As a famous singer says, “Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks.”
The year 2008 was not a diamond. It was bad news followed by bad news. It was one damn thing after another. It started with Robert Lansdorp, who’d become such an important part of my team and my life. He was crazy; he was a pain in the ass; he was difficult and he was weird—but I loved him. Apparently, my father did not. Apparently my father could no longer stand to work with him, or vice versa.
The story?
It depends on whom you ask, and what time of day you ask it.
My father will tell you that things change, that time passes, that people grow apart. We had taken what we had needed from Lansdorp, he will say, and Lansdorp had taken what he had needed from us. It was no one’s fault. It was just over. It was just time to move on. My father believes that it’s important to change coaches and routines every few years—it keeps you learning and it makes life interesting.
But Lansdorp will dismiss all this talk of natural endings and people growing apart as bullshit. He cites a specific incident instead, a specific day.
I was playing Nadia Petrova, a Russian girl who I didn’t think much of. It was just something about her. Maybe it’s more intense when you’re facing another Russian. It’s like you’re playing for the love of the same parent. That intensity can feel like hatred. I assume, when I stop playing, that everyone will be able to forgive me and that I will be able to forgive everyone, but as long as I am in the game, I need that intensity. It’s never really personal. It’s never really about the other girl. It’s fuel. I need it to win. The match was getting nasty, and all eyes were on my father, who was sitting with Lansdorp in my box. Yuri had become a famous tennis parent by this time. He did not give interviews, did not comment in the press, did not do any kind of grandstanding, which made him seem mysterious and interesting. Before he knew it, he’d become a caricature in the tennis world, a cartoon of the crazy Russian father, pacing in his hoodie, frowning, grumbling, keeping to himself. The crowd picked up on this, and the mood around the Petrova match turned stormy. Finally, right in the middle of things, someone in the stands threw a tennis ball onto the court. I had one ball in my hand, and was preparing to serve, when here comes this other ball, arcing down from the sky. Everyone started to hiss. Then I heard my father’s voice, booming over everything: “Just finish the point!”
The press played it up. Another outburst from the wild Russian. A reporter called Lansdorp and asked him what he’d thought of the episode. Lansdorp did not say much, but what he did say, and what the newspaper published, infuriated my father. Lansdorp, in essence, said that he did not believe that Yuri should be yelling down from the box. At the next match, in Lansdorp’s version, my father was daggers and laser beams with Robert. They sat side by side in icy silence. Tension, tension. I began to fall behind on court, and the worse it looked for me, the more evil the mood became. Finally, after I lost a point, my father turned to Lansdorp and said, “See? That’s what you get when you don’t yell down from the box.”
How did Lansdorp respond?
Well, if you’ve ever met Robert, you probably know.
He said, “Fuck off, Yuri. Don’t give me any shit.”
And that was it—the end of my time with Robert Lansdorp. He never coached me again. It was a bigger loss than you might imagine. It was not just the flat shot or the repetition that Lansdorp gave me. It was friendship, confidence. It was a kind of stability and balance you rarely encounter. It’s not a surprise that so many great players cite the role that Lansdorp played in their success. And it’s not technical stuff they mention. You can get that from anyone. It’s the intangibles, the relationship, the sense he gives you that, no matter what sort of slump or hole you have fallen into, you will survive because you are a champion. Want evidence? Well, would he be at your side if you weren’t? It was something that I’d miss over the years, but especially in the months immediately ahead. In other words, Robert Lansdorp bugged out at exactly the wrong time—just as I was about to enter one of the most difficult passages of my career.
The year wasn’t all bad. I did win my third Grand Slam. This was the Australian Open. It was some of the cleanest tennis I’ve ever played at a Grand Slam. I remember everyone talking about where Lindsay Davenport would end up in the draw because she had been injured and wasn’t seeded. It turned out she was going to be my second-round opponent. I didn’t like that. It doesn’t matter how well you’re doing or how high you’re flying, if a great player has a great day, there’s a good chance it won’t be a great day for you. And Lindsay Davenport was a great player. So I prepared for that match like nothing else mattered even though I still had a first-round match to win. It was the toughest draw I’ve ever faced in a Grand Slam. After Davenport, I had to beat Elena Dementieva, Justine Henin, and Jelena Jankovic, all world-class competitors.
I played Ana Ivanović in the final. It wasn’t my best tennis of the tournament. I was better against Davenport and Henin. It was pretty close in the first set. Ivanović had a few chances to lead. That all turned around during a particular rally. She tried to hit a drop shot in the middle of a rally that didn’t really need it, and the ball bounced in front of the net. That’s when I saw it in her eyes. Fear? Nerves? It’s a tell. It said she was not up to the task. From that moment, I took over the match mentally even more than anything else. I beat her 7–5, 6–3. It was a big deal—winning my third Gland Slam. I’d won all the majors but the French Open.
