Unstoppable: My Life So Far

ELEVEN

A year on the professional tour plays out as a series of seasons. You start in Australia in late December or early January with a tournament or two—if you want to watch them in America, you have to wake up in the middle of the night—leading up to that year’s first Grand Slam, in Melbourne.

The year 2004 would turn out to be one of the best of my life. Just two years before, at the end of 2002, I’d been ranked number 186 worldwide. By the end of 2003, I was ranked number 32. My progress on the ranking board was going in the right direction, and this year would continue that trajectory.

The season began with a solid performance at the Australian Open, so much better than my previous washout. In the first round, I beat Conchita Martínez Granados (now that’s a name!) in straight sets. I’d come in as the twenty-eighth seed, which meant I was not at the top but was high enough to be scouted and gamed. It was the first time I entered a Grand Slam tournament as a seeded player and not just a wild card. Even then, my best quality was my focus, the steel in my stare. You could beat me by moving me forward, or by making me hit an extra ball, but if you looked in my eyes you didn’t have a chance. That comes from Yuri. That game face.

The Australian Open is played in a beautiful facility in Melbourne. It’s summer there when the tournament begins, heading into fall, and, now and then, because it’s after harvesttime in the countryside, you smell the distant fields burning. If the wind is just right, a fine white ash rains from the sky. If you are playing when this happens, it feels miraculous, as if it’s snowing in summertime. By the second round, I’d fallen into a routine. I’d arrive at the venue four hours before my match, go out to the courts and warm up, then meet with Yuri and my coach at the time, Eric van Harpen.

I won the second match in straight sets, beating Lindsay Lee-Waters, who was much older than me—ten years, ages in tennis time. It’s a strange thing about this game. Everyone is always arriving or going away. She was going away. I was a kid who had won a few big matches, but the really good things were still in front of me. In other words, I was arriving, still at the very beginning of my career.

Before I looked up, I had reached the third round, losing only eleven games in the process. Everything was beginning to click at just the right moment. It was as if all the things that Robert Lansdorp and Nick Bollettieri and Yuri Yudkin and my father had taught me, in all those hours on all those courts, had suddenly been absorbed by my arms and shoulders. I was consistently hitting the ball low and hard and flat, stepping into my returns, placing my serves into the corners. If anything, I came into that third round feeling a little too good. When you arrive in that way, your opponent will often do you the service of taking you down a peg. In this case, it was Anastasia Myskina, another good Russian player. She was a few years older than me, and really was the better player, although she never felt that she was, because she wasn’t powerful or explosive or strong, but she read the game and anticipated the next shot effortlessly, almost like she wasn’t trying. No matter how hard or deep the ball would come at her, she had the ability to place it back anywhere on the court with depth and precision. I came to the match on a high—with power and intensity, I felt like I could beat anyone. Maybe I was too sure. Maybe I got too comfortable, and I didn’t see how Mysinka’s steadiness, her ability to send any ball back, could undo me. Winning a tennis match is a bit like receiving religious faith. You can’t get there by work alone. You need grace, and you can’t ever take it for granted.

Myskina beat me in three sets, 6–4, 1–6, 6–2. I’d run into her just as she was beginning to peak. It would turn out to be her best year on the tour. She went on to win the French Open that spring and would climb as high as number three in the world. But she would slow down after that. In a sense, I was arriving but she was soon to be going away.

Of course, that meant nothing to me when I gave up that last point and made the sad walk for the sad handshake at the sad net. I hate to lose. I imagine every player feels the same way. It never gets easier, and it never gets old. It never feels like anything less than a death. Over the years, I have developed strategies, ways to deal with the sting of defeat. It starts by “learning the lessons.” Every loss teaches you something. The quicker you learn from the losses, then forget about the actual losing, the better off you will be. And do it fast! The last thing you want to do, after losing, is to talk about losing. And be sure to tell yourself that it’s just tennis, just a game, though you won’t believe it. It’s hard to be calm in the immediate aftermath of a big loss. It’s not just a game in the aftermath. It’s everything. On top of all that, it’s embarrassing to lose, so embarrassing. Everyone is looking at you and judging you and asking you to explain what went wrong. So you end up sitting in front of your locker, thinking, “What the fuck am I going to have to listen to at the press conference? Should I call my mom now, or later? And what should I wear? (Maybe a hat to cover my teary eyes?) And what words of wisdom will my grandparents have when they call, which they will do in about, oh, three minutes? They’re still going to be down about this match when I see them in two weeks. And I’m going to have to call my mom, and she’s going to try to calm me down. And it’s not going to work. It’s going to take me hours and hours to get through this.” No. It’s not just about tennis. In those moments, it’s about everyone and everything. And you can’t stop thinking about all the things you will have to say and do. You have to book a flight, because you are done and must move on. You have to pack and pack fast, but you don’t want to go back to the hotel, because everyone at the hotel knows you and knows you have lost and their eyes will be filled with pity, which is the worst. And others’, happy you lost, will be filled with joy.

Here’s a bit from my diary, which I was writing in constantly in those early years:

Maybe the best lesson I ever got about loss—and how to handle it—came by way of an example. It was a gift, though the giver did not mean to give it to me. Or maybe she did. You never really know. It was at some tournament in who knows where, and Kim Clijsters, a Belgian player whom I’d always liked, lost and lost early. Very early. But she did not seem upset or embarrassed by any of it. Not at all. I bumped into her right outside the locker room. I looked away, then directly into her eyes, because you never really know what to do in such a situation. Now I was the one with those awful pity-filled eyes. Kim was on her way to the press conference—that is, she was heading into the shit. She’s known on the tour to be a smiley, happy girl, but she’s tough and ferocious on the court, a real physical presence. If there is a player that everyone likes, it’s Kim Clijsters. She had that good-girl image on the tour, could not do anything wrong. She was walking into the media room after losing in the first or second round, and she was so relaxed and so calm. My God, she actually seemed happy! I think this happened after she’d had a baby, become a mother. Maybe that had something to do with it. Life experiences beyond hitting a tennis ball can do wonders. Perspective! I looked at her and thought, “Now, that’s cool.” From then on, whenever I lost, I carried that memory with me, that admirable attitude Kim had after her own defeats. She taught me that every time they knock you down, you should jump up smiling, as if to say, “That? Oh, that was nothing.”

I went back to Florida after I lost. I had a few weeks to improve before the start of the U.S. hard court tournaments. I spent them working out at the academy, putting in more hours, trying to keep the sharp edge keen for the tournaments. And it was then, after all that time, that I first faced off against Serena Williams. It was like, yes, finally. It felt as if I’d been circling around her for years. I’d been hearing about Venus and Serena Williams from my father since I was six or seven years old. I’d seen them through the knothole of the film shack at Bollettieri’s when I was twelve. I’d seen Serena, in a gown, from my seat at the junior table at the Wimbledon Ball when I was fourteen. Now I was seeing her the only way and from the only perspective that really matters—from across the net on a tennis court. It was the Miami Open, April 2004. I got out there first, as the lower-ranked players do, stood around and observed. Then Serena came out. Nothing prepares you for the presence she has on court.

A few years ago, my friend Chelsea Handler flew in to watch me play at the London Olympics. She doesn’t follow tennis, and much preferred her Pimm’s cup to anything that might happen on the courts. But when Serena comes out to play our gold medal match—and she is 100 percent Serena—Chelsea looks her over, turns to my coach, and says, “What’s your game plan there?” And that’s exactly how I felt when I got onto the court with Serena for the first time. “What’s my game plan here?” First of all, her physical presence is much stronger and bigger than you realize watching TV. She has thick arms and thick legs and is so intimidating and strong. And tall, really tall. I looked across the net, and, no way to get around it, she was just there! More there than other players, if that makes sense. It’s the whole thing—her presence, her confidence, her personality. She seemed much older than me in Miami. This was just before I turned seventeen. She was a grown woman, experienced, the best player in the world. It still feels that way. Even now, she can make me feel like a little girl.

As soon as you start playing, you realize it’s her confidence you have to deal with. You need to dent it if you are to have any shot at winning. Yes, there is the serve and the ground strokes and the game, but it’s also her attitude that defeats you. She looks across the net with something like disdain, as if you are unimportant and small. It’s a game face, of course, but it works. I’d met my match in intimidation. Then there is her temper, which can be hot and unpredictable. She is not afraid to scream, throw her racket, bitch at the refs about calls she doesn’t like. It’s interesting at first, then it gets irritating. Irritating in a way that might be intended—it lets her blow off steam and fills most opponents with rage. She behaves as if she is the only player out there, the only person who counts. And you? You are a speed bump. You are a zero. Many great players have this mentality. Serena Williams just has it more. The best way to deal with people like this—I’ve learned from experience—is with composure, a maddening composure and a stately calm. It drives them bat-shit crazy.

Serena won that match, but I realized that if I kept working I’d get close to her level. Maybe I also put some doubt in her mind. There were stretches when I felt like I could handle her depth, power, and speed. A spectator new on the scene would have had trouble, on some of those points, telling the champion from the rookie. For me, it was like facing a fear. That’s the thing about champions—they rely to some extent on your fear of them. It’s a bubble that protects them. When that is pierced, anything is possible.

