Who can you turn to in such a confusing time?
For most people, it’s friends from work, all those people in the office, but I am not friends with many people from my “office.” Not because I do not like them, but because in our world, it’s very difficult to be friends with another player. These are your opponents on the court, and being friends with them is giving away one of your advantages. If I like you, I’ll have a harder time putting you away. I don’t believe I’m the only player who feels this way, but I am one of the few who will admit it. When I see two players all buddy-buddy on the tour, I know that friendship will always have its limits. I’d rather live honestly and be truthful than put on a phony show for the press. In the tough times, it’s my family I turn to, and to the few genuine friends that I have made over the years—not my rivals.
Of course, there’s also the comforts of boyfriends. When I look back at my diary, I see, scattered between the positive-thinking exercises and dark ruminations, the constant discussion of crushes and would-be boyfriends, as well as my general thoughts on romance. In my early years on the pro tour, I was amazed by the way I seemed to attract the attention of grown men. It was funny to me, probably because I still felt like a kid.
I was always interested in the question of what sort of guy would best suit me: “Who would I consider the one?” I wondered in my diary as a teenager.
First he has to understand and respect the business I’m in. And he has to have his own purpose in life. He has to be down to earth meaning if he has millions of dollars then you wouldn’t be able to tell. He has to have a sense of humor because I love to laugh. He has to be affectionate, caring, and sweet. He has to be open-minded about things like telling me the truth, because I hate people who have secrets. And most importantly he has to love me for the person I am on the inside rather than on the outside. But I still like the bad boys. Even though I know it’s trouble. I want to fix them and take them home. I love challenges.
I didn’t date seriously until I was nearly twenty-two years old. It was the end of 2009. A friend of mine was preparing a casual barbecue at her house on a Saturday, and she called me up a few hours beforehand to say I needed a distraction, could she invite someone to come who might have potential?
I said “Sure,” not really understanding her intention.
He walked into her house in the middle of dinner with hair still wet from the shower, in sports gear, ice wrapped around both knees. I liked him immediately. Saturday night, and he’d just finished practice? That’s my type of person.
His name was Sasha Vujačić. He was a Slovenian basketball player in his fifth year with the L.A. Lakers. That night we ate grilled fish fillets and talked, then exchanged numbers.
The next morning I was on a flight to Napa Valley with my mom and some close friends. This was my postseason vacation. I told her about Sasha.
I said, “He’s tall and European.”
She said, “Masha, no. Basketball players rarely have a proper education.”
Well, I didn’t have a proper education either. And besides, he grew up in Europe, and has traveled around the world. He must have picked up something along the way.
She shook her head. She didn’t want to hear any more.
I didn’t think that was fair. I wouldn’t disqualify someone because their athletic lifestyle had prevented them from going to school. I decided to give him a chance.
We formed a bond, a closeness and understanding that I thought at the time only athletes could form. And we made sense together. He had a home in Los Angeles and was a professional athlete, he had the height, he had an Eastern European mentality, and he was close to his family. All good on paper.
But there were signs of trouble even in the early days. For one thing, he always insisted, when we were in L.A., that we stay at his place, even though my place was much bigger and much nicer than his place, and just down the street. It was a man thing, or maybe it’s just an Eastern European man thing. He always had to make it clear that he was the center of the action, that it was his place and his world and he was in control. He did not like to be reminded that I had a career of my own, a bigger place, and a bigger income. I couldn’t care less about those things, but they mattered to him. The fact that I was probably more successful in my world than he was in his was not something we could ever talk about or acknowledge. So we stayed at his place and did not talk about it. We just went on.
About a year into the relationship, we got engaged. It was less like a traditional plan to get married—I was definitely not ready for that—than a statement of commitment. Like going steady. I think this was also an Eastern European or Slavic thing. Like pledging your love. It was a way of telling the world that for me there was only him and for him there was only me. He gave me a ring, a huge rock, which I took off only when I played. I’d just stare at it in disbelief, thinking, “Am I really engaged?”
