Unstoppable: My Life So Far

THIRTEEN

I started the 2005 season by playing an exhibition tournament in Hong Kong, a tune-up for the first Grand Slam of the year, the Australian Open, in Melbourne. It was winter in most of the world, even California. In West Hollywood and Manhattan Beach, the shops were filled with Christmas trees and mistletoe. In the windows of the toy stores, the model trains went around and around. The lights in the houses on the hills above the sea glowed at sundown; the sounds of families on the boardwalk, voices unclear because of the breakers, kids on school break living the childhood you never had a chance to live. That’s the moment, when the whole world seems happy and all you want to do is sit in your house in sweats and watch movies, that the coach calls to remind you it’s time to pack up and get going, back on the road, back to the tour, the match that’s always waiting, the young player who is determined to shut you down and take it all away. It’s always hard, starting up again.

The heat was an issue from the moment I arrived in Australia. I was not adjusting well to the conditions, and the sun just sat up there, pounding me. I won the first round in straight sets, but struggled at times as the tournament went on. I beat Lindsay Lee-Waters in three sets, then beat Li Na of China in straight sets. In the quarterfinals, I faced my nemesis Svetlana Kuznetsova, who I finally overcame, 4–6, 6–2, 6–2. It was a victory but it was grueling. Which was important because, by the time I’d reached the semifinals, and it was a big deal to get that far, I’d already played a whole lot of tennis. I felt fatigued, which is not really how you want to go into a match with Serena Williams.

I got off to a quick start in that semifinal. Serena was a little off her game at the beginning. Maybe she cared too much. Maybe she was playing tight. Her forehand deserted her at a few key moments. I took the first set 6–2. I kept pushing. I quickly found myself 5–4 in the second set, serving for the match. Then something happened. I can blame it on the heat—that match against Svetlana Kuznetsova had taken a lot out of me—but of course Serena was playing under the same sun. Or I could blame bad breaks or fluky plays, but in fact all that really evens out in the end. It was just Serena. She cranked it up, lived up to her vow—she said she’d never lose to me again—and just like that she battled back. I dropped three straight points, then went into the third set dejected. The worst part: I had my chances. What were they? Three match points! When you have your chances, you’ve got to convert them. That’s the story. Make the shot when the shot is there. Because how many times in your life will you have a chance to win a Grand Slam? You make that shot, or you don’t. That’s your career. Serena won the match point she had and I did not win any of the three I had. I battled to the very end, though. That’s how I salvaged a losing effort; that’s how I could walk away disappointed but not unsatisfied. I lost 8–6 in the third set. The match lasted close to three hours. This was tennis at its most grueling: just the two of us out there, on our feet the entire time, and the ball never stopped coming. We shook hands at the net but really said nothing. Serena Williams beat Lindsay Davenport in the final. You can tell a lot by reading the score, 6–2, 3–6, meaning both of them had a chance to win right up until the third set, which Williams took 6–0.

After the match, I told the reporters that I was not discouraged, which could not have been true. Not after a match like that. The first part of the next day I spent in my hotel room, with the curtains down, flat on my back, watching movies. At some point, I realized I had to get out. I remember walking to Bulgari and looking in the displays and seeing this beautiful ring and calling my mom and asking permission to buy it because it was pricey. And a Chloé bag with a chain handle that I still have and will probably never use again. Then I had a nice lunch in the sun by myself. And as I sat there, I began to let go of those three blown match points. Because what else can you do?

That’s how I began one of the great consistent stretches of my career. Two years—2005, 2006—when, as far as I’m concerned, I played some of my best tennis. That’s when I became number one.

Why did my game get so good?

I’d like to say it’s because I’d added a new skill, or improved my serve, or got stronger or faster, but I really don’t believe any of that was the case. In fact, I think the reason I got better had mostly to do with my growing knowledge and acceptance of my own game. For the first time, at age eighteen, I finally began to really understand how I played: what I could do and, just as important, what I could not do.

What could I do? What were my strengths?