I left for Europe a few days later. I wanted to train and acclimate myself to clay before the European season began. IMG arranged for me to take up a kind of short-term residence at the Juan Carlos Ferrero Academy in Villena, Spain. There were a couple of other pro players, staying in the cabanas and playing on the courts, including the namesake of the academy, a local hero named Juan Carlos Ferrero. In those few weeks, watching Ferrero train, watching him come and go, seeing how he talked and handled himself, how he brushed his hair away from his eyes, I developed a serious crush.

Ferrero—retired now, in his late thirties—was lanky, not too tall, with tousled hair, dark but dyed blond, and warm, mischievous eyes. He’d been playing tennis since he was too young to know if he wanted to play, like the rest of us, but something about him seemed removed, above, calm and cool. He’d won the French Open the previous season, 2003. The picture taken of him after the last point stuck in my head. It was an image of accomplishment, joy, and release. When you win, you finally get to let go of all that tension and stress—that’s what it looked like. You finally get to live in the moment instead of in the moment after this moment, when the next shot still has to be returned. I must have seen the picture in the newspaper—on some front page, or tossed behind a seat on some airplane. Ferrero has just won the match. The ball is probably still moving just beyond the frame, rolling lazily toward the vanquished player, Martin Verkerk. Juan Carlos had fallen to his knees and is looking toward the sky, as if to thank whoever up there is in charge of tennis Grand Slams. It stayed with me, that celebration. I always mimic the gestures of the people I admire. I don’t mean to. It just happens. Maybe it’s a way of saying thanks.

In 2004, Ferrero was twenty-three and I was sixteen. I mean, in most countries, that’s not even legal. What can I say? The heart wants what the heart wants. I used to monitor him, watch him come and go. I used to plot and plan. I’d stand at the window of my cabana, behind a closed curtain, peeking out, keeping track of his every move. Here was the big problem. Juan Carlos had a girlfriend! She was probably the nicest girl in the world, but how could I see her as anything other than the reality that undermined my dreams? When they stood together, all cute, I was reminded that I was the silliest thing in the world—a kid with a crush.

Yuri knew none of this. Of course, when I actually got a chance to talk to Ferrero, I was polite and goofy and shy. But he must have known. I later found out that everyone in that Spanish academy in fact did know. I guess I’d been following him around like a lost puppy. I appreciate how he handled himself, the gentle and serious way he treated me, never making me feel anything less than grown-up and important, while also letting me know in his easy way that it could never happen.

There were a number of small tournaments that spring, played to build up our confidence, timing, and endurance. It’s all a prelude to the French Open, like an overture. You arrive in Paris in May, the best time of year in the city. The grounds of the arena, Roland Garros, are a kind of dream, the intimate stadium of center court, the colorful green banners that encircle the arena contrasting with the red clay, the crowds. I came in as the nineteenth seed. The top spots were occupied by, number one, Justine Henin, and number two, Serena Williams. Henin had won the French Open the previous year. She was one of the best clay court players of all-time, if not the best. It felt like there wasn’t a ball she wasn’t capable of getting back, especially on clay. She would drive me crazy, the way she kept sending every perfect shot I made back over the net with precision.

Henin did not have height or power, but none of that mattered here. The French Open does not favor power the way the U.S. Open and even Wimbledon do. In Paris, it’s all about fitness and finesse. On a dry day, the red clay is hard and cool. The game is fast then, and power can be a factor, but if there is the slightest drizzle or humidity, the clay absorbs the moisture and then everything gets boggy and slow. The surface turns to soup and the points wind down and the clay holds up even the flattest, hardest stroke. Playing in those conditions is a question of persistence and experience. The pros who grew up on this surface feel its rhythm and know when to stop and slide, how to skid into a ball. They excel when it rains or has rained or will rain, which is usually the case at least once in the course of a tournament. The French Open has a way of doing in even great players. Jimmy Connors. John McEnroe. Martina Hingis. Venus Williams. None of them have won the French Open.

I beat Barbara Schwartz in straight sets in the first round, dropping just three games. She was an Austrian who had this one-handed, left-handed backhand that was never fun to play against. Second round? Straight sets again, this time over the Italian Rita Grande. I lost just two games. All the work I had done in the academy in Spain was paying off. I felt stronger on this surface than I’d ever felt before. The third round was a little more difficult. I faced another Russian, Vera Zvonareva, in this round. I might have won that match in straight sets, but something about her game made me uneasy, uncomfortable—as if we might always finish the match deep in the third set. It was straight sets again in the fourth round, this time over the German Marlene Weingärtner, known mostly for her stunning match with Jennifer Capriati at the 2003 Australian Open. She’d been down 6–4, 4–1, and somehow she came back to win. That was her moment.

Just like that, I had reached the quarterfinals—my first time in a Grand Slam—where I’d play Paola Suárez, a smart, tough Argentinian who won on the tour for years and years. Suárez was five foot seven, meaning I towered over her, but, as I said, on clay…

Max had turned up in Paris by that time. There was a lot of excitement at IMG. It seemed like maybe, just maybe, this might be my year to make it far in the Grand Slams, to move up in the rankings. I was seventeen and just two matches stood between me and my first Grand Slam final. And all the top seeds—Serena Williams and Amélie Mauresmo, Lindsay Davenport and Venus Williams—had been eliminated. That’s clay! For a moment, it seemed like I had a great chance.

Max sat with my father in the hotel bar the night before the match.

Max said, “Tell me the truth, Yuri. Can Maria actually win this match tomorrow?”

Yuri sighed and shrugged. He wanted to lower Max’s expectations. My father believes that overly high expectations are just as dangerous as fast living. “If we wake up in the morning,” said Yuri, “and there is not a cloud in the sky, then maybe, just maybe, we have a chance.”

Suárez was much more experienced than me. When it rains, the clay becomes slower, so you need more strength to really make the ball fly. I needed the clay to play as fast as possible—that was my only chance. So the next morning, game day, I woke up at 5:00 to pee and on my way back to bed I pushed open the curtain for a peek, and what do you think was going on out there? It was like a hurricane, the sky steel-wool gray and the rain lashing down sideways. I lost in straight sets, 6–1, 6–3. I was dejected but not crushed. It helps to have an excuse. In this case, it was the weather. Not me—it was the sky! There’s an upside to losing in the quarterfinals. It means at least you don’t have to stick around; it means you don’t have to put off the healing balm of retail therapy.

After a trip up and down the boulevards with my quarterfinals prize money in my pocket, we headed to England. That’s the thing about the tour—no matter how bad you feel, there is always another tournament, another chance to fix yourself, another shot at redemption. You close the page, you open the page. You empty your mind, you fill your mind. We went straight to Birmingham, an industrial city in the Midlands. The Birmingham tournament was a tune-up for Wimbledon. It always felt so good to get off the clay and onto the grass. It was a relief to have that pace back. I remember, at my first practice in Birmingham, taking a slow jog around the courts, just delaying the moment when I finally went out onto the grass, which was soft and so green. I remember just standing there, breathing it all in. Back on grass, back on grass. God, it felt good, so much better than that fucking clay. It was not like that monsoon in Paris, where it felt like my feet were glued to the ground.

I cruised through the Birmingham Classic, won the whole thing in what felt like two games. This is when it started to happen for me. I hung out with another tennis player between matches—back at the hotel or in the city. She was the closest thing I had to a friend on the tour, a Russian girl named Maria Kirilenko. She was my age and grew up in a slightly friendlier version of the world I’d come from. We’d hang out when we could—go to dinner after the matches, shop together, talk. It was with her, back in our junior days—under her bad influence, ha-ha!—that I stole the only thing I’ve ever stolen in my life. Shoplifting, on a dare. It was peer pressure! “You want it? Take it! Don’t be a chicken, Maria! Are you really that scared? Come on!” It was a small round jar of Nivea Body Lotion. I slipped it into my coat and brought it back to the hotel but never could bring myself to use it. It stood with my toothbrush and lip balm in a kind of rebuke. It made me feel ashamed. I threw it away two days later.

I watched the final of the French Open with Kirilenko that year—on the TV in her hotel room in Birmingham. We had both been playing well, so it was as if we were scouting, comparing. It was an all-Russian final in Paris. Anastasia Myskina against Elena Dementieva. Myskina won easily—straight sets—but I did not care about any of that, not really. I cared only that one of these girls would become the first Russian woman to win a Grand Slam. I didn’t like the sound of that or how it made me feel. I wanted it to be me.

We got to Wimbledon at the beginning of June, a week before the first games of the 2004 tournament. The idea is to become acclimated, convince your body that you are a local, that there is nothing special about this place and these games, that it’s all part of your routine. Of course, there was no denying the specialness of that town, and how good I felt whenever I was there. The main street lined with boutiques and cafés, the pastry shops and afternoon teas, the crowds, the wide tree-shaded roads at the start of summer. Once again, it was perfect.

