Unstoppable: My Life So Far

NINE

I started playing in big tournaments—all over the world. I was still an amateur, but I was on the road to the pro tour, a few steps away. Only the best youth players in the world make it into these tournaments. Only the best of the best make it out. It’s like the eye of a needle. Just a handful get through to the next stage. It was a crucial passage that, for me, could not have come at a worse time. I was fourteen and one of my biggest dreams was about to come true. I began to grow. And grow. And grow. It seemed to happen all at once, in the course of a long summer night. You go to bed in one body and you wake up in another. Stretched out. Long and clumsy and thin—eight inches added just like that. I’d top out at six foot two.

But you know what they say about too much of a good thing. I was suddenly in possession of an entirely new body, but it was gangly and out of my control. And it hurt! Adding all those inches in such a short period of time made my bones ache. And suddenly I was looking down at everyone. I felt awkward, even embarrassed about this at first. I later came to love my height and see it as a gift. I love being tall. That’s probably why I wear high heels. Also because I love the shoes. I am not going to let my height prevent me from wearing exactly what I want to wear. If you have a problem with a woman who towers over you, it’s your problem—not mine. But it was not easy at first. I had a new body and had yet to figure out how to control it. I was uncoordinated, not in command of my own limbs. I could still practice with intensity, but in matches, my body would betray me, go haywire. And this was at a time when I’d started to get wild cards into the big professional tournaments. Because IMG sponsored certain tournaments, they had wild cards to give to clients. With a wild card, I could skip the qualifying rounds and jump directly to the main draw. So, bang! I was on the big, big stage, but I felt so disoriented in my body. I’d have a goal and know exactly what I had to do, but I just couldn’t execute. It was as if my hands and legs, my arms and feet, were not connected to my brain.

The inevitable result was a string of embarrassing defeats, my first real losing streak. I lost, and lost everywhere. I lost in front of small crowds and big crowds. I lost in the daytime and I lost at night. I lost on hard courts and clay. I’d feel fine in practice and then go out for the match and everything would fall apart. I remember losing so many matches in a row, one after another after another. I remember walking through the halls of stadiums, hotel corridors, crying. I remember the way the other girls looked at me—less with respect than with pity, with joy disguised as compassion, looking down on someone they had once feared. I remember thinking, “What’s happening?” My parents were aware of it, too. I had done so well up to this point, risen through each age group ranking, into the final rounds nearly every time. Now this! What a struggle. They tried to help me, but there is only so much another person can do. In the end, it’s something you have to figure out yourself. Many promising careers have ended this way. You probably don’t know their names, or their sad stories. You worry that your name will be added to that list. It was a nightmare, full of uncertainty, but, looking back, I can see that it was ultimately advantageous. Anyone can be composed and cool while winning, when everything is going according to plan. But how do you deal with a losing streak? That’s the big question—that’s what separates the professionals from the cautionary tales.

There really is so much more to learn from losing than from winning—about the game and about yourself. Do you get up when you’ve been knocked down? Do you have it in you to press ahead when your work suddenly seems pointless, when you are playing the game just for the game itself, when you worry that you are letting everyone down? Do you get up one more time than you’ve been knocked down? Or do you quit? That’s the toughness that Yudkin had been talking about all those years before. No one really knows how they will react to disaster until the disaster is on top of them.

I never lost confidence, not entirely. I guess I was too young to fully understand confidence as a concept, to know it was a thing to be had—I just had it. There was never a match I entered not believing that I would win. Even when I lost, and I lost many times, I still believed I was moving ahead, on the path, following the plan. Just keep hitting—that’s what I told myself. Flat, deep strokes, quick feet before every shot, game after game. Eventually, something will break.

I don’t know exactly how long it went on like this—I could probably look it up and count the losses, but who’d want to do that, even in the spirit of being complete? It’s enough to say it felt like forever. It seemed like nothing would ever change. And then, one day, it did. My brain finally began to understand my body. It didn’t happen during a victory, and it didn’t happen all at once. It happened during a loss. To a spectator, it would have looked like just another failure, but something important had changed. It was the kind of subtle shift you’d have to really know tennis to notice.