I could hit the ball hard. And flat. And deep. I could push the other girl around the court by taking the ball early. I loved returning an opponent’s serve, especially her second serve. There’s nothing like taking a few steps in from the baseline for that second serve. I already had big-time power, even as an eighteen-year-old. Now and then, my forehand could get a little dodgy, but, thanks to my coaches and opponents, it’s improved a lot over the years. But my backhand was—and is—my money shot, backhand down the line, the one I love to hit. Maybe because by nature I’m (probably) a lefty, I can hit that shot all day. And my serve—it was a great part of my game back then, a crucial weapon. I could hit a hard serve exactly where I wanted it. It would change—but more on that later. And stamina. And focus. I had a surplus in all those categories. And my greatest strength is probably my will. I will not quit.

What couldn’t I do? What were my weaknesses?

Speed. I didn’t have it. I wasn’t a fast person, wasn’t a great runner. I didn’t have a quick first step running to a drop shot, and I could be sloppy going from side to side. I was not terrific moving up to the net. It was like something was keeping me away. And even when I got going, it was one step forward, two steps back.

Knowing and accepting these weaknesses turned out to be the most important part of my development. It meant that I could steer matches away from my deficiencies and toward my strengths. After so many years, the coaching and strategy made absolute sense. With a good plan, I could dictate with my strengths. It was during that 2004 season that I really began to put it all together. I’m not sure why it happened at that particular moment—maybe that’s just how the mind works. You don’t get it, and you don’t get it, and you don’t get it, until one day: you get it. That’s when I began winning match after match. That’s when, and this gave me special satisfaction, I beat both Serena and Venus Williams in the same year.

I played Serena in the final of the WTA Championship at the Staples Center in L.A. It was the end of the season. We played on a blue court. I’d begun to relax. Maybe that’s why I did so well. This was some of the best tennis of my life. I lost the first set but I won the match. Not many people will remember it—it aired, on the East Coast, in the middle of the night—but I will never forget it. What do you get to keep when you quit the game? Trophies, some money? It has to be memories of those few perfect matches, those days when everything went just right—when every serve landed exactly where you wanted it and every ball hummed. Even now, that’s what I feel when I close my eyes at night and wait to fall asleep. The jolt that goes all through your body when you hit it just right, the happy exhaustion of the endless rallies, the last few shots and the winner that ends it all, and how you felt when you got back to the locker room knowing that whatever reserves you’d had in physical and spiritual strength had been spent on the court and your mind was empty and your body was drained and satisfied.

I remember walking off the court after the last match of the season. My friend Sophie was waiting and she smiled and said, “Do you realize what you did this year? You won Wimbledon and the season-end championship.”

In the summer of 2005, not long before the start of the U.S. Open, I learned that my father’s dream had come true. When the new rankings came out, I was number one in the world. I knew I was getting close, that I had a shot, but still, you never believe it until you wake up on that Monday morning and pull up the new rankings list on the tour’s Web site. The rankings are based on a system. All year, as you travel on the tour, you accumulate points. A certain number for reaching the round of sixty-four, a certain number for the round of thirty-two, for the round of sixteen, and so on. These numbers are amped up during major tournaments. Reach the quarters or semifinals of a Grand Slam, you are talking about serious points. Win a Grand Slam and it’s like the cherries on the slot machine line up and out pour the coins.

A new ranking list is published every week. It has to do with how well you’ve performed, and also how many tournaments you’ve entered, and how well other players have performed. In other words, I never really know. It’s a complicated system. You’d need a doctorate from MIT to understand exactly what’s going on. I’d been ranked as high as number four, and, really, the difference between number four and number one might be the difference between flying to Japan to compete in some small tournament and laying off for a week to rest your shoulder. From the beginning of my career, I’ve planned schedules that I believed would best prepare me to peak at the Grand Slams. I never thought of adding tournaments to that schedule to gain extra points for a better ranking. And that continues to be the way I plan—Grand Slam–focused, not rankings-focused. And yet hitting number one is special and thrilling. I was surprised by my reaction. I didn’t think I would care that much, but I was wrong. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. As long as I held that ranking, I was the best female tennis player in the world.

All these years, this is what I’d dreamed about and what I’d been working toward, and now it had happened. Number one. Think of all the great players who’d held this spot before me! Billie Jean King. Martina Navratilova. Steffi Graf. I was now part of an elite club—that could never be taken away.

But the feeling did not last. Maybe just as long as it took me to finish breakfast, look at my phone, and head out to the courts. There is always another tournament, another winner, and another reckoning of points. There is always another girl, a crowd of other players, working, at this moment, to take your place.