We had been booked into a house outside the village, but it did not feel right. The mood of the place was off, the feng shui or whatever. It just felt wrong. I called Max and complained. When you start to win, these are the kinds of calls you get to make. I said, “Please, Max, find us a new place.” And he did, quickly booking us into a kind of bed-and-breakfast a half mile from the practice courts. It was a huge old house, all dormers and overhangs. There was a big beautiful lawn and big windows in big rooms and a big front porch. I just loved it. That house was absolutely part of my success at Wimbledon, part of the recipe. It put me in the right frame of mind. We had the entire third floor to ourselves. It was owned by a nice couple with three kids—the youngest was two. Having a two-year-old around when you play a big match is great because the two-year-old is interested but does not really care, and that not caring, that happy not caring, reminds you that, in the end, all of this is nothing. There are champions now; in ten years, there will be different champions. It’s fleeting, so have fun—that’s what you get from a two-year-old. It’s a mind-set that gets you playing loose and easy. When you go out there caring, but not caring too much, you become truly dangerous, even if you are only seventeen.

I quickly fell into a routine. Each morning, I had breakfast with my father upstairs on the third floor. Oatmeal. Or maybe just a boiled egg and some strawberries. My father would talk to me about my serve or my return, or who I might play, or where my head should be, or what I needed to do. One of the kids had the great habit of undoing all this strategy by asking silly kid questions, like what’s the difference between skinny milk and skinny people? Or, will it rain, and what will that mean for the mud pie situation?

After breakfast, I’d sit on the front porch, watching the entire world go by, thinking or not thinking, then grab my gear and head to the Aorangi practice courts, which were part of the Wimbledon facility. Sometimes my coach met me and we walked together. At this point, I was known in the world of tennis but nowhere else. I was not a celebrity (horrible word), meaning I could go where I wanted when I wanted, without fuss or hassle.

I would stretch on the courts, run a few laps, then start hitting. I worked on each phase of my game at practice, one at a time. Forehands, backhands, first serve, second serve, spending extra time on whatever might need special attention, as some part of my game always does. It’s like building a sand castle. As soon as this part seems solid, that part starts to crumble. I usually end up by simulating specific scenarios—down a break, second set, second serve; deuce, first set, you must break her serve, and so on. I’d finish my practice with out-of-the-basket drills, just like I did with Robert. I usually had my coach feed me balls one after another, ten minutes of nothing but hitting, hitting, and hitting, so I could close out on a groove. That’s still how I do it to this day.

One day, on my way to practice, I stepped on something. I did not know what it was, only that there was a strange squish, then an extra something on my shoe that felt wrong. When I got to the clubhouse, I noticed the smell, this terrible, terrible smell. A bowels-of-hell kind of smell. I looked accusingly at the other players in the room before coming to a terrible realization… I bent my leg and looked at the bottom of my shoe. The treads were packed with what I assumed to be the richest, blackest, most pungent dog shit the world has ever known. I cursed under my breath. So that’s clearly what we were dealing with, I thought, the most powerful animal contaminant: corgi shit.

There’s a kind of locker-room attendant at Wimbledon. She sits in the locker room, ready to help you with your stuff. She’ll wash or stitch your clothes, whatever. I felt bad doing it, but brought her my shoes anyway. “I stepped in dog shit and I’m not really sure what to do,” I told her. “I need this pair. Do you have a hose or something?”

“No problem,” she said. “It’s Wimbledon. It happens with great frequency.”

I went to my locker and started to change for practice, digging around for a spare pair of sneakers. As I stepped out of the locker room, this old guy came up to me, a maintenance attendant. He was missing a few teeth, prominent ones, but was smiling anyway. He spoke in some sort of brogue. He said, “Hey there, Maria. I heard you stepped in it out on the lawns.”

“Yes,” I said groaning. “I stepped in dog shit.”

“That isn’t dog shit,” he said. “I gave it a good look-over. It’s fox shit!”

“Oh my God!” I said. “That’s awful.”

“No,” he said, laughing. “The opposite. It’s wonderful! Stepping in fox shit is the best kind of good luck. The best! It probably means you’re going to win the whole thing.”

That was the first hint I had that this Wimbledon was going to be different.

The week leading up to the first match was long and easy. You want to go into the big tournaments with a calm mind, and the hours of doing nothing, or reading, or just hanging around with your working family, are a big part of that. In other words, as hard as I practice, I have learned that doing nothing is just as important as doing everything.

We ate at that same Thai place almost every night. It’s where we’d gone the night after I upset Jelena Dokic the previous year, so it became more good luck for us. There is no one more superstitious than an athlete on a winning streak. It got so we did not even have to look at the menu. We could order by number. For me, it was always 8 and 47—spring rolls and sizzling beef with onions. And a side of 87, fried rice.

I spent almost every moment of that week with my team—my father, my trainer Mark Wellington, and my coach Mauricio Hadad. It was Maria and the men! We got so loose and easy, we began playing games and making bets, the sort you make when you know your side has no realistic chance of winning. There was, for example, what I call the bald bet. We were walking to the practice courts one day and out of nowhere I said, “OK, we have to make a deal. If I win, you guys have to shave your heads.” At first, they were like, “No way!” Then my trainer said, “OK, but if you don’t win—” I interrupted him before he could even get going. I said, “No, that’s not fair. You know I’m not going to win.” Then we continued on in silence, thinking. Finally, my coach said, “You know what, Maria? If you win this tournament, if you win Wimbledon, we’ll shave everything, even our you-know-what.” Everyone agreed. Then they forgot all about it. But I didn’t.

I was seventeen years old. I’d grown up in tennis, become an adult on the professional tour. I was at the start of my life, but I felt like I was a hundred years old—so much had happened to me already, there’d already been so many adventures, crises, ups and downs, reversals of fortune. I had already played so much tennis, hit so many balls, been to so many towns and cities. It’s why a tennis player at twenty-nine can seem like the oldest person in the world. She’s been through an entire life span already, from youth to middle age to “get off the court, you’re too damn old.” A pro athlete really dies twice. At the end, like everyone else, but also at somewhere closer to the beginning, when she loses the only life she’s ever known.

Of course, in other ways, I was a typical teenager. I was a girl becoming a woman, prepared for none of it. That year at Wimbledon was the first time I realized I might be pretty. It was nothing anyone said to me, or anything I noticed about myself. It was the new looks that I was getting from the men on the tour, even those men who seemed crazy old.

I wrote about this moment a few years later in my diary, which I quote here without comment:

Before I knew it, the week was over and I was in the locker room getting ready for my first match. The sky was blue in the morning, but now the wind picked up and it started to rain. That’s always a danger at Wimbledon. If Serena Williams doesn’t get you, the weather will. I settled in for a long delay. I wasn’t scheduled to play till after the men’s match and there was no telling how long that would go. Since they play three out of five, you know you’re in for a long wait. And of course these guys went into a fifth set, which everyone knew they would—because neither one of them had any consistency. Why even bother playing the first, when you know you’re going into a fifth? I was bummed initially, but it turned out to be a good thing because it was during the delay that I found one of my favorite places on the Wimbledon grounds, the Wimbledon’s members’ locker room. Yes, a locker room that I actually liked!

After warming up and getting a snack, I went to the regular locker room to wait because the players’ lounge was a zoo: parents, agents, reporters, and lots of others with questionable credentials. There were only two couches in there, so I took a seat and did nothing for an hour. Maria Kirilenko was waiting for her match, so we chatted and did the Russian crossword puzzles she’d brought. We had about three cups of strawberries in the meantime, without cream. Cream is too heavy before a match. Time went slowly, so slowly. Finally, we got bored and went back to the players’ lounge to see what was going on. We found a bench and just sat there, watching the world go by. Lindsay Davenport sat next to us and started talking.

Lindsay is a tall American girl, a top player, with some of the most powerful strokes in the game. I admired the way she played. She had worked with Robert Lansdorp before me. It was, in fact, because my father so admired her game and spotted certain similarities to my own that he first sought out Lansdorp. It gave us a kind of connection. Lindsay spoke to me in a confidential, almost conspiratorial way. After putting in the obligatory time talking about “this crazy English weather,” she leaned close and asked, as if I had a secret strategy of my own, “Why aren’t you in the members-only locker room?”

“Wait! The what?”

“There’s a locker room for the top sixteen seeds,” said Lindsay. I had come in ranked thirteen. Lindsay was five. Venus was three. Serena was one. “Didn’t you know that?” said Lindsay. “You really should go have a look.”

My Russian friend was not ranked above thirty-two. And so I said goodbye, leaving her to her strawberries and crossword puzzles. This is where we must part, I thought, perhaps for only a time, perhaps forever. Then I went up to the members’ locker room. And up is the word, because it was as if I’d gone up to paradise. I mean, this locker room, the members’ locker room at Wimbledon, is the absolute ultimate. When you walked in, you were in a little hallway with paintings from the ’80s. To the right was a cozy lounge with two big comfortable couches, and straight ahead was the most beautiful locker room in the world. There were only something like eight lockers in there, but they were the best, like little cabanas you have all to yourself. They have large white wooden French doors and no locks because you don’t need locks—it’s basically your own private locker room. I maintained my composure, but my insides were screaming with joy.