One of the first calls I made after I won at the Australian Open? It might surprise you. It was Jimmy Connors.
It was Michael Joyce who first made that introduction. This was back in 2007, during our prep season training for the new year. Joyce suggested we go see Jimmy Connors in Santa Barbara. Have him be part of our practices, go to dinner together, benefit from his experience. I immediately agreed. As an athlete, being in the presence of champions is humbling, inspiring. You listen to their every word, inspect their every move. Michael and I drove up to Santa Barbara, where Jimmy resided, in early December, listening to U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” the whole way. It was Michael’s favorite song, and soon became mine. We spent four days practicing alongside Jimmy. I was nervous. To miss a ball, to say the wrong thing, to not have an answer to his questions. He had a calm, mysterious demeanor and spent every water break talking about his mother’s influence, her guidance, and her no-bullshit attitude.
He had me jump rope at the beginning and end of practice until my arms were ready to fall off. He explained that in the old days they didn’t do any of the gym bullshit they do now; it was all practical, simple stuff. So jump rope it was. I liked his approach, and I liked the feeling I left Santa Barbara with even more. I don’t remember the particular U2 songs on our drive home, mostly because I was dead asleep in the passenger seat, emotionally and physically drained from the hours of practice. It occurred to me that, although Michael was still running the practices and we were doing similar drills to those we had been doing for years, having Jimmy Connors on the sidelines watching my every move—silently, like a hawk—adds another gear of concentration, and desire. I didn’t want to miss a single ball in front of Jimmy Connors. I didn’t want to let any winner get by me. I pushed myself, scrambled, laser-focused.
About a month later, the night we were celebrating my Australian Open victory, I called Jimmy during our celebration dinner. I thanked him for spending those days on court together; I told him that they had inspired me. He told me he was happy for me. But he also said to make sure I don’t only call him when I win, but also when I lose. That stuck. And continues to be a very important quality I look for in people I come across. Will they want to hear from me when I lose? When I’m down?
It was strange, those days right after I won the Australian Open. Big things were happening, but not in a good way.
The first big thing: I separated from my father; I separated from Yuri. Not as a father of course—he and my mother will always be closer to me than anyone else in the world—but I separated from him as a coach. My father had always said you need to change it up, get together with new and different people every few years, because it adds energy and revitalizes routine and vanquishes boredom. Boredom, routine—those can be the most deadly foes of all. Eventually, and there is irony in this, Yuri’s advice led me to the conclusion that I had to separate from Yuri himself. For the first time, I could glimpse the end of my professional career. The players I’d made my name against were beginning to call it quits. Younger and younger players were coming up behind me. So this was the time: If I wanted to prove that I could do it on my own, win on my own, be a fully functioning player and fully functioning adult on my own, I had to do it now. By firing my father—that really is too harsh a term—I would be taking control of my life.
I sent him an e-mail because I felt that was the best way I could express my feelings. My father did not take it hard. He did not scream or throw a vase or overturn a table. In fact, he got it. He understood it. He said, “Now, Maria, yes, you have to live your own life.” Maybe he was ready to get off the road, to quit the endless rounds of airports, hotels, and arenas. My father has since dedicated himself to a life of serious active leisure, the beach and the mountains, skiing and exercising, reading and thinking about his beloved Tolstoy. He works out as if he were training for the senior Olympics. The grace with which he stepped away was his last great act as my coach. I continued on with Michael Joyce as my coach. Everything remained the same, and yet it was of course entirely different. Which might have been the only thing on my mind that year, if not for the second big thing that happened after I won the Australian Open.
It was a small thing at first—an ache in my shoulder when I served. But the pain got worse and worse. It reached the point where I did not even want to play, it hurt so much to serve. I cried after some matches, the pain got so intense. I tried to play through it, then to change my motion to alleviate the pain, which only threw other parts of my body into disarray. I was falling out of rhythm, losing my feel and confidence for the game.
Meanwhile, my trainer was treating me with ibuprofen and exercises and rubdowns, but none of it helped. The pain was always there, especially on my serve and high backhand volleys. If I played a point without pain, I was overjoyed. Then the pain roared back, and when it did, I was plunged into a panicky gloom. I became moody. My father finally said, “Look, Maria has always had a tremendously high threshold for pain. If it’s this bad, it must be something more than just the normal wear and tear.”
