SEVEN

I was still living at the academy. And hating it. There might have been a great new deal, but I still had the same old life. I want to call it a prison, but I guess it was really just a tennis prison. All the academies are like that—laid out like prisons, with the stout buildings and the neat paths, the curfews and yards, the food lines, the bragging and the arguing, with the women over there and the men over here. The tennis courts and workout rooms are always very close, waiting like a row of coffins. You get up, and there they are. You lie down, and there they are. Even when you can’t see them.

I lived in a suite in one of the big dorms. There was a bathroom and a living room and two bedrooms, each with two sets of bunk beds. Four girls in a room, eight girls in a suite. I kept losing roommates and getting new ones as girls cycled in and out—did well, struggled, broke down, went home. In the morning, the bed would be stripped and prepared for a new girl.

I was lonely. I barely saw my father, who had struggles of his own. Now and then, I took classes at the nearby public school. This was a requirement, probably. They’d drop a bunch of us off in vans, then pick us up late in the day. We’d sit there with the local kids, like freaks dropped from another planet, but I enjoyed it. I’ve always loved school, and it was an escape—something different. Life in the dorm was no fun. I was younger than the other girls—for a while, I was the youngest kid at the academy—and the others punished me for it. I went to bed earlier than the rest because I was younger and practiced longer hours and needed more sleep. They’d come in late, hopped up on candy, talking and laughing loudly on purpose, waking me up and mocking me. It was not just my age that separated me—I was on a completely different track. I was there on a mission, bound for a different kind of tennis life. These were rich kids for the most part, spoiled and sent down to live out a parental dream. I was a player—one of only a handful on scholarship—who attracted the attention of those parents and got them to fork over all that money for tuition. That was our job, how we paid back Bollettieri. We were the advertisement. We attracted the deluded, wannabe tennis parents.

These girls, they’d go through my stuff when I was out on the courts. I’d notice it when I got back—that everything had been overturned and rifled. The joke was on them: I had nothing to steal, nothing to see. What was I? A poor Russian girl who loved to hit tennis balls. When they weren’t going after me, they were making poster-board collages. It was the thing to do at that time. Elmer’s glue, cutouts of David Hasselhoff (I didn’t know who that was) and Janet Jackson, and LOVE and FRIENDSHIP written in blue and yellow and pink bubble letters. If that was what it meant to have a real childhood, to be a real American girl, you could keep it. I had only one good friend in the suite. Her name was Priscilla. She was a little chubby, with the brightest American smile I’d ever seen. I think she liked me because we were both a little awkward. She didn’t feel like she fit in, and I knew I didn’t. We were outcasts together.

The routine never changed:

5:30 a.m. Wake up

5:45 a.m. Breakfast

6:15 a.m. Practice on Nick’s court

7:30 a.m. Clinics and drills

12:30 p.m. Lunch

1:30 p.m. Practice

4:00 p.m. Fitness

5:00 p.m. Dinner

7:00 p.m. “Schoolwork”

9:00 p.m. Bed

At Bollettieri’s, they never really worked on the technical aspects of my game. When I asked Nick about this, he shrugged and said something like “If it ain’t broke.” He said I came to them, that second time, fully formed. “Yes, there was work you could do on your serve, covering the court, but you already had that thing, that desire, that makes good players champions. We did not want to do anything to screw that up. It’s like a fire. You try to light a fire. But if that fire is already going, your task is to get out of the way and let it burn, feed it maybe, but by God don’t smother it and put it out!” I wasn’t too sure I agreed with that philosophy.

I worked my way into Nick’s “elite group,” boys and girls of different ages, the best young players at the academy. There were six to eight of us at any one time. Todd Reid, Jelena Jankovic, Horia Tecau, and Tatiana Golovin were kids Nick had pegged for the pro tour, the standouts. We played with one another and against one another, ate meals at the same table, warmed one another up before matches, and traveled to tournaments together in a single van. Nick tried to make us into a team, to instill an esprit de corps, which is why he gave us the nickname: the Tigers, I think. Or maybe it was the Cougars? The fact that I can’t remember it shows how little that team meant to me. He might have called us a team, but we knew, deep down, that our teammates were our competitors, not our friends. If you wanted to be number one, these were in fact the girls you would have to beat, and being friends would only make that harder. For me, it helped to turn them, in my mind, into the enemy. I imagine it’s how everyone who really plays has to play, because it’s how you win. Other girls just might be better at hiding it than I am. People say that I’m a bad sport because I don’t seem to be friends with the other girls on the pro tour. Well, I just don’t buy into that locker-room small talk. It feels forced. Fake. There are so many times when you see two players in the locker room, two girls, just chatting away like they’re best friends, about personal lives and boyfriends and “I’m going on this vacation” and “I bought this dress” and “Oh my God, it was how much money?” Listening to them speak, they sound like best friends. And then, a few hours later, one of them is playing a match and the other is in the locker room watching the match on TV, looking pleased when her friend loses the point. That’s how it really is.