I was still smiling from this discovery when I finally got onto the court for my first match, which I blew through, defeating the Ukrainian Yuliya Beygelzimer in straight sets. But for me, the real highlight came after the match, after I left the locker room. I was going down a back hall or up a staircase. I don’t remember exactly, but the sense I had was of going up—which is why, in my mind, it’s a staircase—running into someone coming down, someone who, as we talked, was standing a few feet above me. It was Juan Carlos Ferrero. He’d won his early match and had that cool, pleasant, end-of-the-day-and-nothing-to-do glow about him. He’d just come from his press conference, which, as I’ve explained, is shit no matter if you win or lose. I was now seventeen and he was now twenty-four and all the other feelings were still there. My tremendous crush on him—in a way, it was not even about Juan Carlos Ferrero but about being in love with love—made everything he said seem funny or important. He smiled at me. “Maria, Maria,” he said, “it’s so funny to see you here, to see you now. I was just inside with the reporters and they asked me who I thought would win on the women’s side and I told them no doubt it would be Maria Sharapova. I put my reputation on the line for you, Maria,” he added, laughing, “so don’t let me down, or make me look like an idiot.”

It was magic to hear Juan Carlos say my name, especially in that Spanish accent of his. It’s silly, but I kind of hung on to that memory for the rest of the tournament. It gave me a little extra confidence and motivation. I was not just winning. I was proving that Juan Carlos Ferrero had been right to believe in me.

I played Anne Keothavong in the second round. She was a local player, a hometown favorite, one of the best in Great Britain, but everything was starting to work for me. When I look at films from that tournament, I am always surprised by a few things. First, by how young I am. No longer a kid, but still in the process of becoming an adult, not yet who I am today, sort of half formed, in between. And two, the look on my face, like the person I am playing, whoever that happens to be, has done me personal wrong and now it’s payback time. My brow is furrowed and my eyes are hooded. A lock of hair swings across my face. I hear nothing. That’s the way you gear yourself up: convince yourself that there’s been an injustice and it’s your mission to avenge it. In other words, Anne Keothavong did not have a chance in that match that year. Straight sets, 6–4, 6–0.

Now, here’s a funny thing. I went on to win Wimbledon that year, and there were many great matches and big moments for me along the way, but I did not play my best tennis in the finals or in the semi- or quarterfinals, though each of those is a highlight of my career. My best tennis was played in the third round, during my first match ever on Centre Court, in front of a small crowd, against Daniela Hantuchová, a Slovakian who, at one point, had been ranked in the top ten. Hantuchová had won the Masters in Indian Wells and had made it as far as the semis at Wimbledon. She was a very good player on grass. This is when you play your best tennis. A good player can push you to make shots that you never believed yourself capable of making.

How’s this for motivation? When we met for the coin toss, I realized: Shit! We’re wearing the same dress! To my horror, Hantuchová and I were wearing the same Nike dress. It was not her fault, but I absolutely hated it, and I’d make sure it never happened again. How? When it came time to sign a new contract with Nike, they included a clause that said I will have an exclusive outfit at every tournament I play—no other girls can wear it, not if they’re sponsored by Nike. But the irritation I felt that night added a nice, useful edge to my game.

The points I played against Hantuchová that day, the endless rallies—I still feel them, the pressure of the ball on my strings, the crosscourt winners that barely caught the line. It had been a long trip to this point. I had started off in Spain, played tournaments in Germany and Italy, gotten further than I’d ever gotten at the French, won in Birmingham. I’d put in the time in practice and in matches and now everything was clicking. It felt like the most perfect tennis of my life, by which I mean I made very few errors and executed every shot, the ball landing exactly where I wanted it to land. And it was not just the points or the serves that rang true. It was my state of mind, the intensity of my focus. I’d hit a groove. Remember, focus is not merely about zooming in, it’s also about shutting out, eliminating the rest of the world—eliminating and eliminating until there is just this court and this girl standing on the other side of it, waiting to be moved from here to there like a puppet on a string. At such moments, and they come rarely, and you pray for them, you are so sharp, you are dumb. There is nothing but this and this means nothing but this. I won in straight sets—6–3, 6–1—but those numbers don’t really capture the great thrill of that match.

I played Amy Frazier in the fourth round—straight sets again, not much more to say. But as soon as the last point was over, my world began to change. I had never gotten this far—the quarterfinals!—on a stage this big: Wimbledon! It was as if, all at once, the entire world, or what felt like the entire world, swung around to take a good look at me. It was as if I were a blank spot that needed to be quickly filled in or explained, a character who wanders into a movie at the start of the third act and you can almost hear the producer calling for a rewrite, shouting, “Who is this? Give us some goddamn background!”

This is when my story started to be told. Of me and my father, Yudkin and the court in Sochi, Martina Navratilova at the clinic in Moscow, the years of struggle—on television, one of the announcers said my father had waited tables to keep me supplied with balls and rackets!—Bollettieri and Lansdorp. It was all written up in the newspapers, told in quiet tones on television as I played. “She’s got quite a story…” There’s nothing like hearing the story of your own life as told by John McEnroe. I recommend it to everyone. Of course, that was a danger, too. That all of this attention would mess up my head, break the spell, destroy that trance of deep focus, and, like a bubble popping in a bathtub of bubbles, this dream would end. I remember sitting with my coach in the dining hall at Wimbledon. Normally, we sat quietly, undisturbed—undisturbed because who would want to disturb us?—eating and talking tennis. Suddenly, it was as if every eye was on us—or was I just imagining that? People kept coming over to congratulate me, and ask how I felt, and give me advice. A group of tennis nuts—I don’t know how they got in, but they were from Japan—asked if they could take my picture. When they left, I could see my coach, sort of smoldering. He gripped my wrist. Looking into my eyes, he said, “I understand there is a lot going on, and that a lot of this is new, but you need to do me a favor. For the next five days, you need to put on the horse blinders and look only at the road ahead.”

The quarterfinals rose before me like a palisade. Centre Court, television coverage all over the world, the true big time. Of all the hundreds and thousands of tennis players in the world, only eight remained. Among them, my name stood out. It’s like they ask on Sesame Street: Which one of these things does not belong? The other girls were champions and future Hall of Famers—Serena Williams and Lindsay Davenport. And… who? I mean, yes, yes, I was confident and knew exactly who I was and what I could do, but no one else did.

I played Ai Sugiyama in the quarterfinals, a gritty player who could get every ball back, no matter the speed. Playing against her is like playing ping-pong tennis. She stays low for every shot—a huge advantage on grass. And she can stay out there for hours. This match really did me in, wiped me out. I began to tire. Sugiyama was like me in a way—she refused to quit, even when she was beaten. That is, until she actually did quit.

I lost the first set but it was a close thing and I was determined to get back into it. I’ve seen pictures of my face during the changeover between the first and second. I look bewildered, confused. In a really tough match, there is usually a single moment when everything hangs in the balance—you either redouble and refocus and carry on, or you unravel. Either you break, or she does. When you both refuse to give in, that’s when you get the epic matches.

I won the second set 7–5. What made the difference was my serve. I seemed to come up with an ace whenever I was really against it. What’s more, even if I did not hit an ace, my first serve was strong enough to set Sugiyama up for a point that did not end in her favor.

Sugiyama almost broke my serve in the first game of the third set. That was her moment, but she let it get away. I hung on, turned around, and broke her serve instead. A three-game swing. That was the match right there. Instead of it being 4–1 Sugiyama in the third, it was 4–1 Sharapova. There was a point at the end of the fifth game when I could feel her buckle and give. She’d been broken, not in her serve but in her spirit. It was all mop up and close out from there. This was, in fact, the first time I felt like I was the fresher player at the end of the third set.

The last point?

I was wearing a white halter-top dress, a gold cross necklace that my parents had given me when I was a little girl, silver earrings a friend had given me for my seventeenth birthday, barrettes in my hair, short white socks, and white shoes. I swayed back and forth as I waited to serve. I walk around a lot between points. It stills my nerves and plugs me into a kind of inner rhythm. I served for the match at 40–0. I pushed Sugiyama back with that serve, grunting loudly as I hit the ball. She got the ball back over, but right into the strength of my backhand. I blazed a return, screaming as my follow-through carried my racket toward the sky. I hit it deep to her backhand. Her return sailed wide, and that was it: 5–7, 7–5, 6–1. I raised my arms, turned my face to the sky, and screamed something like, “Thank God!” I could see my box, where my team was celebrating. My father had his fists in the air, just like me. So that’s where I got it from!

Unbelievable. I was in the semifinals of Wimbledon.

As a rule, the task gets tougher as you get closer to the prize. Each round means higher stakes and more pressure and slimmer odds and fiercer competition.

It was my father who told me that I’d be playing Lindsay Davenport in the semifinals. I don’t remember exactly what I thought when I heard this news, but it must have been something like “Fuck.” I was a kid. Lindsay was a woman. I was weak. Lindsay was strong. I was stringy and narrow. Lindsay was powerful and solid. As I said, in many ways our games were alike. We went by power, played from the baseline, hit flat and low, without much spin, a style that both of us learned from Robert Lansdorp. She was twenty-eight years old, so far along there was talk of her retirement. She was not number one just then—that was Serena—but had been number one, off and on, for ninety-eight weeks. She was one of the greatest tennis players in the world. In other words, I’d hung on and hung on till I’d advanced myself right out of my league. I mean, how was I supposed to beat Lindsay Davenport? She was just like me, only bigger, stronger, older, and more experienced. She was just like me, only way more.