As happy as I was, and I’m not entirely sure that this was happiness, my father was ecstatic. Number one? It was something he’d dreamed about and worked for since those first afternoons in Sochi, when Yudkin, crazy czar of the clay courts, told my father I had it in me to be among the best in the world. “But what are you willing to give?” Yudkin had asked my father. “Because this will mean giving up everything and changing your life.”

What troubled me was that I was still missing that essential thing—a second Grand Slam championship. It kept eluding me, making me sort of jumpy and nuts, aware everyone was looking at me, thinking, “Sure, she won once but it might have been a fluke, an accident, even luck. Can she win that big again? That’s the question.” As I entered the 2006 season, it was about the only thing on my mind. Being ranked number one is not enough—I had to prove that I deserved to be ranked number one. I had to win that second Grand Slam.

I had my game face on when I reached Melbourne for the 2006 Australian Open. I wanted to get going immediately. I wanted to shut up the skeptics, gossips, and doubters. I wanted to earn my top rank right there at the start of the season. I flew through the early rounds, defeating each of my opponents—Sandra Klösel, Ashley Harkleroad, Jelena Kostanić Tošić, Daniela Hantuchová—in straight sets. I faced Nadia Petrova, a Russian girl who’d always given me trouble, in the quarterfinals, and beat her. I was like a sprinter flying down the track. Nothing could stop me—until I ran into the wall, as eventually happens to everyone, even sprinters. In my case, it was the small, tough, relentless, mosquito-like Belgian player Justine Henin.

My game had not matched up well against Henin. She exposed my weaknesses better than any player. She makes you move, move, and move. No matter what you hit, or where, she anticipates its direction and gets it back, which is why I’ve compared her to a flying, stinging insect. You slap it and think you’ve got it, but when you look down you realize she’s gotten through your fingers and here comes another ball. I always keep my philosophy basic: I do not have to be the best player in the world to be the best player in the world. I just have to be a little bit better than the other player on that particular day. Henin’s philosophy is seemingly simpler still: If I just hit the ball at her one more time than she hits the ball at me, I win, which can make for a long, grueling match. And that one-handed backhand slice! Even when I’ve beaten her, she’s made me look bad and worn me out. I would go to sleep with her one-handed backhand staring me down. Before she retired in 2011, Henin spent 117 weeks ranked number one in the world and won seven Grand Slam titles, which puts her among the all-time leaders.

I believed I could beat her, but I knew it was going to be tough. Before every match against her, I knew she’d be ready to play for three hours, and I would end up in an ice bath. And that day she just hung in and hung in and hung in. On point after point, I’d hit what I believed to be a winner and she’d somehow hit it back even better. In fact, it was one of the cleanest tennis matches I felt I have ever played—so few errors. It was also one of the toughest physically. Henin is a nightmare to play. She is small and tough and will not relent and will not quit. And she looks like a robot when she plays, no expression on her face at all. And that ponytail! It swings back and forth like a metronome. If you are not careful, you’ll be hypnotized. She was just so hard to finish off—that’s what really annoyed me. I edged out the first set 6–4, but her tiny legs just kept going and going, along with that expressionless face and crazy determination.

I lost 6–1 in the second set, then lost 6–4 in the third. But maybe I had done more damage than I’d realized. She had to pull out of the final after winning only a single game, complaining of stomach pain. Sometimes, the real final is not what’s played at the end of the tournament.

Losing hurts. It is so painful. It can also be the best thing. It prepares you for winning. In this case, it taught me how to play Justine Henin, which would prove vitally important just a few months later.

The U.S. Open is the last Grand Slam of the season, and it comes as a kind of relief, a cool evening after a hot day. My recollections of it tend to be intimidating nighttime memories, of traffic and billboards, Arthur Ashe Stadium under the lights, the sound of the crowd, the highway to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, the people and energy and excitement of the city. I have said Wimbledon is the ultimate prize, but a case can be made for the U.S. Open. There’s nothing like winning in New York City.

