EIGHT

Robert Lansdorp was famous for the work he’d done with Tracy Austin and Pete Sampras, but he was a lot more than that. He really deserves a book of his own. He was white-haired, gravel-voiced, moody, tough, and mean, but also sentimental and generous and kind. And a brilliant tennis coach. He does not believe in bullshit inflation. If he compliments you, you deserve it. If he says you’re good, you are good. And what a story! He grew up in the Far East, in a Dutch colony that was conquered by the Japanese during World War II. His father, a Dutch businessman, was arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp. Robert had gone back to Holland with his family, and that’s where he learned to play tennis. When his father was released, the family went here and there, before heading to America in 1960.

Robert was twenty-two years old. He bought a car in New York and drove to Los Angeles, where he met up with the rest of his family. By the time he arrived, he had fallen in love with America. That’s what he said. He took up tennis again and began to play on a local circuit. He was a natural athlete and astonishingly good for an untrained player. He was spotted by a coach from Pepperdine—spotted because he kept beating that coach’s scholarship stars. Robert was given a scholarship of his own, went to college, and played tennis. He became an All-American player. He floated around the professional circuit afterward, but there wasn’t much money in it, and he eventually took a job at a resort in Mexico. Thus began his raffish life as a hotel tennis pro. He went from job to job, resort to resort, giving lessons in the morning and drinking with socialites in the afternoon. He found his way back to L.A., where he quickly became a sought-after coach. It was not just that he was a good teacher—it was that he had a philosophy, a way of thinking about the game. He distrusted the modern reliance on trickery and spin. He believed in a steady diet of low, hard, flat shots that just cleared the net—the kind of shot it takes guts to deliver because, if you miss by half an inch, you’re finished.

By the time Yuri learned about Lansdorp, he had become a fixture at the Riviera Club, a fancy spot in Beverly Hills. He charged an outrageous amount per hour for lessons and made most of his money teaching the children of movie producers and moguls. They all knew his record, the elite players he’d coached—Tracy Austin most famously. Austin and Lansdorp were a kind of team. They traveled together, became like family. She was his greatest pride, the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Open. Lansdorp went on to coach many greats—but he never stopped talking about Tracy Austin.

Yuri learned about Robert in one of the tennis magazines. He’d been working with Lindsay Davenport, and there was a picture of them together, walking off the court. It impressed Yuri because Yuri was impressed by Lindsay. He’d seen her play at a tournament and was convinced that my game should be like her game. She was not especially fast, nor did she look very strong, but she had such tremendous power. Those hard, flat, spinless shots! According to the article, this style and those shots owed a lot to the teaching of Robert Lansdorp.

Yuri tracked down Lansdorp’s phone number—probably a spare line at the Riviera—and called one afternoon. Yuri got him on about the fifteenth ring. Lansdorp was gruff.

“Who is this?”

“Yuri Sharapov.”

“Who gave you my number?”

“IMG.”

“Why would they do that? Bastards. What do you want?”

“I want to bring you my daughter.”

“What am I supposed to do with your daughter?”

“Coach her at tennis.”

“Who is your daughter?”

“Maria Sharapova.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Ask around. She is something special.”

“Do you know my rates? You can’t afford me. I am incredibly expensive.”

“We’re fine with the money.”

“Where are you at the moment?”

“Nick Bollettieri.”

“Who is Nick Bollettieri?”

* * *

We took the next plane—it felt that way, anyway. Just like that, we were in Los Angeles. My father had me call Lansdorp from the airport’s pay phone. We needed directions to the club in Beverly Hills, and he figured I’d have better luck with Lansdorp on the phone. It’s harder to be gruff and sarcastic to a little kid.

Lansdorp picks up. Grunts. Groans. “What?”

“Hi, this is Maria Sharapova.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“I have an appointment to come and see you this afternoon.”

“Yeah? So what? Is this the afternoon? Why do you people keep calling?”

“We need directions.”

“What?”

“Directions.”

“Take the 405. Exit at Sunset.”

Bang. He hangs up.

I turned to my father and said, “Who is this monster you’re taking me to see?”

“I hear he’s very good,” said Yuri.

This was my first time in L.A. Yuri was careful with the money we got from IMG and Nike—there were not a lot of frills in our life—so I was thrilled when we went to get our rental car and found they had mixed up our reservation: it was a sports car, a red Mustang convertible! We sat in the smog and traffic of the freeway, but I was dazzled by the palm trees, the mansions, the distant hills, and the big broad boulevards all ending at the Pacific Ocean, which is of course the end of America.