What’s that thing they talk about in school? The pathetic fallacy? When your internal mood is mirrored by the weather? The sky was overcast the morning of the match. Thunderheads were streaming in from the continent. Dark and gloomy everywhere. It rained off and on as I headed to the courts. I went through my regular routine—stretched and ran, then hit for about forty minutes on one of the practice courts—but my heart was in my mouth the entire time. This was the biggest test of my life, what my father and I had been working toward all these years.

Then, a moment later, I was on Centre Court, waiting for the first game to begin. The scene, the pomp and the show of it, dazzled me. I’m a master of high focus, but this was simply too much. For starters, there was the mystique of Centre Court. Every detail of it was like a revelation. The feel of the grass—it’s like nothing in the world. How it’s kept up and cared for but also left to run down ever so slightly. Parched at the edges, faded green and going brown, dilapidated in the way only rich people allow things to dilapidate. A tweed coat frayed at the cuffs: it does not say you’re poor; it says you’re sophisticated, evolved beyond green, green grass and other vain perfections. And the way that grass played, the trueness of the bounce and speed—there’s nothing in the world to match it.

And the people in the seats, the regular Wimbledon tennis crowd, who, on that day, struck me as the most knowledgeable fans in the world, a swarm of analysts who would x-ray through my skin and see I was a kid and did not belong here. And the Royal Box, where the Queen sat with the aristocrats and retainers. And the celebrities, the legends of tennis past; now I’m thinking of Billie Jean King, who was up there, watching me with eyes that had seen everything in this game. It calmed me down a bit when I looked at my box—each player gets a group of seats for her entourage—where my father sat with my trainer, my manager, and my coach. But it was not enough. Before I realized what was happening, I was through my warm-ups and serving to begin the match. My body felt tight. I was moving so slowly. My arm went up and my racket met the ball and my serve fluttered across the net like a butterfly.

I’d never played Lindsay Davenport before. I’d heard about her power, but there is hearing and seeing at a distance, and then there is being right in the firing line. It’s the difference between reading about a person stuck in the cold and actually being trapped in a snowstorm. Lindsay returned my serve like it was nothing, blazed it right past me. I barely had time to react. I went across the court to the ad box and got ready, bouncing the ball before starting into my next serve. There was that butterfly again. A moment later, the ball was behind me and I was down 0–30 in the first game. Something inside me shivered. Something inside me cracked. Something inside me said, “You can’t possibly win.”

Then, and this proves that even the best moments depend on luck, the dark clouds rolled in and it began to rain. The umpire threw up his arm and we ran off the court and stood beneath an overhang. But it was a short reprieve, as the rain quickly gave way to sunshine and I was back out there getting pummeled as if the first pummeling had never stopped. Davenport broke my serve in the first game—I got one point!—and it was downhill from there. I was overpowered, overmatched. She was a woman. I was a girl. She was big. I was small. She hit the corners. I hit the net. In that dazzling run of awful games, it seemed as if she did not miss a shot.

What the hell was going on?

I think some of it had to do with fatigue. I’d played so much tennis in the past few months, so many games and points and break points. So many great players. So many marathon rallies. I was seventeen years old and wiped out. Tired. Sore. Aching everywhere. I found out about the existence of certain muscles only because those muscles screamed, “Out of gas, out of gas, out of gas!” At the moment, I did not think I could win. If you think you can’t, you can’t.

Davenport broke me again, and took the first set before I could figure out what happened. She broke me early in the second set and was on the verge of breaking me again, but somehow I hung on. That was my situation, my desperate situation—down a set and a break in the second set of the semifinal—when the skies opened and the rain really came down. They called for a delay, and it looked to be substantial. I mean, it was pouring. I was such a novice, so new to all this, that I did not even know the protocol. When it rains like that, you have to get your ass off the court, because the ground crew is waiting with the tarp and they need to cover up fast so the grounds aren’t swamped. But I was just taking my time—in my mind, this thing was already over—walking to my bag, slowly putting my stuff away, humming to myself, oblivious. When I looked up, there were like twenty men, holding a tarp, glaring at me. There’s a picture of this somewhere. They’re all looking at me and I’m looking back, like, “What is your problem?”

When I got into the locker room, something inside me gave and desperation made way for glee. I was the happiest person on the planet. Why? Because it was over! I’d made it further than I’d ever made it and now I was finished! In my mind, I was already on the plane, heading home. I asked for a rubdown. Then I was on the massage table and they were working on my leg and my eyes were closed. Then I had a Bounty chocolate bar. It was delicious. Then I sat in a big chair, reading Hello! as the rain drummed on the roof. I was thinking: “Is the flight booked for tomorrow? Yup. Is there a good place near the hotel for some retail therapy? Yup!”

Then the sky cleared and the rain stopped. I went to the gym for another warm-up, and ran on the treadmill, getting ready. After the warm-up, you have a few minutes to talk to your team. A few seconds, really. My father and coach stood with me outside the gym, beneath an overhang, rain dripping down. My coach spoke first. He did not have a lot of technical ideas or plans. His advice was simple: “Just get the returns in. It doesn’t matter how, it doesn’t matter if they’re great or if they’re shit, just get them in. Make her play. Make her hit a ball. Make her think. She just had two hours in the locker room to think. And what’s she been thinking? ‘I’m going to be a finalist at Wimbledon.’ She’s as ripe as a ripe peach. Wouldn’t you like to pick that peach? Wouldn’t that be fun? And all you have to do is get the goddamn ball over the net. I don’t care how you return it, make her hit another. You have a short ball, go to the net. Make her hit a passing shot. She can’t hit a passing shot when she’s had two hours to think about how nice it will be in the final.”

My coach walked away, and then it was just me and my father, as it had always been at the key moments. He was smiling. No, more than smiling. He was laughing.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked.

“Because I know that you will win this match and it makes me laugh,” he said.

This might have been the first and last time I had ever seen my father laugh before a match.

“Are you insane?” I asked. “What makes you think I can possibly win?”

“Because it’s already happened,” said Yuri. “Because last night I saw it in a dream that was more than a dream. It has already happened. You have won the match and the tournament. All you have to do is fulfill what’s already been dreamed.”

He grabbed my arm, looked deep into my eyes, that hard unblinking stare, and said, “You’re going to win this fucking thing, Maria. Now. Win it.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Win it.”

“You haven’t been watching if you think I can win.”

“I don’t think, I know. Now go out there and do everything we’ve talked about and win it.”

This made me laugh, then it made me angry, then it scared me shitless. But it had its effect. In that minute, I went from feeling like I had absolutely no chance, being beaten before I even went back out on the court, to believing that I’d have the prize if only I could summon the will to take it.

Everything was different after the delay. It was as if I had woken from a trance. The world had gone from foggy to sharp and clear. Suddenly, it was my shots that were finding the corners and hitting the lines. Movement was not my specialty; up and back was questionable, and side to side needed work. For years, Max had called me “the turtle.” But if you hit the ball hard enough, and with enough depth and precision, none of that matters. And it did not matter after the rain delay. The points were short and crisp. Winner. Winner. Winner. I got her serves back. I made her play that extra ball. I even came to the net, like my coach wanted me to do. I held serve after the delay, then broke Davenport’s serve, then held serve again. Three straight games put me right back in the thick of it. As I won, I gained confidence. As I gained confidence, I became aggressive. As I became aggressive, Davenport retreated into a defensive crouch—you’re always in danger when you think you have a match won—then she began to fall apart.

I won that second set in a tiebreaker. That was the moment, the exchange that broke Lindsay’s spirit. The third set was me on a skateboard racing down a long hill. I broke her early, then I broke her again. Then I was serving for the match. I hit the corner. Lindsay returned it long. It was all over. I went down on my knees. Then I rushed to the net, overwhelmed in the best way. Lindsay shook my hand and said something like “Good job” as if she really meant it. I mean, can you imagine a more difficult moment? There’s probably more bullshit phoniness said at the net after a match than anywhere else in the world. But Lindsay was raw and sincere. It was as if she had been playing the match but also watching it from the outside, as if, though she must have been crushed by the loss—you only get so many chances to reach a Grand Slam final—she could appreciate what I had done, the impossibility and importance (for me) of that comeback. She was happy for me. I shook hands with the umpire and waved to the crowd, but I really had only one thought in my head. “I am going to need a dress for the Wimbledon Ball!”

There was a nice symmetry to the tournament for me. Martina Navratilova played her last professional matches at Wimbledon that year. She was forty-seven years old, and it was her thirty-first consecutive appearance at the All England Club. Astonishing! She was playing for her twenty-first doubles title. How perfect. It was Navratilova who spotted me at that clinic in Moscow when I was seven years old. She picked me out, talked to my father, and sent us on our way to America. And now, a decade later, our paths had crossed again. Does Navratilova even remember that first encounter? To her, it was nothing. To me, it was everything.

