And so began the crazy first days of being famous. The telephone rang, the agents called, the offers poured in. Everything was perfect and everything sounded great. How do you say no when the world is on the line? I would eventually become a great pitchperson, a master of selling products, a name in the corporate world. But it really began with a single company—Motorola.
It was the Wimbledon final that did it, not the match but what happened immediately after. I took my father’s flip phone and tried to call my mom but could not get a signal. From there, the ad wrote itself. It would be me on a tennis court after a big match, wanting to call my mom and this time finally having the right phone for the job. Motorola called IMG the day after Wimbledon, and we did the shoot. The ad shows me, racket in hand, chatting on the new Motorola RAZR phone, which wasn’t even out yet. They gave me some kind of prototype to carry around. It was so cool, superthin and sleek. I went from having a piece-of-crap phone to being like James Bond, flashing the newest piece of high-tech hardware. I remember eating lunch at a sushi place in New York right around this time. I was holding the RAZR phone, and a businessman was eyeing me, and the RAZR, like a hawk. Finally, he came over and said, “Excuse me, how did you get that phone?” I told him that I knew someone at Motorola. But I wanted to say: “Because I won Wimbledon, that’s how.”
They made me the face of Motorola, which itself became a story: that I was just a kid and yet was representing a huge brand, with ads everywhere. People assumed I was making millions of dollars, but it was really not a huge deal. Max’s idea was to go with a cool, quality brand—we’d gotten bigger offers from competing phone companies—and let other work flow from that. “We don’t want to tarnish your name by going downscale,” he explained. And he was right. The offers flooded in after Motorola. I was soon working for half a dozen blue-chip companies. TAG Heuer. Land Rover. I’d had a sponsorship deal with Nike since I was an eleven-year-old junior, as many tennis players do, but now I actually started doing commercials for the company. Bleacher Report put together a slideshow of my greatest commercials. They’ve got Nike on there, Canon, Head rackets, and a funny thing I did for ESPN. I never planned to become a big pitchperson or public face, it just happened. It was more like a side effect of what I was doing at the tournaments, but it made me famous. All of a sudden, writers were more interested in my life off the court than on the court. I went to the beach, someone snapped a picture of me in a bathing suit, and the next day it was all over the Internet. How crazy is that? And there were rumors. Ridiculous rumors. Every day, they had me dating someone else. It was weird. Irritating. Everyone thinks they want to be famous, but let me tell you, a little goes a long way, especially for a seventeen-year-old girl.
And your life changes. It’s not the money or the fame, but the way the money and the fame separate you from other players. They see it as a zero-sum game. We are all competing for the same dollars, so this reasoning goes, so if Maria gets them, they don’t. If you are a certain kind of person, you will really dislike me for that, though you never will admit it to my face. Jealousy became a new thing I had to deal with on the tour. If they resented me, it was not because I was beating them on the court, or because I was a better player, but because I was getting all those goddamn ads. It drove some girls crazy. Elena Dementieva, a Russian who traveled with her mother, was always giving me dirty looks, laser beams. Then, one day, her mother complained to my masseur, a Russian who worked with a lot of Russian players. She told him, “Elena can’t get any deals in Japan because Maria has taken them all.”
How does the world change when you win Wimbledon?
Of course, the most obvious thing is the money. At some point, and it must have been later, I heard a reporter say that I was the highest-paid female athlete in the world. I don’t know if that’s true, or has ever been true. I have never cared enough to look into it. But things did change, and fast, after I beat Serena Williams. I first became aware of it a few weeks after I got back from England. I was in Florida, shopping at the T.J.Maxx in Bradenton, standing there alone in the aisle with my cart, looking at all those discount pants and shirts, and I had this sudden realization. I thought, “My God, I can buy whatever I want.” A few years back, standing in this same store, I’d actually thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to buy anything in here?” And now I could. I could probably buy the whole store!