When we finally got there and I got changed, Robert Lansdorp was sitting in a chair beside the court, all alone. He looked to me just like some mean old guy, hunched in a defensive crouch, maybe twisted up by cramps. He was talking on the phone—that’s why he was all bent over—but I did not realize this at first. I walked toward him, slowly, carefully. I said, “Hello, Robert?” He didn’t even look up, so I said it again, louder. “Hello, Robert?” I called out his name a few more times, put my bag down, and started to stretch, like I needed to warm up. I really didn’t know what to do. That’s when he finally acknowledged me. He did this by giving me one of those “Who the hell are you?” looks.

I said, “Hi, I’m Maria Sharapova. I’m here for a lesson.”

“Get your ass out on the court.”

That’s all he said. It was our very first conversation, and yet—maybe it was his tone of voice—I knew right away it was going to work out. Robert has his way of beating you down and making you feel like nothing, but I had my way of charming grumpy older men. Always have. It’s a sneaky little voice in my head that says, “I know how you are going to like me.”

I picked up my racket and went to the far side of the court. It took Robert five minutes to finally get out of his chair, groaning and cursing the entire time. Oh, fuck. Shit, fuck, shit. My father was standing right there, but he didn’t say a word. I looked at him like, “Thanks, Dad! Look at this lunatic! What a brilliant idea.” Robert finally got himself situated, set up, ready. He was holding a huge wire basket with maybe five hundred balls. I was on the far service line. That’s how I warmed up, by hitting balls back and forth from the service line. He scowled at me and said, “What the hell are you doing there?”

“I don’t know,” I said, almost laughing, because everything I did was apparently so wrong. “I thought I was warming up.”

It turned out he’s a coach who just feeds balls, one after another, like a machine. He doesn’t hit with you, he does not volley. He just feeds and feeds and feeds and you just hit and hit and hit. He shouted at me: “Get your ass on the baseline.”

OK. I got my ass on the baseline and he started feeding those perfect balls. It’s this incredible gift he has. He is able to endlessly feed balls with the same pace and rhythm forever. After an hour, you feel like you can return them with the same smooth, hard stroke with your eyes shut.

I spoke to Robert while working on this book. He is currently living in a house south of L.A., and from his kitchen he can sit with a cup of coffee and look out at Long Beach harbor, which is crowded with schooners and tankers from every part of the world. It puts him in a thoughtful mood. He likes to talk, even likes to remember. He’s saved memorabilia, small relics of our years together. Pictures and old rackets, even a collage that I made for him. (I guess I did do some collaging after all!) He talked about the old days calmly and happily, but of course it was not so calm and happy when it was happening. It was nuts.

I asked if he remembered the first time we met.

“Sure.”

“What was your impression?”

“I thought you were a skinny little thing, but you did run well. You had a weak forehand, such a weak forehand. You couldn’t hit the ball crosscourt. I remember Yuri asking me, at the end of that first practice, ‘Well, Lansdorp, what do you think about my daughter?’ I said, ‘She’s pretty good, Yuri, but her forehand sucks.’”

I wrote about Lansdorp in my diary. Here’s one of the first entries:

The greatest thing about Robert is that he’s a no-bullshit type guy. If you suck, he tells you you suck. If you’re out of shape, he tells you you’re out of shape. He doesn’t care if you are tired and can’t do it anymore. He makes you keep going and going.

Robert’s persona was really a front. It was an act, even a kind of test. If you were the sort of person who got easily offended, and couldn’t take criticism, it was better to find out right away. If you couldn’t take the tough words, then it wasn’t going to work out with you and Lansdorp. But I knew I could work with Robert, that he could work with me. He’s a weirdo but has a soft spot. He pretends to be intimidating, but that’s only when you don’t know him. You need to have been through a lot to really understand that guy. He’s obnoxious when you first meet him and has bad moments. But ever since I was young, I could handle difficult people. It’s something I developed during my childhood. I’ve always been able to take the best, skip the rest. It’s my philosophy.

I quickly fell into a new routine. In addition to my regular schedule at Bollettieri’s, I’d fly out to L.A. at the end of each month to work with Lansdorp for a week. At first, my father and I stayed in a cheap hotel near the Riviera Club. Later on, Robert asked a family whose kid he was teaching if it would be OK for me and my father to stay in their home while we were in L.A., to save a little money. The LaPortes kindly agreed. They lived in a big house in Palos Verdes and had two kids, Shane and Estelle. The first time we went to the house, a little girl with wavy-curly hair and freckles, no more than nine years old, opened the door. Her look was suspicious: Why was this blond, skinny girl and her father standing at her doorway with suitcases? But we bonded quickly. Probably because she could only play so many basketball games with her brother Shane. She became the closest thing to a younger sister I will ever have. She played some tennis, but mostly focused on school. On school days, I would patiently wait for her to wake up, then help her pick out an outfit. We would walk together for a while. She would go to her school and I would continue on to the public tennis courts behind the school to practice serves with my father. I could see her sitting in her classroom. I would wave to her and she would pretend not to notice so she didn’t get in trouble with the teacher.