I came into the 2006 U.S. Open ranked third in the world. Justine Henin was number two. Amélie Mauresmo, an outstanding French player, was number one. A few weeks before, I’d filmed an ad campaign for Nike. The commercial was released at the end of August, a few weeks before the start of the tournament. It was shot like a documentary, a film crew following me through a typical competition day: me waking up, getting ready, leaving my hotel—the Waldorf-Astoria in midtown Manhattan—and heading to Arthur Ashe Stadium. Along the way, I run into people, each of whom sings a line from the West Side Story song “I Feel Pretty.” “Oh so pretty and witty and bright.” The ad ends with me on court, hitting a backhand winner in the final. A jinx? Well, the idea was to turn that commercial into reality. It was shown during every commercial break of the tournament.

One of my first serious challenges in the U.S. Open that year came from the top seed, Amélie Mauresmo, in the semifinals. She had a tricky one-handed backhand and was great at the net, which was far from my strength. Her game was smooth and resilient. I’d never beaten her in a tournament. She’d already won two Grand Slams that year: the Australian Open, where she prevailed because Henin had to withdraw, and Wimbledon, where she beat me in the semifinals and Henin in the final. Here, we played on center court at sunset. You had to drift between the shadows, eagle-eyed, the ball moving in and out of the light. And there was wind—a lot of it. I was wearing a lilac dress that night, and silver shoes. I was nineteen years old, working toward the peak of my career.

I took the first set without losing a game, 6–0. She beat me in the second, 6–4. Was there a moment of doubt? Maybe. The conditions we were playing in took away all the confidence a player might normally have had. During the changeover, I first looked up at the score on the jumbotron, then I looked up into the box. There was my coach Michael Joyce. There was my father. He held up a banana, then a bottle of water. I took a moment during the changeover to visualize it: winning. I was consistent, solid. Did the right things, played the right way. I did not lose a single game in the third set. Finally! I was back in a Grand Slam final for the first time since I’d won Wimbledon.

They interviewed me on the court after the match. They wanted to know what I thought of Justine Henin. We’d be playing in the final on Saturday. I had faced her four times in the past two years, and lost all four times. But that didn’t faze me. “I’m not done yet,” I told the crowd. “I haven’t beaten Amélie in a competition match before; I beat her today. I don’t have a great record with Justine, so, you know, I mean, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a new match, new opportunity.” Looking back and writing these words, I can’t believe how confident I was.

I wore that black Audrey Hepburn dress to the final, determined to turn that Nike commercial from fiction into fact. The crowd seemed especially close to the court that night—the stadium was just electric. Camera flashes and movie stars. Now and then, you feel less like you are living your life than like you are watching it being lived. Like you are someone else, somewhere else. You need to snap out of that before the start of the first game. You have to be present to win. In other words, I came at it slightly removed, which is nerves. Henin broke me right away—took the first two games before I even woke up. The crowd was muttering, mumbling. I could feel that they were for me—they wanted to lift me up.

The key was my serve. That was one of the best years for my serve. I began to hit it again and again. It was precise, consistently placed where I wanted it to be. In the corners, on the lines, delivered with force. When you do that, you control the point even when it’s not an ace. By knowing my weaknesses, I was able to direct the action toward my strengths. I began to impose my will. On some points, I moved Henin like she was a puppet on a string. I moved her the way she had moved me in our four previous meetings. It got in her head, which meant that even when she stepped on the line to serve, she knew she was in for a long rally. After a bad start, I went on to break her twice in that first set. I took it 6–4. It was more of the same in the second. My serve set up my backhand, which determined the course of the night. I broke her in the eighth game of the second set—and sometimes you only need that one break.

As we neared the end, I could feel the energy build. The crowd, the shouts and the screams of New York. At this point, it was all about my focus. I had it in this match as I’d never had it before. The tournament rested on my serve. It was a good one. Henin played it to my backhand. Big mistake. I hit the ball with pace, power—she couldn’t handle it. It ended up in the net. And that was it. At that moment, I dropped to my knees and put my face in my hands, then ran into the stands to hug my father. Then I ran back onto the court for the trophy, a silver cup, which I raised up so fast, the lid fell off. Typical of me. I couldn’t stop laughing. I knew I’d win but still couldn’t believe it. That impossible second Grand Slam, won right there, in New York City, with everyone who cheered for me and everyone who cheered against me watching. Life can be sweet. At that moment, it seemed like it would always be sweet. Of course, whenever you think that, whenever you are so sure of anything, you are probably wrong.