Robert Lansdorp can name the match, or thinks he can. We’d been working together all along. If he was worried about my losing streak—he later told me that he was—he did not say so at the time. He didn’t back off either, or let me resort to the topspin that could probably have made my life a lot easier. He was like a guy whose car has overheated halfway across America: we’re closer to the Pacific than to the Atlantic, so let’s just keep on keeping on till we get there. “You were fourteen years old and struggling,” he told me. “Your father was worried and IMG was worried and everyone was thinking, and then you got into this big tournament at this crucial moment and I just wanted to fly out there and see for myself. Was it really as bad as they all said? It was in Sarasota, your first professional event with prize money. I flew out on my own dime, which, if you know me, tells you something.”

I remembered the exact tournament Robert was talking about. It was probably my first as a pro. I actually had a chance to win some money! That might seem like a big shift, but you hardly notice it when it happens. It’s still the same courts and the same players and the same everything. Robert and I sat down before the match, but he did not want to talk about tennis at all. He talked about music instead, iPods, and the beach. He asked, “What do you want for your birthday?” He said it was important, now and then, to stop caring. Then he gave me a guitar. I still have it, a beautiful little acoustic guitar that I never did learn to play. And a gift certificate for lessons. He said, “That way, instead of getting yourself all wound up about a match, you can just pick up the guitar and play.”

“You were playing an older girl, much older, bigger and stronger and seasoned and all of that,” Robert told me. “This was on clay. I watched each point very carefully. Nowadays, someone watching those games would tell you that you played dumb, because you hit every ball just as hard as you could, low and flat, exactly like I taught you. There’s a lower margin of error with all that topspin. I call it Academy Ball. It’s all about the averages. ’Cause anytime you go to an academy, I don’t care whose academy it is, when you hit the ball hard and low or make an error, they’ll tell you to hit it high over the net with a lot of topspin, especially on clay. But you’d have none of it—you kept hitting those blazing low-margin, high-reward shots. It took guts and the kind of stubbornness that’s all-important. It took the very best kind of stupidity.”

I was in a funk after the match—I’d lost in three sets—but Robert was smiling when he came into the clubhouse.

He said, “Maria, if you keep playing like that, you have nothing to worry about.”

I said, “What are you talking about? I lost.”

He said, “You lost only because you made a few too many errors, you were slow getting up to a few balls.”

“You had no fear, even at fourteen, when you were playing your first match on the professional tour, at night, on a bad clay court, and things weren’t going well,” he said not long ago. “You were not choking, you were not getting nervous. That loss told me more than any victory could have. Because you did not back off or give in. You did not say, ‘Oh, let me hit some high balls with topspin.’ You just kept going for it and going for it. That’s when I knew that Yuri was right. You were going to be the number one player in the world.”

Of course, there’s the spirit, then there’s the body. Which is just another way of saying: yes, my attitude was important in the turnaround, but not as important as my serve. To that point, my serve was the same as it had always been. It was the same serve I’d had since I was eight or nine years old. I didn’t know it, but it was about to change. This happened after a Challenger in Pittsburgh. Challengers are second-tier tournaments put on by the ITF, the International Tennis Federation. If you win enough Challengers—it’s all about accumulating points—you can earn a place on the WTA tour, which is the big time.

I had just turned fifteen and things were starting to fall into place. As Robert promised, my ground strokes were becoming a weapon. I’d lost in the final in Pittsburgh, and afterward, I saw a look on my father’s face that could not have meant anything good. I was talking to Max when Yuri burst in, almost shouting. “Masha,” he said. “You will never serve like that again.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Your serve is weak,” said Yuri. “It’s fine for a little girl, but you are no longer a little girl. You are growing into a powerful woman and you must serve like one. Your game is not finesse. It’s power.”

“Why now?” asked Max.

“Because now she is strong enough to have a real serve,” said my father.