What about the other girls in that team of elites?

We didn’t spend much time together away from the courts. I was too competitive to get very close to them. They were very good. Jelena Jankovic has been in a Grand Slam final. She’s been the top player in the world. I remember when we were eleven years old, we made up our first e-mail addresses together. The password to mine was Loveandpeace. I wonder if she remembers. Tatiana Golovin, almost the same age as me, was from France. Tatiana, Jelena, and I were rivals at the academy, and Tatiana was the favorite of the pack. Everyone loved her. She’d always have her hair up in just the right way, with perfect braids, and always had cute outfits, with perfectly tucked shirts. She walked Nick’s daughter’s dogs and wore pom-poms on her shoes. Jelena was more of a tomboy. I was in the middle. I was vanilla. I didn’t think about my clothes too much, and I really didn’t care about my hair. I put it up in a ponytail—done. My clothes? Usually a tennis skirt. We did some things together, activities at the academy; sometimes we’d all go out to dinner at a restaurant with a coach. That was fun but I never came back thinking, “Oh, now we’re friends.” I never forgot that the time would come when we’d face each other on the court, with everything on the line.

Nick’s staff did not do much for me in the way of coaching. Repetition, hour after hour on a court, hitting the same shot again and again—that’s what I did at the academy. If a certain part of my game needed work—and there always has been, and there always is—Yuri would call Gavin Forbes and ask him to suggest coaches, offer ideas. My father was always researching, studying, and analyzing. Many of his ideas came from articles, or from conversations he had with other parents.

“Yuri was aware of the fact that he had to have the best team around him,” Gavin told me. “So he would search for the best guy for a forehand or he’d find the best guy for a serve, or he’d find the best guy for physical training. He was smart enough to realize that while he might be the director of this project, he needed the best people around you to make this thing really work. I remember one time when Yuri felt that, for some reason, you needed, number one, to be on a clay court and, number two, to work more hours than was recommended at that time for a kid of your age at the academy. And he asked me to help him get some more balls, which I did. I remember going down to meet him on Highway 41, right there in Bradenton. He’d found a clay court hidden beyond a doughnut store. He had a shopping cart with old balls and he had a guy from South America with big holes in his shoes hitting with you. This guy could hit, obviously. And they would spend an hour every morning at six with this kid. And I remember saying to Yuri, ‘I’ve got to get this boy some new shoes!’ Yuri found him on the street or something. And wow, could he hit the ball. But that was Yuri, always searching, always working.”

* * *

I never thought of myself as a good tennis player, nor did I think of myself as a bad tennis player. I just did not think about it at all. I had yet to become conscious of my game in that way. I was still happily dumb to all the ways you can be valued, marked up or marked down. I was still living in the first bliss, meaning: I simply played, because it’s what I’d always done and because I loved to hit. Was there a moment when this state of ignorance ended, when that bubble was pierced? Was there a moment when I realized that I was very good and that being very good would have value for those around me?

Yes, there was.

It happened at the academy one night after dinner.

I was already in bed, reading, doing homework, staring at the ceiling. One of Nick’s guys called me down to center court. This was unusual. The hours and length of time we played at the academy were tightly regulated—that’s why my father and I ducked out to grab an extra hour behind the doughnut shop. And this was definitely after-hours, the time of crickets and cicadas and silence. Yet center court was lit like the deck of an aircraft carrier, stadium lights blazing, and the bleachers were filled with businessmen in suits. Nick told me to warm up, then head over to the far court. One of the teachers would hit with me. So that’s what I did—got out there in what felt like the dead of night, chasing and hammering, while the businessmen looked on and the mosquitoes swarmed. It was a kind of showcase. I figured this out later. These were investors thinking of putting money into the academy, and they wanted to get a look at the merchandise. In other words, Nick was the owner and I was the product. Or victory was the product and I was a machine that cranked it out.