I woke up with a sore throat the day before the final.

I hate to admit it, but this is my pattern. I hold it in and hold it in and hold it in and then at the crucial moment, a day before a big match or event, my immune system breaks down. I touch a railing or shake someone’s hand, and bang, I’m hacking up a lung at the worst possible time. I decided to will it away—to make myself healthy, as I’d made myself tall by hanging from that rod in my closet in Florida. “I am in the Wimbledon final tomorrow,” I told myself. “It is not permissible for me to be less than a hundred percent in the Wimbledon final. I will therefore be a hundred percent for the Wimbledon final.”

I went through my usual morning routine, worked out, then did a press conference, which is required. By the time I got back to the house, my nose was stuffed, my throat was raw, my body ached, and goddamnit I had a full-blown cold.

We called up a doctor, who came over to the house and went after me with every tool in his big black bag. In the end, he shrugged. “What can I say, Maria? You’re sick. The good news—no fever, no virus, no flu. It’s just a common cold.”

“How do I make it go away?” I asked.

“Drink fluids, get plenty of sleep, and don’t exert yourself,” he said. “The usual. In a week, you’ll be fine.”

I thanked him, went up to my room, threw myself on the bed, and screamed. Then I called my mother. That’s my pattern, too. I act tough and cool in the world, because the world can hurt you, then I call my mom and burst into tears. “Why, why, why?” She shushed and consoled me, then told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. “Tomorrow, you play the biggest match of your life,” she said. “Today, rest and think positive. If you do that, everything will be fine.”

I spent the rest of the day in bed, reading gossip magazines and drinking tea with honey.

I tried a bit of autosuggestion just before I went to sleep that night. Lying there, beneath the big quilt, in that high English bed, the room as dark as any room in the world, I spoke to my body the way Yuri spoke to me during the rain delay in the match against Davenport. I said, “Listen up, body, in the morning, this cold will be gone and you will be healthy. This is not a request. It is an order. Now do it.” Then I turned over, closed my eyes, and tried to fall asleep but couldn’t. First of all, there was tomorrow, the television and the crowds, the match, the biggest of my life. Then there was my opponent, the player who would push me more than any other player in my career, Serena Williams. She had won Wimbledon the year before and the year before that. She was trying to become the first player since Steffi Graf to win it in three consecutive years. From the outside she seemed unbeatable, big and fast and strong, a player who could finish off any point from anywhere on the court, perhaps the best to ever play the game. And she was older than me, and had been here before, and knew this, and knew that. And as I thought about all this, as it all went through my mind, I became acutely aware of my throat, which was killing me, and of my nose, which was so stuffed I could barely breathe. And if I couldn’t breathe, how could I possibly play? And as I went over it again and again, my heart started to pound. And then I became aware of just how little sleep I was getting because of all this thinking. Of course I needed sleep, but as I was thinking about needing sleep still more time without sleep was passing, and soon it would be morning. Maybe I did sleep a little—maybe I was sleeping when I thought I was just lying there worrying—but, if so, not very deeply and not for very long. At most, I got a few hours—the night before the Wimbledon final.

I felt terrible at breakfast. My father looked at me with real concern. It made me ashamed, and embarrassed. How could I fall apart like this, right at the big moment? It felt like a failure, like weakness. I was angry, but tried not to show it. Yuri made me oatmeal, like he did every morning. I ate that and drank tea and honey, then left for the courts.

I told my coach about the cold the way you might tell someone a terrible secret. To him, it must have seemed like I was excusing my inevitable defeat. You know, “I’ve got this terrible cold. And I hardly slept last night. So what do you expect?”

He looked at me and laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“You,” he said. “That you are sitting here, a few hours before the Wimbledon final, and you are worried about having a cold. A cold. A cold? A fucking cold? As soon as the first point is being played, your cold will be gone. Like it never happened. And not enough sleep? As soon as you get out there, you will be more awake than you’ve ever been in your life. Ha. Maria is worried because she has a cold!” In fact, I did not have to wait for the first point to lose the cold. As soon as those words were spoken, the cold was gone.

I went through my prematch ritual. Went out on the court, hit for a good forty minutes, came back, went back to the locker room and cooled down, thinking and trying to not think. I was set up in the members-only locker room, plush beyond plush. A few days before, it had been crowded with the other players. Now it was just the two of us, Serena and me. This was my first professional Grand Slam final, so the first time I’d really experienced the spookiness of the last round. Outside, there are huge crowds, fans and reporters. It’s a big swarm, a big buzz. But at the center of that swarm you sit in an empty locker room, alone.

Did I sit there, thinking about the long road that had brought me here? Nope. I thought only about now and five minutes from now. That’s how you get through this kind of day. You go from task to task.

I went to warm up in the gym. It had turned into a beautiful day, mid-seventies with a slight wind, the world after a storm. The seats were starting to fill. It was early afternoon, but there was a prime-time electricity to everything. I was revved up, excited, ready to go. I could feel that old thing stirring in me, that never-ending desire to beat them all.

I went back to the locker room and waited. Serena was there. I could hear her even when I could not see her. She went through her rituals as I went through mine. She sat alone as did I. It was like we were the only two people on a deserted planet, fifteen feet apart but each behaving as if we were the only person in the universe. Serena and I should be friends: we love the same thing, we have the same passion. Only a few other people in the world know what we know—what it feels like in the dead center of this storm, the fear and anger that drive you, how it is to win and how it is to lose. But we are not friends—not at all. I think, to some extent, we have driven each other. Maybe that’s better than being friends. Maybe that’s what it takes to fire up the proper fury. Only when you have that intense antagonism can you find the strength to finish her off. But who knows? Someday, when all this is in our past, maybe we’ll become friends. Or not.

You never can tell.

There is a great deal of ritual and tradition at Wimbledon; everything has to be done exactly so. The ushers came to take us out to Centre Court, and I went first because I was the challenger; Serena followed a few dozen feet behind, because she was the defending champion, the higher seed. We each had our own escort, a British official in the proper dress, tight-lipped and serious. No joking, no fooling around. I was wearing the same Nike white mesh dress I’d been wearing throughout the tournament, white Nike shoes, and a gold cross on a gold chain. Serena was wearing a white dress with a gold stripe up the side, a white headband, and gold earrings that dangled. She looked like a champion. As we came through the tunnel, I could sense the crowd, all those people. As I said, it was prime time, electric. There is nothing else like it. We were entering the biggest stage in the sport, coming into the court of the Queen. I should have been considering history and empire, life and destiny, tennis and time, but instead, as we made that entrance, as the crowd roared, I had just a single thought on my mind: I have to pee! It was that tea and honey. Why did I drink all that tea with honey?

As soon as we finished our warm-up, I turned to the chair umpire and asked, “Where’s the closest bathroom?”

A line judge led me back the way we came, pointing out a door beneath the stands. So that’s how it began for me—as soon as I’d made my entrance, I went back the way I came, to pee. It was a fancy members’ bathroom right next to the court, with plated handles and silver sinks and real towels instead of paper. “They’ve got a good maintenance budget,” I told myself. I stayed there for what felt like a long time, listening to the crowd, the ambient noise, then went back, got my racket, and started to play.

Serena Williams has an almost arrogant look on the court, a kind of detachment, as if she were viewing you from a great height. I recognize it because I have a similar look of my own. It’s gamesmanship—her way of telling the opponent, “You have no chance.” Usually it works, and they don’t. But it does not always work, especially if the opponent has the same attitude and carries herself in the same way.

Maybe, if you work long enough and hard enough, you will be given a single perfect day, a few hours when everything clicks and even the moves that seem wrong at first turn out for the best. For me, that was the Wimbledon final, July 2004. I served the first game, and held. Serena served the second game, and held. But even on the points I lost, it was clear that I was looser than my opponent. Some of it probably had to do with just where we were in our careers. Serena was number one in the world, a returning champion. Everyone wanted something from her. Everyone expected her to win. If she did win, she’d therefore be doing nothing more than what had been expected. There was little upside and an abyss of downside. How could she lose to… what’s that girl’s name again? And me? I was no one from nowhere. I was supposed to go down in straight sets. Just being here, years ahead of schedule, was my victory. I was lucky to be on the same stage, with John McEnroe calling the match from the broadcasting booth. In other words, while Serena had everything on the line, I had nothing to lose.

I think this dawned on Serena in the fourth game of the first set. She was up 0–30 on my serve. This is when, in the normal course of events, she begins to put players away. Instead, I returned each powerful shot with a powerful shot of my own. On this point, I blew the ball past her and she fell down. People made a lot of it, but she did not need to fall down. I love the way she plays—she’s an incredible athlete—but there’s a lot of drama in her game. It’s like she’s acting, showing everyone in the world just how she feels. Is stumbling when she doesn’t need to her way of telling the world, “Oh, I could have gotten that if the grass wasn’t so fucked-up”? It doesn’t feel real. She got up fast but I won the point, held my serve, and won the game. Serena suddenly knew that I would not quit and would not break. And even if she did break me, she was going to have to break me again and again. Now she knew that she was in for a fight.