The tennis world is small and gossipy and my news quickly spread everywhere. Some of the other girls congratulated me or asked about my wedding or my honeymoon plans. One day, around this time, Serena Williams pulled me aside in the Wimbledon locker room. I was about to play my first match of the tournament and was trying to get into the mental space you need to reach when it’s time to play—players tend to leave each other alone in the hour preceding a match. Serena did not know or care. She was too excited and wanted to talk about my engagement. She’d just come back from an injury. I hardly ever talked to Serena, but she came on like we were old friends.
I said, “Hi, Serena, I’m glad you’re back.”
“I heard you got engaged,” she said, excited. “Sorry for that. HA! HA! HA!”
Then she just stood there, laughing and laughing at her own joke.
I just stood there, too. I mean, what was I supposed to say to that? I laughed with her. As I said, it was just an hour until my match. I was already in my dress, about to start my warm-up. She had to know that. She was done playing for the day, so what did she care? She saw me in the members’ locker room, sat next to me, looked around, as if checking for spies and eavesdroppers, then whispered, but it was one of those loud stage whispers, the kind you use if you really want to be overheard, saying, “You know, I got engaged, too! And I haven’t told anyone but you.”
Think about it. This was a person I’ve never had a real conversation with in my life. Our talk had never gone deeper than the sort of pleasantries you exchange at the net after a match. Still whispering, she said, “You won’t believe it, Maria, but I’m dating a guy. I have been with him such a long time. And he asked me to marry him. But I don’t know what to do. I want to get married, but I don’t think it’s the right time.”
I looked at my watch. Forty-five minutes till my match. First round of Wimbledon.
I said, “That’s interesting to hear, but now—”
She talked right over me.
“I’ve got to show you this,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out a little pouch with a clasp. “I have the ring right here,” she said, then dropped this big diamond into my hand.
“So are you engaged?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say, what else to do.
“Yes and no,” she said, taking back the ring. “Or, well, yes. But nobody knows. My father doesn’t know. My mother doesn’t know. Only you. You are the only one who knows.”
I just sat there staring at her. I did not know what to say. Why was she telling me this? Then I went down and won my match. Afterward, when my coach and team rushed up to congratulate me, I said, “You will not believe what happened just before I got out here.”
Then, one day, Sasha was traded to the New Jersey Nets. It would be his chance to get more game time, or that was his plan. Hoboken, New Jersey, his new home: Where the hell was that? He told me it was just a ferry ride to one of my favorite cities in the world. I was skeptical. I started looking it up, searching for local coffee shops where I could sit while he was at practice. All I could find was a place called Carlo’s Bake Shop, apparently made famous by the reality TV show Cake Boss. If people are lining up outside a bakery to buy cannoli in Hoboken, I asked myself, how bad could the place be? Pretty bad. Even worse in February when the rivers are ice, the ferry is off-limits, and the traffic is so congested that the city I really wanted to be in felt like it was a million miles away.
Many months later, as the NBA was heading into a lockout, Sasha was considering a few financially appealing offers he’d received from abroad, deals I never thought he’d accept until, one day, he did. He signed with a Turkish team. Goodbye Hoboken, hello Yesilkoy. Another town I didn’t know anything about. I struggled with the idea, then I struggled even more with the reality.
We were now apart for months at a stretch, which gave me time to really think over the way we were struggling in our relationship. He so badly needed to be the man in the relationship, and my own career made it hard for him. The fact that I was more successful in my world than he was in his was something he could never acknowledge. My success, my fame, and my wealth were evidently becoming a struggle for him. Maybe it was always there, but our time apart really opened my eyes to it. Or maybe I just never wanted to admit it. Now it started to really bother me. It made me feel closed in, claustrophobic and trapped. In the months before the 2012 French Open, I started to withdraw from Sasha emotionally.