I went back to my room and climbed into bed but never really got over it. That showcase changed my perspective. I realized how much was at stake, and it made me see the other girls in a new way. From that moment, I was on the lookout for competition, for those girls who could take my place under the lights. I knew that I liked being there. I made fun of it and dismissed it, but I liked that I was the girl Nick summoned when cash was on the line. I began looking here and there, searching for those who could challenge me. And I began searching for those I’d need to challenge. Jankovic. Kournikova. Golovin. I’d have to beat them all, beat them again and again. And as I got older, closer to the matches that really counted, I kept hearing the same names. Steffi Graf was still around. Lindsay Davenport. Monica Seles. But they were older, on their way out. Among the new generation, there were just two names: Venus and Serena, the Williams sisters. Of course, I’d heard of them before. It was in part that article about the sisters, and how they were training at Rick Macci’s Tennis Academy, that convinced my father we had to make our way to America in the first place. But I had not thought about them since. I’d been living my own life. Now suddenly they were everywhere. Teenagers—only one year apart—but already the best in the world. They’d won tournaments, been crowned all around the world. They were big girls, and they hit with unbelievable power. That’s what people told me. They would dominate the game for years. The more I heard about them, the more determined I became not to be beaten down, or submit. That’s when the rivalry began for me. Not on a tennis court, or at some banquet, but right there, in my mind, before I’d even seen the Williams sisters.

I was twelve or thirteen—five years younger than Serena. She was already a grown woman, while I was still hanging from a chin-up bar at night, praying for inches and pounds.

Then, one day, we got the news: the sisters were coming to Bollettieri’s to train. It started as a rumor and spread like wildfire. It was as if an astronaut or a movie star were visiting. The morning schedule was canceled. Everyone wanted to watch the Williamses work out, to get close and see how the magic was done. Yuri told me to watch “with clear eyes. See what they do. Learn what you can. This is who you will have to beat.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘No’?”

“I will not watch them,” I said. “I’m not going to let them see me at their practice. I don’t care if there are a hundred people watching and they have no idea who I am. I will never give them that satisfaction.”

In truth, I did want to watch them practice, but it had little to do with tennis. I’m always fascinated by the great ones—How do they carry themselves? What are they like on the court?—but I’d never put myself in the position of worshipping them, looking up, being a fan. My father and I argued and argued about it. He said I was letting pride get in my way.

“You need to watch them,” he explained.

He finally came up with a solution. The sisters were playing on court two, which had a wooden shed set up with a camera to shoot footage of each player. You were supposed to go into the shed after your session and analyze yourself on film. Look at your feet! Look at how you dropped your shoulder! But no one ever did that. The shed was there so Nick could put it in a brochure: “We have a film room and video facilities.” It was dark and dank, filled with old equipment. Yuri got the key and snuck me in ten minutes before the sisters showed up. He rolled the camera away so I could watch through a kind of knothole—just me alone, in the dark, seeing the next twenty years of my life.

The image of the Williams sisters would eventually become iconic, and it was in the works even then. They’re a force. Tall girls in tennis whites, with bright smiles and piercing, focused eyes. They began hitting, easy at first, then with terrific pace. Their father—a tennis father, parental nut, the will behind the operation, really not all that different from my own father—leaned against the fence, calling out instructions and orders. The bleachers were filled—every kid in the academy was there. They hung on each shot and followed each volley like worshippers, like fans, like sheep. The sisters moved around the court with languid grace—Serena especially. She was younger but clearly stood out. She swung easily, but the ball smoked off her racket. Now and then, when a rally had gone one shot too long, she’d end it with a crosscourt winner. And yet, for all the power, for all the intensity of their practice, I had just one thought: I want to beat them.

* * *

In the spring of 1996, something big happened—bigger than picking up a new stroke, or developing my serve, or being signed by IMG. After years of waiting, my mom was finally granted her visa, and she joined us in Florida. She moved into the apartment in Bradenton. A few weeks later, I left the dorm and settled in the second bedroom. We were a family again. We ate meals together! And watched TV and talked together! I had not seen my mother in close to two years, but it was as if no time had passed. This was maybe the happiest time of my life. You don’t realize how much you’ve been missing someone until you have that person back.

My mom immediately put things in order. She threw out all my Kournikova hand-me-downs, fixed my hair, confiscated Yuri’s scissors. Never again would he cut my bangs. She fired my tutor. Now she and I would spend our evenings together, working on math problems, reading Russian literature. My mother, the most educated person in our family, took my education very seriously, and she was a wonderful teacher. She focused on the classics—the great Russian writers and poets—because that’s what she knew and loved. She took care of the food and the shelter and the love and everything else. In a few months, I went from being a kid living a strange existence to being an athlete from a warm, stable, conventional home.

Maybe this was when my father went sort of bonkers, because suddenly there really was nothing for him to think about but my tennis. I remember one night, sticking my head into his room. He was lying there, a light shining on his lap, filling page after page with notes. I tried to back out unnoticed, but he spotted me.

“Be ready,” he said.

“For what?”

“We’re going to Los Angeles.”

I did not believe him, but asked why anyway.

“Because that’s where Robert Lansdorp lives.”

“Who’s Robert Lansdorp?”

“The man who’s going to make you the number one player in the world.”

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