In the fourth game, as we played points that went on and on, I felt something shift. In a moment, Serena’s look of confidence, which she carries like a racket—it’s almost as important for her game—gave way to something else. At first, I could not tell exactly what sort of look it was, though I knew I’d seen it on the faces of other girls before. Then, amazingly, as I went on to break Serena’s serve in that first set, it hit me. Fear. Serena looked afraid. It was as if she’d suddenly realized how upsetting it would be to lose to this skinny seventeen-year-old kid in front of all these people. I did not lose another game in the first set.

Still, for a moment in the seventh game, it did look like Serena would get back into the set. I was down two break points and battled back to deuce. We went in and out of deuce for what seemed like hours. Serena is a great champion, and great champions are toughest to beat when it comes time to put them away. They grow stronger the closer they get to defeat. They will not go down easily. Game and set point: I finally managed to put a ball exactly where I wanted it, skidding across the baseline. Serena got to it, but her shot was weak and ended up in the net. First set: Sharapova, 6–1.

I sat during the changeover, drinking water and staring straight ahead, trying hard to think about nothing. The changeovers are short reprieves, like the blissful break a boxer gets between rounds, without all the blood. I wiped off my face and took a bite of a banana. I stared into the crowd. Everywhere I looked, people looked back, smiling as if they knew me. I looked and looked till I located my box. My father was up there with my coach and my trainer. Not my mom—she was back in the States. It made me feel good seeing my father, knowing he and my coaches were with me all the way. And yet, at the same time, the presence of these people, so close and still so far away, reminded me that I was really all alone. Tennis is not a team sport. It’s not a sport where the coach whispers to you on the sideline between plays. You are surrounded at nearly every moment of the day by coaches and partners and friends, surrounded right up till the first point is played, and then you are alone—as alone as you can possibly be, which is alone in a crowd. Surrounded but apart, with no one to help you or hold your hand. The bigger the game, the more alone you will feel.

I passed by Serena as I went back out on the court. It’s a strange moment—the changeover walk-by. You come close enough to brush shoulders, but do not acknowledge it. You are entwined with this person, as close as you can get to another player, yet cannot acknowledge each other.

Time had gone by. The light was changing. I had won the first set. I had one more to get. It was the middle of an unbelievable day. Serena would try to bring real pressure—this was her moment. She needed to break me early in the second to flip the plot. She held her serve in game one, then pushed me to break point in game two, but I hung on.

Something interesting happened in game three of the second set, the sort of thing that does not show up in statistics or on charts, yet that can mean all the difference. We both came to the net in the middle of a rally. She hit a hard shot, but I hit it back even harder. It caught her flush on the nose. I won the point, and she seemed at first irritated, then angry. There was a flash in her eyes. It’s humiliating to take a shot in the face on Centre Court at Wimbledon, with the TV stations showing it, then showing it again in slow-mo, then again in super slo-mo, then from a reverse angle. A thing like that can be exactly what a player needs to get going, to reverse the momentum. Serena won that game, then pushed hard to break my serve. I hung on, but she played with a new fury in the games that followed. I did not win a point in the fifth game, and in the sixth she broke my serve.

Just like that, Serena had seemingly turned the tide. We were deep into the second set and she was ahead 4–2. Another possible future opened up before me, a future that fit the common pattern: Serena Williams wins the second set 6–2, goes on to win the third, and secures her third consecutive Wimbledon championship, cementing her place as the number one player in the world. They would say I should be happy to have made it so far, winning a set in the final before Serena took over. You could feel it in the crowd—it was how things were starting to look, that it might be Serena’s day after all. It can happen a dozen times in the course of a single match. Fortunes shift, fates change. The minute you accept it, you’re finished. At such moments, here’s what you say to yourself: Good! I need to be down if I want to be known for making an amazing comeback. In other words, it was the gut-check moment.

Do I fold and give in, or do I stand and fight?

As I’ve said, it’s my defining characteristic. I’m a fighter. I do not quit. Just because you’re beating me 4–2 does not mean I will roll into a crouch for games seven, eight, and nine. In fact, that’s the time to counterpunch, just when that other girl is starting to believe in her own victory. So what did I do? I took the force of Serena’s serve—now and then, it hit 120 m.p.h.—and turned it right back on her. She broke my serve? I broke her serve, then hung on to win the next game. Now it was 4–4 in the second set. That was the crucial swing. It set up the all-important ninth game of the second set. This was where I’d have to take it. Serena was serving. I watched her bounce the ball, take a second, bounce it again. She was the same old Serena Williams, yet something had changed. Something in her seemed diminished, faded. Maybe she knew that she was going to lose. She’d already seen it in my eyes. And she knew how bitter it would be. And still, because she is such a fierce competitor, she would fight every step of the way going down.

That ninth game—the sixteenth game of the afternoon—was epic, the whole match in miniature. It went on and on and on. I pushed Serena to break point four times. Each time, she hung on and pushed back. Finally, on the fourteenth point of that game, racing toward a ball that I’d put in the back corner, Serena slipped and fell, but it looked phony. Does she do this to take that point away from her opponent? “It’s nothing that you did,” she seems to say. “It’s just my bad luck.” In other words, she does not miss the shot because she’s fallen down; she falls down because she’s going to miss the shot. She scrambled to her feet and got to the ball but, once again, it ended up in the net.

I was now serving for the championship, all momentum with me. I lost the first point, which is never a good way to start a championship game. I hit an ace on the second point, then a great serve to get it to 30–15. Another return error by Serena and I was a point away from winning it all. I served to her backhand. The return came back faster than a Ping-Pong ball: 40–30. Then, getting ready for the next attempt, I remembered something my coach had said earlier that day. “Do not serve to her backhand. That’s her strength. Make her beat you with her forehand.” So that’s what I did. Serena returned it, but it was weak. I quickly set up, shuffling my feet around my forehand, and hit the ball as it was starting its rise from the grass, hit it with my own forehand right to hers, screaming as I made contact, reversing my follow-through over my right shoulder, a stroke that capped every stroke I’d ever made. I ended with my arms and eyes pointed skyward.

Serena’s return did not make it over the net. I dropped to my knees and put my hands over my face and exulted. Even as I was doing this, I was aware that this gesture—everyone has their own way of punctuating a big win; some pump a fist, some point to God—was not my own. It was exactly what I had seen Juan Carlos Ferrero do when he won the French Open. I’d like to say I did this intentionally, that I was thanking him for the confidence he’d shown when he (ridiculously) picked me to win the tournament, or that I was sending him a coded message, but in fact I did not know what I was doing. I was just living in the moment.

I jogged to the net. I’d expected Serena to reach across and shake my hand. That’s what you usually do, shake hands and exchange the bullshit pleasantries. But she came around and hugged me instead. It was a surprise. I remember thinking, “Is this the protocol? Is this what you’re supposed to do when you lose a Grand Slam final?” Then: “Well, if it’s a hug she wants, it’s a hug she’s going to get.” Serena squeezed me and I squeezed her right back, although I was really looking past her into the stands, trying to locate my father, trying to make eye contact with him for the first time as Wimbledon champion. Serena said something like “Good job.” And smiled. But she could not have been smiling on the inside.

There is a tradition at Wimbledon—a new tradition, it turned out, but it seemed old to me—of winners climbing into the stands to celebrate with their families. Being seventeen, I wanted to taste everything, have all of it. So I hopped the rail around the photographers’ pit and went up into the seats toward my father. It had been him and me then, and it should be him and me now. I love to look at the film and see Yuri at that moment. My father is not an emotional man. It’s there, under the surface, but he does not show it. In fact, the only time I’ve ever seen him cry was when my little dog had to have surgery the day after we got him—that’s another story. You can see him, on that film, trying to make his way to me as I am trying to make my way to him. It’s like a silly old movie. He finally got to me, grabbed me, and endlessly hugged me. Everything was in that hug, all the struggles and all the dreams.

A minute later, I was back on Centre Court, where everyone had assembled for the awards ceremony, which takes place immediately after the last point. They were waiting for me, but, just as I began to make my way over, I suddenly remembered my mom! I have to tell my mom! “Hey,” I screamed to my father—he was twenty or so rows up—“I want to call Mom!” Yuri, without thinking, got his cell phone out of his pocket and tossed it to me. Perfect throw, perfect catch. I dialed as I walked toward the television camera to do the postmatch interview. I dialed and dialed again, but I kept getting either voice mail or a fast busy signal—oh, the dreaded fast busy signal! Here’s what I did not realize: my mom was on an airplane, flying from Florida to New York on JetBlue, where I would meet her after the tournament. But she was watching all this on TV. She was calling over the flight attendant and explaining and laughing and holding up her phone but nothing could be done. Everyone in the stadium was laughing, too. I still had the phone in my hand when someone stuck a microphone in my face and said, “Can’t get a signal?”