When I got to the locker room after winning the final of the French Open, with the trophy sitting in my lap, I dialed his number. He answered the phone, but I could hear the shot clock ticking in the background, players on the basketball court in the middle of practice. His coach had told him I’d won my match. He congratulated me. I was so excited, so emotional, that I then began thanking him. For being there for me during many challenging moments. For encouraging me when I was down. For pushing me, believing in me. He seemed genuinely moved, upbeat. It was more than I’d had from him in months. But when I called that night, his mood had changed. He sounded aggravated, almost angry. I asked him what was wrong. He said he’d watched my match when he got home, then the trophy ceremony. Now I knew exactly what was on his mind. He was mad that I hadn’t thanked him in my victory speech. That’s all he could think about it. For many months, I had been waiting for some sign from him, some hint. Now I had it. In just one sentence. Our relationship was over.
I’ve often asked myself what I want in a relationship, or what it is that I think I want—other than height. Well, I guess I want a partner who is also a friend. An equal. I want the house and the kids, but that seems so far in the future that it’s hard to imagine, because my life is just city after city after city; because it’s such high highs and such deep lows and there are very few men who can take being second to whatever is happening or not happening to a player on the court. As I said, the man wants to be the man. If you are on the tour, then you have to be the man, no matter your gender. If you have a boyfriend on the tour, he’s most likely sacrificing his career to be with you, and who wants that? Or, and this is the other possibility, he’s going to be another tennis player. And I’ve tried that, too.
I get a text from my agent Max after every match I play: “You are a champion.” I can tell how much he means it by the number of exclamation points he puts at the end. It has become so automatic, I wonder if he just copies and pastes the message. Does he say that to all his clients? I don’t even want to know. In October 2012, as I walked off the court after my quarterfinal match in Beijing, I checked my phone and there was the message from Max. “Thanks,” I typed back, just as I do every time.
Ten minutes later, I got a second message, which surprised me. Max was in Miami, and it was 4:00 a.m. there. Shouldn’t he be asleep?
“Grigor Dimitrov wants your number.”
I looked at my phone surprised, and may I say excited? The phone went back in my pocket, and I went through my ten-minute cooldown on the bike, followed by fifteen minutes of stretching while my coach was in my ear, talking to me about the match. But my mind wasn’t really with him, which is nothing new, because Thomas Högstedt—he was coaching me just then—talks too much after a match, more than anyone needs. I took my phone out, and now I had a new text message from Max. It was the same thing: “Grigor Dimitrov wants your number.”
Why two messages? Did Max think the cell service was bad in Beijing?
I typed back: “For what?”
Max: “For what? Are you fucking stupid?”
I googled Grigor’s name to find his age. Was he even legal?
Twenty-one. Barely.
“Give him my e-mail.”
I remembered noticing a kid walking through Wimbledon village, tall, skinny, and carrying a type of good-looking grin that says he knows he is good-looking. I remembered telling my coach, “Thank goodness he didn’t exist in my generation, that would have been dangerous. Dangerously distracting.”
A few back-and-forths with e-mail, and Grigor asked for my number.
I played hard to get and gave him my BlackBerry messenger PIN. Then my cell number. Our messages turned into phone calls, our phone calls into Skype calls. It was very simple and genuine. I didn’t think too much of it until, after one of our phone conversations, he dialed me back thirty seconds later and said, “I’m sorry, but I miss your voice. Can we speak for a few more minutes?”
I didn’t know his ranking at the time.
Our Skype conversations continued. My mom started calling them my therapy sessions because, at the end of each, I always had a smile on my face.
Something about Grigor’s tour schedule confused me—he was getting to Paris too early for an indoor tournament in Paris. It didn’t make sense to me.
What would he be playing before the main draw began? I quickly opened a much-dreaded application I have on my phone called Live Scores, which has live scoreboards from every tennis tournament being played around the world, including all the tournament draws. I spent way too much time on NBA.com during my three years with Sasha, searching for minutes played, point percentages. I wasn’t ready for another round of that, not so soon. And yet here I was, again.
