In April 2003, I turned sixteen and was finally old enough to play on the pro tour full-time. I was almost as tall as I would get, but I was still filling out. I needed to get stronger, though, and regain my coordination. I’d seen far too many talented players fade in the third set not to know that. Strength equals stamina, and stamina is everything in the tough matches.
My father traveled with me on the tour. Now and then, my mother would join us for one of the big tournaments, but she just could not stand the stress of the events, sitting in the stands, with no control and nothing to do but watch. She would ask me, “How can anyone hit the net when the net is only a few feet tall and you have the whole sky above?” It was the same with Nick Bollettieri and Robert Lansdorp. Otherwise it was just me and my father, as it had been from the beginning, just the two of us making our way from tournament to tournament, city to city, hotel to hotel, from North America to Asia to Europe and back to North America. It’s a slog. It’s endless. It’s around the world in eighty days. You visit the entire world but see none of it. You live in a bubble on the professional tour. It’s always the same faces, the same rivalries, the same feuds. It’s always the same day, again and again.
It took me some time to find a rhythm on the tour, which is probably why I struggled so much at the start of that pro year. The season began, as it always does, at the Australian Open, where I did not win a single match. It felt like I didn’t even win a game. All I remember is the long plane flight, the hotel, the losing, and the feeling of emptiness that rushes in like a tide in the aftermath of losing. Did we travel all this way just to live through that bleak afternoon? It was the same with the French Open, the next Grand Slam, played early in the summer. I moved into the hotel, spent days on the practice courts, getting ready, going through my routine, only to get out there and lose. I’d like to say that I at least enjoyed Paris, devoured the museums and restaurants, but no, no, I did not. The fact is, no matter the country, when you lose, you always find yourself in the same bad place. I still had a lot to figure out before I could really compete on the pro tour. I was still a kid, just turned sixteen, learning. I mean, what were other girls my age doing? What lessons were they “taking away,” as my coaches told me to do?
“You must try to understand why you lost,” my father explained. “You must try to figure out what exactly went wrong. Then, once you’ve figured it out, you must forget all of it. You must remember it, then you must forget.” Remember, forget. Remember, forget. That way, when you find yourself in the same situation again, you will take the same stupid chance, only this time it will work. It’s what Robert Lansdorp meant by “having guts.” It’s what Yuri Yudkin meant by “being tough.” Do you turtle? Do you fold up like a card table? Do you become a safe player, relying on high-percentage shots, or do you go right back out there and take the same crazy risk all over again? Do you remember? Do you forget? Meanwhile, I was winning enough matches in the smaller tournaments between the Grand Slams to push me up the rankings. Very quickly, I was in the top hundred. By the time we reached Wimbledon that June, I was ranked forty-seventh in the world.
Wimbledon felt like a rebirth. I’ve always gotten such a jolt from the pomp of that place. It was a great relief to get out of the hotels and into the perfect little town, where you could lead something like a normal life. It’s almost like a village in a train set, a toy town, with gingerbread houses and mansard roofs and narrow attic windows with glass so old it’s warped but still reflects the sun, the streets, straight and curved, the clop of horses that makes you feel like you are back in the nineteenth century, the awnings over the shops and the light that comes on in the restaurants at nightfall. And the courts! And the grass on those courts! I loved getting off the red clay of Europe and back onto the English grass. The speed of those grass courts, the way the ball glides low along the court, makes all the difference. I spent my earliest years in Sochi on clay. It was not like the red clay of France, not like that fine loam. It was a hard gray clay in Sochi, and it quickly could turn to muck. On a wet day, you’d come off the court dirty with grime. But I was soon playing almost entirely on hard courts in southern Florida, where the game is so quick you might as well be playing on glass. That’s my native surface. But grass, especially the grass in Wimbledon as it was fifteen years ago, soon became my favorite.