I stood next to Serena a few minutes later when they gave out the trophies. Losing on a big stage is tough—believe me, I have come to know. You have to appear warm and gracious while everything inside you is screaming. Wimbledon is especially torturous, as it’s the only Grand Slam where they make the loser walk around the court with the champion, as she showcases her trophy to the public. It’s one of the toughest moments any player ever faces on the tour. You’ve left every piece of yourself on that court, expecting to win. And somehow you lost! Now you have to stand out there in public and on TV celebrating the person who took all that from you. It’s torture.

The runner-up gets a commemorative plate and a thank-you. The winner gets a silver salver, also called the Rosewater Dish—it was first awarded in 1886—and close to a million dollars, plus plaudits and love. The trophies were handed out by Prince Charles and the head of the All England Tennis Club. Serena got hers first. She really did handle it beautifully—when the television reporter asked about her feelings, she spoke only of my accomplishment—but behind all the smiles and nice words, you can see that she is suffering and can’t wait to get the hell out of there, just as anyone would. On TV, I thanked everyone I could think of. I thanked Nick Bollettieri and Robert Lansdorp. I thanked my parents. I talked about my cold and I alluded to Juan Carlos Ferrero, though I did not say his name. I didn’t think I’d ever share that until writing this page. At some point, I looked up at my box and, smiling at my entourage, made cutting motions. This was me reminding my father, my coach, and my trainer about our bet. “If I win, you have to shave your heads.” In the end, I did not hold them to it. For one thing, if my father cut off all his hair, it would probably never grow back.

I went to the locker room alone. Serena had left the court as soon as she could without making a scene. I did not notice it and wouldn’t have thought about it if not for what was going on when I got to my stall. Having your own private stall means that, even though you cannot see your opponent, you can hear her. And what I heard, when I came in and started to change clothes, was Serena Williams bawling. Guttural sobs, the sort that make you heave for air, the sort that scares you. It went on and on. I got out as quickly as I could, but she knew I was there. People often wonder why I have had so much trouble beating Serena; she’s owned me in the past ten years. My record against her is 2 and 19. In analyzing this, people talk about Serena’s strength, her serve and confidence, how her particular game matches up to my particular game, and, sure, there is truth to all of that; but, to me, the real answer was there, in this locker room, where I was changing and she was bawling. I think Serena hated me for being the skinny kid who beat her, against all odds, at Wimbledon. I think she hated me for taking something that she believed belonged to her. I think she hated me for seeing her at her lowest moment. But mostly I think she hated me for hearing her cry. She’s never forgiven me for it. Not long after the tournament, I heard that Serena told a friend—who then told me—“I will never lose to that little bitch again.”

The next few dozen hours went by in a delirium. It was the culmination of everything that we had worked for and planned. Victory really only lasts a moment, and then you are right back out on the practice court. But what a moment!

The morning after the final I went out to find a gown for the Wimbledon Ball. Winning Wimbledon changes everything—there’s no denying it. Every other time that I wanted to get a new dress in London, I had gone to my favorite store, looked through the collections, gone into the dressing room, and so on. But on this occasion, when I said that I wanted to head into the city to do some shopping, an official Wimbledon town car materialized at my front door. It carried me across the country and into the city like a magic carpet gliding over streets and rooftops. They were waiting for me in the showroom at Louis Vuitton. I was surrounded by salespeople who were waiting to help me in and out of the most gorgeous dresses you have ever seen. Red and gold and silver. I walked away with a unique cream double-figure dress with a pleated skirt underneath.

I was in the dress that night. I had dried my hair straight and wore barely any makeup because I had no clue what to do with makeup. I was nervous and shy and there were more cameras than I had ever seen. The flashbulbs hurt my eyes. I was seeing spots and wanted to get past all this and run inside. Official escorts stood at either side of the grand entrance. The doors opened and I floated in and continued to float all the way across the floor, following the same path that Serena had followed three years before. Back then I was watching, but now I was the player at the center of the action. The people in the room stood and began to applaud. A standing ovation. I went by the junior table, stealing a quick look at the girls I knew I’d have to defeat in the coming years if I wanted to stay in this perfect spot. The night flew by. It was a fantasy. All those gowns. All those colors. All that music and wine. It was 8:00 p.m. Then it was 2:00 a.m. I was back at the house, making my way up the stairs, shoes in hand, wanting nothing more than to tell my father about everything that had happened, all of it, but he was not there.

As important as winning Wimbledon had been for me, it had been, if anything, even more important for my father. He’d had his mind fixed on this goal ever since Yuri Yudkin first pulled him aside and spoke to him beside the courts in Sochi. Everything he had done, everything he had sacrificed, he had done and sacrificed to reach this moment. And here we were. Whatever came after this would be wonderful and terrific and everything, but, for my father, and, in a sense, for me, too, it would never be better. This was the destination, the true peak. What came later would just be our lives. This was a dream. And my father was going to celebrate it and mark it properly. He was not going to do that by going to a tea party or fancy ball. He would not do it by wearing a tux or dancing with a duchess. Nope. None of that bullshit. Yuri Sharapov wanted to celebrate in the old way, in the traditional way. He went out and got drunk. He stayed out until the night itself had been defeated. He went into a pub in the dark and did not come out till it was light, drunk and exultant. He woke me up when he finally got in. It was five in the morning, and he was carrying a tower of newspapers.

I sat up in bed. “What’s that?”

“The newspapers,” said Yuri, smiling. (I can’t remember if he was speaking in Russian or English.) “I went to that little shop on the corner. It wasn’t even open when I got there. I sat and waited. And waited. The goddamn sun was coming up! The guy who owns the place, he finally comes in with the keys. He’s stacking up the papers. I take a paper off the pile and, my God, Maria, you are on the front page! The front page! And I show it to the guy and I point to the picture and I ask him, because I am still not sure if this is real, I say, ‘Do you know who this is?’ And he smiles and says, ‘Of course, that’s Maria! She won on Saturday.’ Maria—even the newsagents know you by your first name! I said, ‘I am Maria’s father.’ And this guy, he was so excited for me, he starts going all around and gathering up every paper with your picture, and look at how many!”

He dropped the pile on the floor and began going through them. I went back to sleep, but he stayed up, reading all the articles in the living room. He later said that it was only by reading those articles, which had the statistics and the history and the fact that I was one of the youngest players to ever win Wimbledon, that he realized just what a big deal this win was. A few days later, he ran into Conchita Martínez somewhere. Martínez is a Spanish player and a former Wimbledon champion. She and my father got to talking about Wimbledon and she told him, “Yuri, your life is never going to be the same.”

I had been invited by Mayor Yury Luzhkov of Moscow to some sort of event in that city—the invitation came after I won the final. I’d already committed to something in New York, but my father offered to go in my place. The mayor sent a private jet. Yuri later told me the drinking resumed as soon as he took his seat on the plane. In other words, he marked my first big win the Russian way. Finally, completely exhausted, he met his brother in the mountains, where they had spent so many important days as kids. They hiked and talked and all of a sudden the whole thing finally seemed real to my father. Something about going back to the place where you started—you can see things more clearly there.

Meanwhile, I was also sensing life had changed. As I stepped out of the car at the airport, heading to New York for a promotion commitment, I was met by a crowd of reporters and photographers, paparazzi, the cameras going flash, flash, flash. People suddenly cared about me in a way that was cool, but also kinda creepy and disorienting. The reporters kept yelling, “Maria, Maria, Maria.” I, the rookie, was thinking, “Take it easy, guys, I’m two feet away from you.” It was the start of a new life—good and bad.

Losing. I know what losing does to you. I’d learned its lessons on tennis courts all over the world. It knocks you down but also builds you up. It teaches you humility and gives you strength. It makes you aware of your flaws, which you then must do your best to correct. In this way, it can actually make you better. You become a survivor. You learn that losing is not the end of the world. You learn that the great players are not those who don’t get knocked down—everyone gets knocked down—they are those who get up just one more time than they’ve been knocked down. Losing is the teacher of every champion. But winning? On this level? It was entirely new and I would have to learn its lessons, which can be devastating. In short, winning fucks you up. First of all, it brings all kinds of rewards, which, if seen from the proper perspective, reveal themselves for what they really are: distractions, traps, snares. Money, fame, opportunity. Each laurel and offer and ad and pitch takes you further from the game. It can turn your head. It can ruin you, which is why there are many great players who won just a single Grand Slam, then seemed to wander away. They simply lost themselves in the thicket of success. And then there is what winning does to your mind, which is even more dangerous. It completely distorts your expectations. You start to feel entitled. When you win Wimbledon, you expect to win Wimbledon every year.

I had begun my journey by picking up a tennis racket on that clay court in Sochi when I was four years old. My ability to hit a ball off the back wall of those courts brought me first the attention of the locals, then of people from all over the world. My father and I followed that attention from Russia all the way to America. It was an adventure that we shared, a dream that was a quest. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. It started in poverty and ended in fame. It led to a kind of city shining on a hill. The fabled city of the big win. In the weeks after Wimbledon, we looked at each other and almost whispered, “So the legends are true.” It was happy, but of course it was also sad. The end of a journey, the end of a quest, is always sad. There is a loss of altitude and of direction. Do we simply do again what we’ve already done, or is something else expected of us? My first existence—the days of me and my father alone, the two of us against the world—was over. And I had not yet figured out what would happen next.