We went to see a doctor. He said it was tendonitis. The right rotator cuff. The tendon is like a big rubber band there, made of many small strands. These can become inflamed, even frayed—that’s tendonitis. In my case, he said it was probably caused by the repetitive motion of my serve. He told me to take it easy but to keep on playing—if you don’t move the tendon, it can get stiff and even lock. He told me to ice my shoulder after each session and take an anti-inflammatory. It might take a few weeks, he said, but the pain will fade.
“The pain will fade.”
Do you know how many times I heard that line? Too stinking many. I played and iced and took anti-inflammatories, but the pain did not fade. In fact, it got worse. I went to see another doctor. He took the same pictures and did the same tests and came back with a different diagnosis. It might’ve been tendonitis, but now it’s bursitis, he said. Without going into a lot of detail, suffice it to say bursitis is an inflammation of the tissue beneath the tendon. I was told to stop playing for a few weeks, put ice on the shoulder, and take anti-inflammatories for pain. Given time, they said, my shoulder would heal. In the worst-case scenario, there would be cortisone shots.
One day, after I’d done all that—didn’t play for two weeks, took anti-inflammatories, applied ice, even tried the cortisone shots—I laced up my shoes and went out to play. I hit some balls from the baseline—so far, so good. But as soon as I lifted my arm to serve and made contact, there was the pain, waiting for me, and worse than ever. I did not feel it when I hit a forehand. I could volley just fine. And I did not feel it every time that I went up for a serve, which was confusing, but I did feel it most of the time. It was right at the top of my shoulder—a sharp pain that sort of mellowed into a dull ache that lasted maybe ten seconds. While it was happening, I could think of nothing else, which made it impossible to play out points. I was devastated. When you are an athlete, your body is everything. When it fails, it’s so painful. It feels like you’re finished.
Someone recommended a doctor on the Upper East Side in New York, Dr. David Altchek, an orthopedic surgeon who’d seen everything that could happen to a shoulder. They said he was the best in the country. It took him about five minutes to know that I had a serious problem. He did a lot of tests—X-rays and MRIs—then sat me down in the waiting room. The news was not good. The bursa was not irritated. The tendon in my shoulder was not inflamed—it was torn. I had been playing for weeks with a torn tendon, which is why I had all that pain. It was probably a result of my serve, the repetition of that same violent motion. My shoulder rotated till my hand reached the middle of my back, exploding forward to meet the ball high in the air. Once, a few years before, a baseball coach who’d seen me serve took my father aside and said it was a motion he’d seen only in certain pitchers. He admired it and said it generated tremendous power, but warned my father that it could also cause tremendous injury later on. My father had forgotten all about this exchange, but remembered it now. He thought, “I knew she should be playing lefty.”
The doctor said I needed surgery. The tendon would have to be reattached, sewn back together. The sooner, the better. It was a serious operation for a tennis player. He did not sugarcoat it. Several tennis players had had shoulder surgery in the past, but none had made it back to the top. “You can overcome it,” he said, “but you will not be the same player.”
I sat there, staring at my feet, taking in these words. I was twenty-one years old. At first, it did not register. I did not believe him. Later that night, when it did hit me, I fell into a kind of black hole. I’d finally made it, gotten my game and life just where I wanted it to be, and now I was going to lose everything because of one small split tendon? And what if my career did end there? How would I be remembered? As a flash in the pan, just another sad story, a cautionary tale? No. I refused to believe that this is how it would end.
I was in the hospital a few days later, prepped for surgery, and in that gown that has been in and out of the washing machine so many times. I went to New York with my mother, Max, and Michael Joyce, who’d now been coaching me for several years. I’ll never forget Max’s face. He was saying all the right things, and being encouraging and calm, and it’s no big deal, every player, and so forth and so on, but his eyes were red and it seemed to me that he’d been crying. He was so shaky that it made me shaky, but mostly I was touched. Max and I had been together for so long, been through so much. Without realizing it, we’d become family.
The details of the operation had been explained to me. I understood it on an intellectual level, but the thought of someone cutting into my shoulder and playing around with the ligaments and nerves was terrifying. It’s a big part of the makeup of any athlete—being in control. My serve, my plan, my game. And now, when it came to the most important game of all, I was giving up all control. A complete loss of autonomy. When the big plays were made, the plays that would affect my own body, I’d be less than a spectator. I’d be unconscious.