At the end of each day, we would jump on the backyard trampoline until it got dark, or until my father would tell me I had to stop before I tired myself out—there was always the next day’s training to think about.

We made up a lot of games, pretend games. Our favorites were Bank, with a metal box register and handmade paper checks, and Sherlock Holmes, in which we staged a crime, then solved it. And when the Harry Potter books came out, we competed to see who could read them all the way through first.

We planned trips to Disneyland months in advance, mapping out each place we would go. Once, I asked Robert if he would give me Saturday off to go to Disneyland. He made me run side-to-sides, a hundred of them, just for talking about Disneyland. Then he let me go.

Eighteen years later, Estelle and I still plan our trips to Disneyland and still pick apart Harry Potter. It is a deep friendship. We are loyal and rely on each other. We may not be in the same city, or even in the same country, but nothing separates us.

Staying at her house made those trips fun and gave me something to look forward to—it wasn’t going to be all torture. Estelle really helped me through those years. I love her, and will always be grateful.

Robert’s practices were pretty much the same every time. That was the point of them. He believed in repetition. Doing the same thing again and again and again. Do it till it’s second nature. No matter what, he just kept feeding those balls. Forehand to backhand. Side to side. No mercy. When you’re hitting one ball, he’s already feeding you the next—it’s speeding toward the opposite side of the court and you have to run to get it. On some days, he was an absolute asshole. He would just pound and pound that ball until you thought you would die. He’d end each practice by feeding ten quick balls side to side, running you back and forth, back and forth. He called it “ten at the baseline.” We’d do that six or seven times. Then, just as I was heading off court, he’d say, “Where do you think you’re going, broad?” He loved that word, broad. Then he’d make you do another dozen from the baseline.

Lansdorp was not a sadist. There was a point to all that torture. Everything was done in the service of a philosophy; every drill had a reason, was taking the player somewhere. When I asked him to explain that philosophy, he laughed. “Well, you know me, Maria,” he said, smiling. “I just hate spin on a tennis ball. That’s what most modern players use. They hit the ball hard, then put a lot of spin on it to keep it in the court. It drops, like a sinker ball. I hate it. What I want is a good, hard, flat stroke. That’s what all that repetition is teaching. A flat stroke doesn’t have a lot of topspin. Flat strokes were big in the 1970s and 1980s, into the early 1990s, then a new, terrible style came in. I think it had to do with the new rackets and new grips. It changed everything. With the new grips, it’s easy to put a lot of spin on a ball. Too easy. The spin gets on there even when you don’t want it to. The kids who thrive on that can be hard to beat, but when they get to be fifteen or sixteen they hit a wall, because now they have to hit the ball harder and suddenly they can’t control the spin. You have to learn to hit flat when you’re young because you need to be fearless to do it, and the older you get, the more fear gets into your game. That’s why we did it again and again. You were learning to hit that hard, flat stroke.”

Once I’d acquired what Robert considered a suitably hard, flat stroke—it was all about getting into a nirvana-like hitting groove—we began to work on my accuracy, my court placement. There was nothing high-tech or modern about his method. There were no video cameras, or lasers, or algorithms. Robert simply taped empty tennis-ball cans a few inches above the net on either side of the court and told us to hit those “targets” as many times as we could. It was like trying to drive a tennis ball through a keyhole.

“You know, you have the record,” Robert told me recently.

“The record for what?”

“For hitting the target,” he said. “I put them just above the net because that really gives you a sense of the sweet spot, where the zone is. You didn’t like doing that in the beginning—no one does. Then, after about a year, you started getting into it. You’d actually ask me to set up the targets. That was very unusual. When you were maybe fifteen, you hit the target eight out of ten times. That’s still a record. Eight out of ten forehands. Justin Gimelstob hit eight out of ten backhands. One day, Anastasia Myskina, who later won the French Open, was at the club. She had a lesson, and, Maria, you were three courts away, playing a practice match. Myskina’s hitting the target, and, the way I worked, each time a player hit the target, I’d bang a tin can, ring it like a bell. One for one. Two for two. I get to four for four and you start screaming, ‘I know she’s not hitting the target! I know you’re faking it.’ Meanwhile, you never missed a beat in your own match. Crazy concentration. We were laughing so hard. You knew we were faking it—and we were! No other girl could hit that target eight for ten forehands.”