In the following days, we flew back to Florida and started working on my serve with one of the academy coaches, Peter McGraw, an Australian. We worked at Bollettieri’s, as the sun went down and the bugs swarmed, hitting baskets of balls. The fear of their stingers gave an urgency to the sessions. We spent hours and hours adjusting my serve—hitting the ball, then figuring out what I’d done right and what I’d done wrong by watching me on video. We made changes, then changed those changes until the serve that would define the first part of my career finally began to emerge. It was not an entirely new serve, of course. It was a refinement of the serve I’d developed with Yuri years before. But it made use of my new body—height, strength, broad shoulders and arms, flexibility. I’m strangely flexible, especially in my shoulder. This let me reach so far back when winding up to serve that my knuckles occasionally brushed against my spine. I turned into a human slingshot, arm whipping forward. It generated a kinetic energy that sent the ball whistling. I had a second serve that was slower and more certain for when I needed it, but it was that first serve that really enabled me to win. I had transformed a shot that was mediocre, neutral, into a weapon, one that I could rely on when I found myself down in a match. Struck just right, it was devastating. It meant free points. It meant starting each service point from a position of power, dictating what happened from there. It meant my service games were quicker, my matches shorter. To beat me, you had to break my serve, which did not break as easily as it had before. That’s when I became dangerous. That’s when all those defeats turned into victories. At age fifteen, I began to win, and win consistently. My serve propelled me into a golden era, some of the best years of my career. But I would eventually pay a price for that serve and the tremendous pressure it put on my shoulder.

My father had been waiting for a new sign—some indication that I was ready to compete in the big tournaments on the big stage of the professional tour. Technically, I was already a pro. I’d played for money. I was ranked and I was known in the world of junior tennis. But I’d yet to play in the top-tier tournaments, the majors covered by the press and followed by the fans. More money, more pressure. You fail there, it’s a whole different level of complication and consequence.

The sign came on a trip we made back to Russia. It probably wasn’t my first trip back, but it was the first trip I really remember. We visited Moscow and stayed in Sochi. And we traveled. We saw my grandparents, friends, and relatives. It was strange to stand in those little houses and little apartments again. Everything was so much bigger in America. I will always be Russian in my heart and in my soul, yet there is no hiding the fact that I spent many of my key early years in Florida and California, watching American TV and wanting American products. Some part of my identity will always be from the USA. It’s the most comfortable culture for me, where I really feel at ease. I understood this only when I went back to Russia. That’s the thing about living life on the circuit, training from such an early age—you make a dozen different hotels and apartments and countries your home, which is another way of saying you kind of live nowhere. Everything drifts by. You never let yourself get too deep or have too much fun because you know that the day after tomorrow you’ll be gone. Only the tennis rackets remain, always by your side. People think it’s a glamorous life. And, in a way, it is—maybe it is. I am not convinced. It can also be confusing and lonely.

I played tennis every day on that trip back to Russia. Yuri made sure of that. We had to stick to the schedule, the regimen. That meant waking up just after dawn, stretching and running, then finding a court. I’ve always believed that you have to train harder than you play. That’s how you win—so that the match, when it comes, comes as a kind of break. And you train, in this world, not for one match or for one tournament or for one season, but for an entire career, which will continue until they make you leave the last court on the final day.

At the time, it was still just me and Yuri, out there each morning, hitting. We went back to Gomel at the end of the trip—the land of radiation. We stayed with my grandparents, walked through the streets of the little town, wandered in the park and forest. Yuri arranged a match for me at the public courts where he’d first started playing. He set me up to play against this big guy who was studying me from the far court, waving a big hand in a big greeting. I don’t really remember what he looked like, but he was tall and square-jawed with a five o’clock shadow and thick black hair. I did not know it at the time, but this guy had been the standout on Yuri’s old tennis scene, the unbeatable star. Yuri had been defeated by him and had seen him defeat every other good player in the area. I did not know any of this until later, much later, but this man stood as a kind of benchmark for my father, a symbol. He was to be my test. How would I stand up against this old-time hero? “If you can play with him, Masha, you are good,” Yuri told me. “If you can take more than five games off him, you are ready for whatever is waiting for you.”

I was fifteen years old, or close. This man must have been forty. He had an old-fashioned racket and a big ground stroke that started at his heels and ended in the sky. The court was scuffed and slow and the man grunted as we played, but I grunted louder. He was not a pushover, but he was also not all that my father remembered. I took his best shots and returned them on the rise, hitting the ball just as Robert Lansdorp would have wanted me to—hard and flat and just a whisker above the net. As the games went by, the man became agitated, then annoyed, then angry. He could not believe what was happening. Was he really losing to this kid, this girl?

We played two sets. I won them both. It was close, something like 7–5, 7–6. The angrier this man became, the happier my father got. It was as if that anger were a gauge. Yuri watched the needle climb and smiled. When it touched the red, he was fully satisfied. As we left the courts, in a dank building with weak yellow lights, echoing with the sound of balls, he put his arm over my shoulder as if to say, “Masha, you are ready.”