Here’s what bothered me most: various people, nurses and doctors, came into my room and asked me a question that had already been asked many times before. Which shoulder? Is it this one, or that one? Are you sure it’s not the left shoulder? I felt like saying, “Hey, have you ever watched a tennis match? Have you ever seen me serve? I serve with my right arm, my right shoulder! Which is why it broke down, which is why I’m here!” Finally, someone came in and drew a big X on my right shoulder with what looked like a Sharpie. An X surrounded by all kinds of helpful arrows. Operate here!
At some point, after they’d shot me up and wheeled me in, a man put in my IV… I was gone. When I opened my eyes, and it seemed like a moment later, my shoulder and arm were swaddled like a newborn baby and my thoughts were as thick as syrup and I was being wheeled down a long linoleum hallway. Fluorescent lights. The hum of rubber wheels. Then I was back in my hospital room, surrounded by three familiar faces. Thirty minutes later, I looked at Max and said, “I don’t belong here. Get me out of here.”
Then I sat up and, as I did, vomited all over the floor. It was from the anesthesia. I guess I wasn’t ready to leave the hospital yet, but that’s when I began my long journey back.
I started rehab in Arizona soon after. I did most of that work with Todd Ellenbecker, a specialist in shoulder recovery based outside Phoenix. I would fly to Arizona each Monday with Michael Joyce, then back to L.A. on Friday. Every week, on Monday and Friday, that same bag of peanuts on that same Southwest Airlines flight. I could have stayed in Arizona, but the work was hard and tedious and I don’t love living in a hotel, so I went back to L.A. each weekend.
We started with stretching and strength exercises. It was as if I had a brand-new shoulder, still stiff from bubble wrap and tape. I had to regain power and mobility. Of course, I had known about all this and was prepared. But what I was not prepared for, what took me by surprise, was the pain. The incredible pain. It hurt like hell to lift those little half-pound weights and do those little drills, but I could not rest and could not whine. It went on for days and days. And every day seemed the same. Hours of gray skies and bad moods and afternoon showers, and meanwhile the world was going on without me, the matches and the finals and the trophies raised at center court, all of it continuing as if my presence did not matter, as if I’d never been born. It was like being shut out of your own life, or locked out of your own house.
They brought in various trainers and strength coaches to work with me and still it hurt like hell and still the progress was slow. They’d cut me open in October 2008. I was back on the court, hitting balls (badly) by Christmas. But everything felt different, and by “different” I mean wrong. It hurt and was ugly. My strength was gone. My flexibility was gone. And my range of motion. When I tried to serve, I could not get my arm back far enough to generate any power. I would eventually learn to hit the ball again, to emerge from this pain and funk, but as a different player. I’d never have the same kind of serve that I’d had at seventeen. Not as consistent, not as free, not as loose. Not as powerful. Not as accurate. My motion had to be shortened. I knew that, but could still not get it quite right. I did not feel comfortable on the court, or in my body. What was I doing out there during all those miserable mornings in the winter of 2008? I was learning to play tennis again. I’d have to rely more on canniness and strategy. I’d have to rely less on my serve than on my return of serve. In some ways, I’d be a better player as a result. In other ways, I’d be worse. In either case, I had to learn to win in a new way.
My father set up a few practice matches. These did not go well. I lost to inferior players. It sent me into a kind of panicky moodiness. Nothing made me happy. I became obsessed with my shoulder, my future, my game. And did I mention my shoulder? It made it impossible for me to enjoy the other parts of my life—my friends and family, food, shopping, a sunny day.
My parents were worried about me. And so was Max. Not about my tennis—they claim they always knew that I’d find my way back—but about my spirit, my state of mind. Despite the large amount of support and love I received from people in my life, I felt so lonely and small. And nothing they said could make me feel any better. So I decided to resume my childhood habit of writing in a journal, putting my sad thoughts on paper. As days went by, that paper became my best friend, the only friend I could trust, the only friend I could share with.
It would be a crucial part of my recovery. I came to believe that the physical act of writing can reeducate your brain. By writing, you access certain thoughts and feelings that might otherwise remain hidden. You can bring them to the surface, where they can be understood and then dealt with. It’s like turning on a light in a dark room. What you had believed to be a monster is revealed in the light to be little more than shadows. Boom, you’re back to your old, less freaked-out self. I also came to believe that you can plant positive thoughts in your psyche in the same way. Put it on paper and in it goes. Which is why, if you look through those diaries, which I have saved and used to help write this book, you will see pages given over to nothing but positive phrases in the nature of “Yes, you can. Yes, you can. Yes, you can.” But mostly I am talking myself through my injury and frustration and pain.