These drills gave a new pace and consistency to my game. It got to where I could just drive that ball, hard and flat, over and over again. This puts tremendous pressure on opponents. The assault never stops. I did not have a lot of court speed, but these shots could make up for it. Working with Lansdorp also gave me a new attitude, a terrific confidence. Robert was so certain about what he was doing that it made you just as certain. He was a guru. You could feel his presence in your head. It was a voice that said, “This is how it should be done. There is no question and there is no doubt.” And he’s proved it. Lansdorp has trained three world number ones. The fact that he could be such a difficult man only made it more special. I loved him partly because I felt like I could break down that cold barrier.

Once, at the end of a long practice, as I was leaving the court, he called me back.

He said, “Hey, broad.”

“What is it, Robert?”

He handed me a package.

“It’s that thing you won’t shut up about,” he said, frowning.

That’s how I got my first iPod.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, why the hell not?” said Robert.

That’s the thing about that man. He’d always surprise you.

When Robert Lansdorp celebrated his seventieth birthday, a bunch of his old students came back to pay their respects. Lindsay Davenport and Tracy Austin were there. Several of them got up to make toasts, to offer little tributes. They spoke about what they got from Robert. The ground strokes were mentioned of course, but the main thing, what people kept coming back to, was the attitude and confidence, the toughness, the determination to fight back even when everything looks bad. If you can survive Robert Lansdorp, they joked, you can survive anything.

It took two years, but Robert remade my tennis game. Or maybe remade is the wrong word. Maybe he just helped me find what had always been there but was dormant. I emerged from those lessons with a new confidence and a new mind. That’s how I made the transition from kid to adult. By age fourteen, I was already playing the game I play now.

* * *

Those years were marked by a failed experiment that still haunts me. It’s the kind of thing you dwell on late at night, asking yourself, “What if?”

Yuri believed a mistake had been made right at the beginning, when I first started playing. As I worked out with Lansdorp, as Yuri watched me hit forehand after forehand, backhand after backhand, he became convinced that I was by nature a lefty. “If you had been playing lefty from the first days, no one in the world could beat you,” he said.

On a visit to Sochi, he tracked down Yudkin and asked him, “How did you miss it? Couldn’t you see that she should be a lefty?”

“What do you want from me?” said Yudkin. “She came out on the court hitting the ball with her right hand. So, she was a righty. End of story. She decided that herself when she was five years old. No one knows anything better than a five-year-old knows herself.”

But Yuri only became more and more convinced: “You should be playing lefty, and there’s still time to fix it. It’s simply a question of will.”

Now and then, when I played lefty goofing around, it did feel natural. It was just so easy, so normal. It was ZING! The world humming, the gears turning, the stars lining up for the solstice. Then again, I do hold a pencil and a fork with my right hand. So maybe, or maybe not. The more I thought about it, the more confused I became.

My father asked Lansdorp: “You’ve been working with Maria, what do you think? Should she be playing righty or lefty?”

“I remember Yuri asking me this question,” Robert told me. “And I remember my answer. I said, ‘I don’t know, but she probably should be a right-hander because then her backhand will be world-class.’ Because you really could hit left-handed, Maria. Your ability to hit a left-handed forehand made your two-handed backhand look natural. Some people are not pure two-handers, that takes time to develop. But you were a pure two-hander from the first day I saw you. So what did I tell your father? What I tell everyone with an interesting idea: ‘Why not try it?’”

A few days later, my father told me to switch to my left hand.

“Why?”

“Because Yudkin messed it all up,” he said. “You really should be a lefty.”

“Yeah, but I play with my right hand,” I said.

“Look, Maria,” said my father, “if you play left-handed, you’ll be impossible to beat.”

I resisted for a few days but finally decided to give it a try. A real try. At the time, my father was sort of obsessed with Monica Seles and Jan-Michael Gambill. Each of those players had a crazy method. Instead of hitting a traditional forehand and backhand, they relied on two-handed backhands from both sides. When they approached a ball on their left, they would hit a left-hand dominated backhand. When they approached a ball on their right, they would hit a two-handed forehand. Yuri wanted me to play that way. It extends your range. You get to more balls in a position of strength. That’s what Yuri had in mind. He spent all his free time watching videos of Seles and Gambill.