I got into the tournament as a wild card, a direct entry into the main draw. They’re usually given to players on the rise, young stars, former champions, or local favorites. It gives the agency a certain power. They can wait for a client to slowly climb their way into the big time or they can simply reach down, Zeus-like, and deliver them to the grand stage. It was my first time in the main draw. All my memories were from Junior Wimbledon—junior matches in the junior tournament, the kids’ table at the ball, chewing ice as Serena made that grand entrance. I played Ashley Harkleroad in the first round. An American, Ashley was ranked thirty-ninth in the world when the tournament began. I’d yet to win a single Grand Slam match at this point. In other words, I was seemingly out of my depth. And yet everything clicked. I lost only three games in that match. I got stronger with each point, and it was all over in less than an hour.
Apparently, I was really screaming when I hit the ball, so much so that, near the end, someone in the stands mocked me, calling out, “Louder.” I don’t even know I’m doing it. The noise just rises from some place deep inside me, meets the ball, and sends that ball into the world just as much as my forehand or my backhand. Without my realizing it, this was becoming a thing. In the previous tournament in Birmingham, a couple of weeks before the championships, I was facing Nathalie Dechy. It was on a back court with a few plastic chairs lined up for the spectators, one of the earlier rounds. In the middle of the first set, her husband called over the tournament supervisor and complained that I was grunting too loudly. They told him they couldn’t do anything about it. Following the match, which I won in straight sets, Dechy’s husband came up to my coach. He apologized, saying I really impressed him and that he would never complain about my grunting again.
After the match against Harkleroad, on TV they described me as a “Russian sensation,” which is funny, considering this was the first Grand Slam match I’d ever won. They also talked about all the Russian players who’d suddenly “appeared on the scene.” Eighteen of us were at Wimbledon that year. I had felt as if I’d been living my own life and making my own decisions, but apparently I had just been part of a wave, propelled by a force even stronger than my father.
I played one of those Russians in the second round, Elena Bovina, a big girl, over six foot two, with a strong two-handed backhand. She’d already won a handful of tournaments that year, but I was riding a kind of crest, building toward the greatest tennis in my life. I beat her in straight sets, again losing just four games all afternoon. A lot of that match I won with my serve, which, on the grass, was turning into a weapon.
The third round—that was the first big test I faced on the pro tour. I was facing off against Jelena Dokic, the number four player in the world. In 1999, she had famously annihilated Martina Hingis, then number one in the world, on this same court, in straight sets, 6–2, 6–0. As far as I know, that was the only time a number one had ever lost to a qualifier at Wimbledon. She was older than me, more mature, and really in her prime in 2003. She was considered a contender in every tournament she entered. She hit every ball as hard as she could, and they went all over the court. It sometimes felt impossible to keep up. And she had a crazed tennis father all her own, the famous Damir Dokic, who kept pushing Jelena to switch nationality: from Serbian to Australian, from Australian back to Serbian. I was supposed to lose, then be happy and satisfied that I’d made it so far. Instead, to my own disbelief, I won, in straight sets, 6–4, 6–4, which made me even happier. That night, we finally tried the Thai place. It was delicious.
I played Svetlana Kuznetsova in the fourth round. It was tense, even before the match began, mostly because this, too, was Russian versus Russian, and who would be the best, who would carry the banner and so on. Svetlana was a few years older than me, and her father had been an Olympic athlete and an Olympic coach, which is not nothing. She had access to the kind of experience that most of us have to acquire through years of heartbreak and defeat. I had come into the tournament as a wild card, but I surprised her. That was turning out to be the theme of the week. I was surprising everyone, especially myself. It was supposed to be a walkover for Kuznetsova, because she was a counterpuncher and would retrieve every powerful shot I would hit, and I had real problems with counterpunchers when I was young. It was supposed to be a walkover but it turned into a dogfight. You might beat me, but it won’t be easy. It came down to the third set. She won the match, but it was one of those rare times I was not crushed by the defeat. In fact, I was encouraged, even invigorated. It was one of those strange matches where the loser actually comes away more satisfied than the winner, thinking, “I can win,” while the winner is thinking, “I’m not so sure.” Kuznetsova was knocked out by Justine Henin in the quarterfinals. Henin then lost to Serena Williams, who once again beat her sister Venus to become Wimbledon champion.