My life as a professional tennis player really began in the spring of 2001, soon after I had turned fourteen. The first tournaments were small-time: a court on the outskirts of some medium-sized city, a few thousand to the winner. I won several of these and began to move up the ladder, to bigger showcases and larger stages. First were junior national tournaments, then the junior Grand Slams. I was flying commercial airlines all over Europe, as cheaply as possible, flying, as Yuri would say, “in the toilet.” We’d also travel by train, in the rear cars, with our cash and passports safely out of reach of any potential thieves. To prepare, I would get to town a couple of days before the tournament. I was almost always playing girls who were older than me, which was really nothing new. At thirteen, I’d reached the final of the Junior Italian Open, where I lost to a seventeen-year-old.

I made my WTA debut as a fourteen-year-old in 2002. This was the Pacific Life Open, now Indian Wells. I beat Brie Rippner in the first round, 5–7, 6–1, 6–2. In the second round, I got to play Monica Seles, which was a big, big moment for me. I was fourteen, and Seles had just turned twenty-eight. She’d been the greatest player in the world. She was also a hero, less for me than for my father, who’d studied her two-handed game for hours and hours on videotape. It was close to ten years beyond the terrible stabbing she had suffered between games in Hamburg, but it was still Monica Seles—one of the best in the game. She’d won nine Grand Slams and spent months and months at number one. I could not keep my eyes off her. It was so strange, being on the same court. It was almost like I had fallen into the television set. I was surprised to find myself on the wrong side of the screen! I was dazzled, too, which might help explain the beating I took, 6–0, 6–2. I won only two games that afternoon. But there were moments when I forgot who she was and who I was and just played. It was a huge match for me because it taught me two important things: one, that I could in fact play with the best of them; and two, that I belonged. It also showed me just how far I still had to go, how much better I still had to become. Seles made it to the semifinals of that tournament, losing just a handful of games along the way. She lost to Martina Hingis in the semis, who then lost to Daniela Hantuchová in the final. There were so many levels, so many people to beat. I don’t remember much about that match except the score line and Mary Joe Fernández giving me a hug in the locker room after the match when she saw me crying.

I spent most of 2002 and 2003 as a junior because there were only a limited number of pro tournaments I was allowed to play. I was still too young to play a full WTA schedule. By the end of the season, I was number six in the junior ranks. People were starting to know my name. Coaches would show up at my matches to watch me play and search for weaknesses. They devised strategies to beat me. My big weakness at that time? I was slow and not powerful enough to make up for that lack of speed. I needed to get stronger. I needed to mature.

As I became known, so did Yuri. This is just the way of things on the tennis tour, especially in the juniors. It’s the mothers and the fathers you remember, the tennis parents, each of whom seems to stand for their kid. Yuri struck many people as a typical crazy Russian father, hypercontrolling and iron-willed. This was not true, or not entirely true. It was just a caricature that came across in newspaper stories.

Yes, my father did pace on the sidelines. He did whisper in my ear as I came out of the stadium tunnel. He did sit in the stands, giving me signals, which pissed off everyone—coaching is not allowed during games, especially not from the stands. But he wasn’t coaching from the stands, not at all. He was giving me reminders. I’d get so caught up and focused during matches that I’d forget to drink and eat, and my blood sugar would crash and I’d get dehydrated. By late in the second set, the world would start to reel and my stomach heave. So, during the changeover, when I looked up at the stands to see my father, he might hold up a bottle of water, which meant “Drink,” or a banana, which meant “Eat.” For the most part, my father was just a classic tennis parent. And, the fact is, you probably need someone like that if you’re going to make it to the top. Maybe that’s the case with every sport, but it seems especially true of the non-team sports, those games to which you have to dedicate your life when you are still too young to really know anything. It usually takes a strong parent. Who else is going to get out there day after day and make the kid work when the kid only wants to go back to sleep or play video games? No seven-year-old in the world will do that on her own, and no twelve-year-old will stay with it when things go bad, as they always sometimes do, unless someone is right there cheering them along. In other words, you might not like all the antics and the TV time of the tennis parent, but, without those parents, you would not have the Williams sisters or Andre Agassi or me. The tennis parent is the will of the player before the player has formed a will of her own.

When I look back, it’s the big moments that stand out, the turning points. The rest of it fades into a kind of gray wash—statistics on a scorecard, numbers on a page. For me, the first big marker—it stands like the entry gate to my adult career—was the 2002 Australian Open.

