting… learning about the journey she had been on and is still navigating, her passion for tennis and the role it had and continues to play in her life, and how Sharsheret could connect so many of these dots. Her willingness to share her story publicly and champion all that we are trying to achieve here is what makes this event so meaningful.’

And Laufer-Ukeles will be right in the middle of it.

She regularly plays at the Ra’anana Municipal Tennis Center, where she has found a community she deeply appreciates. Her coach, Oded Yatskin, is also donating his time to support the Sharsheret tournament.

She is grateful for the people making the event possible and hopes it succeeds both as a fundraiser and as a way of strengthening Sharsheret’s presence and ability to support women.

She has been particularly impressed by the positive attitude of the people involved.

There were, she noted, plenty of people who might have looked at an ambitious fundraising event and said it wouldn’t work.

Instead, a group of people simply decided to make it happen.

She wants to be part of that effort.

And yes, there is still the small matter of the tennis.

Asked whether she expects to win the tournament, Laufer-Ukeles laughs.

There is probably a little pressure now.

After all, she is one of the faces of the event.

But pressure is familiar territory. So is perseverance.

She will train. She will show up. She will compete. And she will give it everything she has.

Because after everything she has been through, perhaps that is the greatest lesson tennis has given her.

The scoreboard matters. The medal matters. The competition matters.

But sometimes the greatest victory happens long before the first ball is served.

It happens when you decide to step back onto the court.