I had made it into the second week of Wimbledon, which was a huge accomplishment for a sixteen-year-old. Much of the frenzy of the first week has died down by the quarterfinals. As players lose and leave, Wimbledon changes, becomes calmer. My memory of leaving the complex for the last time that year is still vivid. It was quiet, the buildings and the courts and the paths were empty. In the daytime, with all the crowds, you really don’t get a good look at Wimbledon; all you see is people. But I saw it now, I really saw it. It must have been 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. I remember turning around and looking back and just taking in the green ivy on the fences and the brick and the lawns and being in awe of how still and beautiful it was. I was just standing there, the seconds going by, and the mood of the place overwhelmed me. I felt its specialness deep in my bones. I didn’t compare it with my expectations, because I had no expectations of Wimbledon—nobody had really painted this picture for me. None of my coaches, not my parents. My father had always told me this is the top, this is where you want to be, but he never really managed to explain why. Likely, he couldn’t put it into words. But now I understood what he meant.
I won my first tournament as a professional that September. It was the Japan Open. Betsy Nagelsen had won the tournament in the first year that women competed, 1979. There was a beautiful symmetry in that. In the final I beat Anikó Kapros in a third-set tiebreaker, suitably dramatic for that first big win. I won the last tournament of the year, too—the Bell Challenge in Quebec—and was named WTA Newcomer of the Year. Winning as a pro turned out to be a lot like my father said it would be. You hold up the trophy and the people cheer, but only for a moment. Then you are right back out on some nowhere court, running wind sprints as the mosquitoes swarm.
There’s a short off-season in pro tennis, so short that it’s almost a joke. For women, it runs roughly from the end of October to the warm-up tournaments that precede the Australian Open in January. When it comes to actual downtime, you are really talking about two months that run from Halloween through Christmas. The most I’ve ever taken off during that time is ten days, because as soon as I hit the last ball of the season, I’m already thinking about how I will improve the first ball of the upcoming season. In 2003, I spent those months in Los Angeles, working with Robert Lansdorp almost every day. I needed to build on this previous season, improve every part of my game, if only by small margins. I also needed to get stronger, much stronger. I was now playing against grown women, though in many ways I was still a kid. Skinny arms and skinny legs. I may have been sixteen years old, but I still looked like I was twelve.
Though I’d finally begun to make some money, it was still a bare-bones operation. My parents and I were staying in a cramped two-bedroom apartment on the edge of Torrance, and we tried to spend as little money as possible. Our only luxury was renting a car so I could get to practice and back. Robert still jokes about it. “I went by that apartment—it was in the middle of December—and I thought, ‘What a dump!’ Christmas was just a few weeks away. The glittering displays were up in the store windows all over L.A., but your family didn’t even have a tree! I was feeling very sentimental at the time, and I thought it was a shame that this child would have no Christmas. So I went out with my now ex-wife and we bought a big evergreen tree and ornaments and presents and tinsel and a star and set it all up when you were out somewhere with Yuri. Your mother let us in. She was looking at us like we were crazy. I don’t know if you remember any of this, but we made it perfect, so perfect, so that no matter what you did not have, you would at least have a Christmas tree.”
I did not have the heart to tell Robert Lansdorp that we had no tree because we’re Russian Orthodox. Our Christmas comes in January.
Lansdorp was not big on strategy or traditional coaching. “Don’t fill her head with all that nonsense,” he’d say to my father. “Just let her hit the goddamn ball!” Lansdorp was all about instinct, letting me go out and play my game. “The hands will know what to do, even when the brain is not sure,” he told me. I always responded best to this type of coaching, which is minimalist, the coaching of no coaching. Less is more. Most coaches love to scout out your opponents and devise some complicated strategy, but I’d rather be the player that gets scouted. Let them devise and overthink. I just want to play. So yes, give me a few tips on how to win the match. Tell me to hit it to her backhand, or to make her run, but more than that and I’m thinking when I should be playing. That’s one reason I worked so well with Lansdorp. He was all about the hitting. If you asked him what strategy he had in mind for a particular match, he’d say, “My strategy is to hit until you win.”