Then, a few weeks later, we went to Los Angeles so I could get back to work with Robert Lansdorp. There’s always something else to work on, prepare for, improve. Even the biggest win gets you just a moment of celebration, then it’s right back at it. The wheel never stops turning. Stay off too long, you’ll never get back on. I’d usually stayed in a crappy hotel in Torrance, a motor court, a roadside ruin. Max did not even tell me that he’d switched hotels, just gave us a name and address. It was the Beach House in Hermosa Beach, which—well, Hermosa Beach is like heaven, miles of boardwalk and stores and shops beside the Pacific. The room itself was much smaller, and there was no kitchen, but the view! It was ocean till the water met the sky, and then the sun went down, and the moon came up, and the stars came out. I could stand on that balcony for hours and hours, thinking about nothing. And the bathtub! It actually had a little yellow rubber ducky next to it! I called up Max as soon as I’d unpacked. I was laughing. I said, “Max, winning Wimbledon is the greatest thing in the world!”
Not long after that, we bought our first home. My parents and I chose a house in Longboat Key, Florida, because that’s what Yuri loves—the shoreline, the harbor where the sharks swim at night. A year later, we bought a house in L.A., for all those trips to see Robert. My crappy hotel days, the days of motor courts and dorms and second bunks in shared rooms, were over. It was an upgrade—not just in room or class of hotel, but in life.
Yet, at the same time, seen in a different way, things did not change that much. It was still tennis, tennis, tennis. It was still practice, practice, practice. It was still run, hit, play, stretch, run, hit, sleep. Or else it was life on the tour, the endless merry-go-round of airports and hotels and buffets in the lobby, the same tournaments, the same girls, only now they had an extra motivation when they played me. If they won, they’d not just be beating a girl from Russia, they’d be beating a Wimbledon champion.
Life on the tour is strange. It’s a hermetically sealed bubble, beyond normal history and current events. First of all, you are in all these different towns and cities, the most beautiful places in the world, but, unless you now and then force yourself out of the bubble, you see none of it. You are in cities but not in cities. You are in the world of tennis, where the rooms are filled with the same people and the same energy, no matter where you happen to be. Second, it’s very difficult to have any sort of personal life on the tour. You are under a microscope, being watched by other players and coaches and reporters all the time. You can’t have much of a social life, and forget about a boyfriend. I mean, you’re never home, so the only way you can have a relationship is either with another tennis player, a player also on the tour, or with a person who gives up his life to travel with you, becoming part of your entourage. And who does that? Someone without a life of his own? That is, someone you’d probably not want to date in the first place. These sorts of characters do exist. You see them in the players’ lounges or carrying bags. Not the coach, not the parent, but the boyfriend. By definition, any relationship you have is going to be long distance, which amounts to a kind of telephone buddy or pen pal. Not terribly exciting.
Of course, after you win, life on the tour does change. Because you have won, you are treated better. You’re given all kinds of extras, like your own driver at tournaments and better practice courts. The atmosphere in the tournament venues and at the press conferences changes, too. It turns chilly, intense. Suddenly, the world, the only world you have ever known, is filled with girls who dislike you. They’re jealous of the money and fame. They want what you have and the only way to get it is to take you out. Every match becomes a big deal—if not for you, then for her. There is no more sneaking up and taking a player by surprise. Everyone has scouted and studied you, probed your weaknesses and come up with a plan. Everyone is waiting.
It’s the first big test of a long career—yes, you can win, but can you win again? That’s an even tougher task. The history books are littered with the names of athletes who got that single big win but never got a second Grand Slam. One-hit wonders. Not because they were not great, or won by luck. But because they never figured out how to adjust after everyone else has made their adjustments. They never figured out how to play as the favorite, which is another thing altogether. As the weeks go by, the pressure mounts—you’ve got to win that second Grand Slam. Only once you’ve done it will you have proved you are something more than an asterisk. What’s on the line? Not just that second Grand Slam but, in a weird way, the first one, too. Only by winning again can you prove that the first Grand Slam was something more than a fluke. This feeling was new and never went away. It was pressure. There was much more on the line after I’d won Wimbledon. But I welcomed the challenge. I wanted to prove myself again and again and again. I wanted to beat them all. I was eighteen years old, the reigning Wimbledon champ, with nothing but time in front of me.