A typical entry:
I am completely flustered! You see I can’t even write. It’s been God knows how long since I started (I believe eight weeks now) and I’m still all the way in the bottom of the ditch somewhere in the middle of America. Basically I don’t feel like my shoulder is getting any better. It’s a constant battle. I’m doing everything I can possibly do for it. Yet I constantly have a hollow feeling inside me. I know that it will get better and I am going to play and serve without any pain but I also feel like I’m fooling myself for no apparent reason. I walk into the clinic every single day and do what? Get stronger? Will that take the pain away? How long will it take? It’s these constant questions that I myself cannot answer.
I missed too many tournaments while rehabbing my shoulder. My ranking, which had been near the top, fell into the high double digits. I’d had to skip the Australian Open, meaning I could not defend my 2008 title, which really stunk. It meant I wouldn’t get to walk through that tunnel and see a picture of me holding up the big trophy beside all the previous champions.
I did not begin really playing again until March 2009. I started in the dregs. My shoulder hurt, my body disobeyed my mind, my serve did not exist, and I tired easily, but I was determined to scrap my way back into the game. Nothing makes you want something more than having it and losing it. Until I got that top ranking, I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted it. Now, more than anything, I wanted it back.
The French Open was to be my reemergence on the scene. That’s what I was training for, but I felt just awful. The bottom came in May at a small tune-up tournament in Warsaw, Poland, on the worst clay courts I had ever seen. I did not want to play in it, but I had to get through some matches. I couldn’t go into the French Open cold turkey. I won maybe two matches, losing in the quarters, in a match I could’ve won convincingly at any other point in my career. The winner was Alona Bondarenko, a Ukrainian. After the match, I watched her give her press conference. I remember every word she said, like it was yesterday. Maria has lost the speed on her serve; Maria has lost her power; Maria has lost her game; Maria is not what she used to be; blah blah blah. I remember seeing those lines run across the bottom of the screen on CNN. That was just the fuel I needed. That’s the kind of thing that gives you motivation. Of course I wanted to win the French Open and Wimbledon. But now it was more than that. It wasn’t just that I wanted to win. It’s that I wanted to make Alona Bondarenko eat those words.
The French Open was a disaster. That’s how I remember it, anyway. When I look back at the stats, the story seems a little more complicated. The fact is that in my first Grand Slam postsurgery, I made it to the quarterfinals, playing some good matches and beating some good players to get there. But I tend to really remember only how things ended. Were you playing on the last day, or were you already in the next town while the focus of the tennis world was on someone else? I lost a terrible match in straight sets. I managed to win only two games. I should have been all right with the result, as it was just my second tournament back, but I wasn’t happy with the tournament and I was very unhappy with that final match. It was a low point, utterly deflating. After a match like that, you go back to the locker room and scream.
My diary:
Ever since the Open, I am walking around with a huge doubt on my shoulders. I go into my press conference and the first question is… “People are saying you’re not making progress. Why is that? Do you think you need a new coach?” Seriously, why the fuck do you care, why does anyone care? It’s as if these people were scientists, that they think they know everything! Get a life!
I eventually made my way to Wimbledon. I was hopeful when I arrived in town because Wimbledon had always been a magical place for me. Whenever I’d been down, that town and those grass courts and that tournament had always brought me back up. It had been like pixie dust. Well, not this time. It was an upside-down world. Whatever had been good turned out bad. This was the real rock bottom. Maybe I wanted it too much. Maybe I had pushed too hard. I made it through the first round, beating a qualifier but having to work hard to do so, and lost in the second round to an unranked Argentinian player named Gisela Dulko. It was one of my quickest exits from a Grand Slam ever. Before I had even unpacked my bags, I was back on the plane, heading home. The sportswriters were busy writing obituaries on my career. I was twenty-two years old. It had been a good life, but now it was over.
As soon as I got in from the airport, I took out my diary and began to write:
Well, I am finding myself back home on a Thursday the first week of Wimbledon. Yep, it pretty much sucks. To be honest there’s such a mix of thoughts and feelings. On the one hand it’s pretty amazing to think that my arm has held up as well as it has. I really didn’t believe I was ready to play at such a tough level, four tournaments in a row. And yet for some reason I feel like someone kicked my dog. Of course it’s Wimbledon, and I don’t like to lose. Then I’m at the airport this morning buying one of those stupid gossip magazines with every paper staring me down with my face on the cover, the headlines saying, “It’s All Over for Sharapova”! Fuckers! Then I get on the plane and they’re asking if I want a paper every two seconds. Then the lady in front of me is reading the sports section. And there it is again. “It’s All Over for Sharapova.” All of a sudden women decide to start reading the sports section on that particular day?