I was playing in the junior tournament. I did not go in with a spotlight on my back. I was very young and skinny and people did not expect much from me on a stage that big. They knew I was good, but considered me more of a prospect than a threat. I still seemed to be about two or three years away. But I knew something that the sportswriters and tennis people did not. I knew that something had happened to me, something had changed. It was a deep-down thing, like the gears had shifted in the dark and I woke up in the morning thinking, “My God, I can beat anyone.”

This was my first Grand Slam in the juniors, one of the four major tournaments you must win to be at the very top of the game. (The others are the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open.) It was the first time I’d experienced the electric atmosphere of the big time. All those people and all those reporters and all those players, the best in the sport, gathered together for a week of the roughest sort of competition. I loved it. It made me nervous and it made me excited. And happy, because I knew I was exactly where I belonged. My early matches flew by like a dream. It seemed as if I won them all in straight sets, though that can’t be true—I can’t remember the last time I got through a tournament without a three-set match. But there was a lot of winning, and it left me with a lot of time to explore and soak up the atmosphere. Between matches, I watched the best games of the main draw, the pros. I loved the energy of center court ten minutes before the start of a big contest. Jennifer Capriati, Kim Clijsters, and Monica Seles. But even then, a million years ago, the dominant players—here they are again!—were Venus and Serena Williams. The sisters. But even if I watched them play, which I hardly ever did—unless I was on the other side of the net—it was in an abstract way, not all that interested. I looked at their game the way you might look at a tough math problem that somebody else has to solve. I’d yet to realize that all these players, all these problems, were my problems. It was personal. I’d have to solve every one of them if I wanted to get where I needed to go.

I kept winning my matches, that was the main thing. A week went by and just like that, I was in the final. I later learned that, at fourteen years and nine months, I was the youngest player to ever make it to any final in the Australian Open.

I played Barbora Strýcová in the final. Not only did she beat me, but she was dating my first-ever junior crush, Philipp Petzschner. I didn’t like that—at all. Barbora was a tough Czech who’d later climb as high as number nine in the world. She was a whirlwind, coming at me from every part of the court, returning every flat, hard ground stroke with a little dink that grew maddening as she won more and more points. It’s amazing. You spend months and years getting yourself into a match, and then, if you don’t slow down the world and really grab hold of the moment, it’s over before you know it.

I did not win a game in the first set. As I walked back to the baseline after the water break, I heard my father yell to me in Russian: Do you know what you’re losing? You’re losing a fifty-thousand-dollar Nike bonus! It was the first time I had ever heard my father speak about earnings. I managed to fight back and take five games in the second set, but it didn’t matter. Or, if it did matter, it was only for my self-respect. But even with this disappointing finish, I knew it had been a great tournament for me. The youngest player to ever reach the final! There was a feeling that I was already so much further along than I was expected to be, that I was years ahead of schedule.

But the highlight of the year—and it’s not even close—was Wimbledon. That tournament had always felt special to me, though I’d never actually been there. It stood above and beyond all the others—probably because my father never stopped talking about it. It was the ultimate prize and the ultimate place. It glowed in his imagination. The Australian Open, the U.S. Open, the French Open? Yes, they were all Grand Slams and all mattered, but Wimbledon mattered more. The others were sporting events, money and crowds. Wimbledon was something grander. It was the Queen and her retinue. It was aristocrats. It was the red coats of the royal guard, the lush grounds and epic battles on the green grass. It was history and empire. It was England. If you grew up in a poor Belorussian town, like my father did, if you watched that tournament (if you could watch it at all) on a flickering black-and-white TV set, if your eyes chased Borg and McEnroe all over the screen, then Wimbledon stood out. Yuri had conveyed this specialness to me from the time I was small. Every match mattered, every tournament deserved my full attention and best effort, but Wimbledon was—still is—of another order. It’s the soul of the game. It’s everything.

This year, 2002, was my first experience of that special place. Was I excited? Of course. It was a story I’d been listening to my entire life; now I got to walk into its pages. My mother came along, which was unusual. Wimbledon itself is a suburb in southwest London. There’s a main street and outskirts, ancient trees and shady places, bed-and-breakfasts and a few hotels, but most players rent a house for the two weeks that they will—hopefully!—be playing.