I checked the main draw. Grigor’s name wasn’t there. I moved on to the qualifying draw. There he was. Ranked sixtieth in the world. Next thing I knew, I was peeking at the live scores of qualifying matches.
It was all long distance until one night he arrived at my doorstep with red roses and a giant teddy bear.
We spent a lot of time together over the next few weeks.
Within days he asked me if I would be his girlfriend. It caught me off guard. I wasn’t ready for anything like that. He said he would wait until I was ready.
“Who is this person?” I asked myself.
I looked at him, wonderingly: Why is this handsome guy, who could be playing the field, waiting for a woman who is not ready to be in a relationship?
“OK,” I said, “but I don’t know when I will be ready. It might be months.”
“OK,” he said. “I’ll wait. I know what I want and I want you.”
Weeks rolled into months and there was nothing that could stop us. I watched him grow, triumph, suffer setbacks, recover. Up and down. I loved watching him play so much. I would find myself sitting on a rubber chair, on Christmas Day, watching him practice. Just me; my best friend, Estelle; him; and his hitting partner on a sunny California day that felt nothing like Christmas.
I watched him climb through the ranks. I watched him go from dumpy hotels by the highway in Madrid—the sort of hotel even the rats avoid—to a suite at the Four Seasons in Paris, the Carlyle in New York. I watched him go from being a kid who was reluctant to spend a little extra on an upgrade to economy-plus while flying to Australia, to being a man boarding a private jet provided by a new billionaire friend. After one of my matches in Brisbane, he gave everyone on my team a white crisp collared shirt with a note wishing that one day he could have a team like them. And before we were through, he did. I watched him grow into his own person, a person who makes his own decisions; I watched him shift into manhood.
Grigor has been called the next Roger Federer, the next this, the next that. He’s been ranked as high as eighth in the world, and has so much potential. He has beautiful strokes. The way he hits the ball, then slides, even on hard courts, is inspiring. He can do amazing things with his body. It’s a gift and also a curse. It’s gotten in his way, this need not only to win but to look beautiful doing it. It has to be perfect or he does not want it at all. It has to be unbelievable or forget it. That’s why he’s yet to fulfill all that potential. What sets the great players apart from the good players? The good players win when everything is working. The great players win even when nothing is working, even when the game is ugly; that is, when they are not great. Because no one can be great every day. Can you get it done on the ugly days, when you feel like garbage and the tank is empty? That’s the question. I’ve been close to flawless on a few lucky afternoons—I can count them on one hand—but it’s usually a question of figuring out how to win with whatever I’ve got. There are so many matches that I’ve won just by figuring out how to sneak by. Grigor has yet to learn how to do that. It’s like if it’s not easy, if it’s not perfect, he does not want to do it.
Grigor recently told me—we were talking on the phone after he’d reached the semifinals of the Australian Open—that one of the worst things in life is when you have the right thing at the wrong time. It made me think of an evening we spent before the 2015 Wimbledon tournament. He had reached the semifinals the previous year by beating Andy Murray; he lost to Novak Djokovic in four sets in that round. He pulled out a book that Wimbledon puts together of previous championships. He quietly flipped through the pages of the book until he found a picture of me, in his box, watching his match.
He looked at me, sad—I thought I saw tears in his eyes—“Did you see this? This means everything to me. Seeing you in my box next to my mother.”
It was then, at that moment, that the emotional pull I had been fighting came to an end. I knew, and so did he, that I couldn’t be that person at this time of my life. I was supposed to be focused, getting prepared for my own matches, my own triumphs and defeats, on the largest stage of my career. I had been watching his match that day only because I’d lost early at those championships. So his good memory was my bad memory. What meant everything to him happened only because I had lost. Like he said, you can have the right thing, but it might come at the wrong time.