So began this strange period when I played tennis as a lefty. Well, it was really a progression. At first, I tried playing as a pure lefty—a one-handed left-hand forehand and a two-handed backhand—but I just didn’t have the arm strength. So I went with all two-handers, that is, two-handed backhands on both sides, like Seles and Gambill played. It turned out that I could do it. Robert Lansdorp was impressed, and Yuri was happy, but Nick Bollettieri and many people at the academy were irritated. They’d spent so much time working with my right-hand forehand and my two-hand backhand and now it was suddenly back to square one. And I was confused. Not in my mind, but in my body. North was south, back was front. Arms and legs, feet and hands—I did not know what to do. This went on for three or four months, endless days of my father videotaping my practices followed by endless nights of my father watching those videotapes over and over again. It exists in my memory as the time I spent in an alternate reality, in the future that never happened, on a train that never left the station. What would life have been like as a lefty? Maybe worse. Maybe better. McEnroe, Connors, Laver—all lefties. I had to decide.

One night, at the end of a practice match at the academy, playing under the big lights, a smattering of people in the bleachers, Nick Bollettieri took me and my father aside. Nick had mostly left my game alone, but now he had something on his mind. He said, “Look, I don’t care what you do about this—not really. I think Maria will have great success lefty or righty. But you have to make a choice. Otherwise, she’s going to be half as good at both and not nearly as good at either.

“Maria, I know this is a very hard choice,” he added, looking only at me, “but you have to choose now or else it’s going to be too late. It’s not a choice for me, or your dad, or your mom, or Robert. It’s for you—only you.”

I was speechless, devastated. At that moment, I thought Nick was the meanest man on the planet. I was only twelve years old and I had to make a decision that might impact my entire future. I was crying when I got home. My mom asked me why. When I told her, she said, “Just remember which people make you cry.”

It shook my father up, too. It was as if he’d been slapped awake. Was he screwing me up? Was he putting everything in jeopardy? That’s the impression we got from Nick. Yuri was bugged, but he knew that Nick was right: a decision had to be made.

My father and I remember the next part differently. As I remember it, the decision, as Nick said it had to be, was left to me. Who else could know what it was like from the inside? I spent days and days going back and forth, choosing and then reversing that choice. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. Lefty or righty? Righty or lefty? To be or not to be? My mom and dad would come out onto the court and videotape me from different angles, helping me examine the question in every possible way. In the end, I decided to stick with what I knew, with what I am, with what I’ve always been. I’m a righty. If I’d been seven instead of twelve years old, maybe I would have chosen differently. But if I switched hands at twelve, then I’d really have been going back to square one. I would lose all those seasons and all those years of work and development, all those hours with Yudkin, and Bollettieri, and Sekou, and Robert, all those matches on all those blistering days. I just didn’t have that much strength in my left arm. I had never developed it. That was especially evident when I hit a lefty serve. I’d be taking a big step back. In the end, I just did not have the energy or desire or faith to make such a radical change. I told my father, and Nick, and Robert, “I’ve always been a righty. That’s what I’m going to keep on being.”

“Good choice,” said Nick. “Now let’s get back to work.”

This lefty-righty adventure, even without the permanent switch, did actually affect my game. First of all, it really built up my backhand. In the old days, a coach would tie a young basketball player’s right hand behind his back to develop his left. That’s what it was like for me: all those weeks of playing lefty really worked up and developed my backhand. Like Robert said, it became my weapon. Backhand, down the line, my favorite shot.

My father remembers the decision being made in a different way. (At times, when we talk about the past, it’s as if we’ve been living in two different worlds.) He says the choice was made not by me but by him. By him! “How could such an important decision be left to a child?” he asks, shrugging. He had indeed been shaken by Nick Bollettieri and what he said on the court that day—“You have to make a choice. Otherwise, she’s going to be half as good at both and not nearly as good at either”—but he couldn’t make up his mind. Lefty was like the moonshot—it could transform everything—but righty was logical and smart. Look at how much success I’d already had with my right hand. So he hesitated and delayed.

“What were you waiting for?” I asked.

“What I’m always waiting for,” he told me. “A sign.”

It finally came at the end of dinner at a friend’s house—a tennis friend. Yuri held a dessert dish in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. He wandered into the living room, put the dish and cup on the coffee table, and sat on the couch to look at a stack of tennis magazines. He flipped through one at random. It fell open to the horoscope page. “Astrology Corner,” he told me. “And it said, right there, in black and white, I swear, Maria, it said: ‘The number one women’s tennis player in the world will have the initials M. S. and she will be right-handed.”

Yuri never mentioned my left hand again.

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