We rented a tiny cottage that first year, right in the village. I loved it from the first day. It was all that I had imagined. I’d wake up with the sun streaming into my tiny room, or cover myself with the heavy quilt against the chill of another gray morning. Then I’d head down the stairs, open the door, and there, on the cute little front porch, just waiting for me, was a chilled bottle of fresh milk! What a great break from the usual round of hotels and locker rooms. The village was jammed with boutiques and cafés and bakeries. It was a fantasy of another life, how I might have lived had I been born in a different place, at a different time. One of the restaurants—this little Thai place—kept catching my eye. It was always packed, always had a wait. We never went, but I kept it in mind: if—when—I was back in Wimbledon, I was going to try it.

The clubhouse was filled with gossipy players. Reporters waited outside the door. This was a new experience for me. Who cared what I had to say? The lockers were small and the bathrooms were… yuck. When I joked about this, one of the other girls told me that the top sixteen seeded players are put in another locker room, a dream place of plush velvet where the porcelain shines. Capitalism! The West! They always give you something practical to play for beyond just the prestige and money. You are not playing only for cash. You are playing for a locker room with private bathtubs! And fresh plump strawberries! And a decent place to hang your jacket!

It was a great tournament for me. I did not lose until I reached the junior final, where I was beaten, in three sets, by another Russian, Vera Dushevina. But that’s not what sticks in my mind. What sticks in my mind is what happened after, as I was changing in front of my dank little locker. I’d tossed my stuff in a bag and was about to head back to the cottage, but just as I was leaving, a tournament official handed me an invitation. It turned out that all those players—men and women, juniors and pros—who make it to the final are invited to the Wimbledon Ball, a big gala right out of a storybook (or so I thought), where the Duke of This and the Lady of That are trailed by retinues and dance with the winners and losers as an orchestra plays a mazurka and the moon swells over England.

The woman who gave me the invitation was just standing there, hovering, watching as I read, and, here’s the key thing, not leaving.

I looked up at her, smiled, and said, “It sounds nice.”

“Will you be attending, madam?”

“I’d like to go,” I told her, “but I don’t have a dress.”

She said, “That will be taken care of,” and snapped her fingers, or gave a signal of some sort, and out of nowhere a man appeared with a huge selection of gowns, which he spread out on a table. I chose a long one, covered in beads, and left.

The grounds of Wimbledon were deserted as I headed back to the cottage. Fog crept along the pathways. The tournament was over. Just about all the other players had packed up and left. It’s a strange thing that happens when you start to get deep into tournaments. You suddenly find yourself in a lot of empty spaces, empty halls and empty locker rooms. The crowds of players and families and coaches begin to disappear. By the quarterfinals of a tournament, only a handful of survivors remain. The better you do, the smaller the world becomes. I remember having this strange feeling that night as I left. It was déjà vu in reverse. I remember turning around and looking at the buildings in the fog and having a feeling that I’d be there again. And not just as a junior.

Yuri was reading the newspaper when I got in. He did not notice the gown, which I hung up in a hall closet. Without looking up at me, he said, “What do you want to do for dinner? I’m thinking we should try that Indian place.”

“Sorry,” I told him. “But I’ve got plans.”

“What plans?”

My mother helped me get dressed. We had a special moment looking at each other in a big mirror in that little cottage, laughing and telling jokes. That was easily the best moment of the night. The ball itself was highly disappointing.

There is one thing I do remember, though. Everyone came into the big room together—everyone except the men’s and women’s singles champions, who made their appearance only after all the others had been seated. They came in one at a time, each making a grand entrance through huge, ornate doors and between the tables as those in the room gasped, then cheered. I was at the juniors’ table, which was like the kids’ table at a wedding. We were set up right beside the entrance. Just as I started to relax, I heard the clapping, that thunderous applause. Serena Williams had won the championship that year. She did it by beating her sister Venus in the final. She’d already started to separate herself from all the other players, and had begun that crazy run of dominance. She squeezed every bit of glory out of her grand entrance, head held high, shoulders back, beaming. Cheers and cheers and cheers. People started getting to their feet. It was a standing ovation. The girl next to me, whoever that was—I can’t remember—banged me on the shoulder and said, “Get up! Get up! It’s Serena Williams!” I wanted to get up, but my body just would not let me. It was as if I were stuck in that chair, staring at Serena through the crowd of people, with a single thought in my head: “I am going to get you.”