Unstoppable: My Life So Far

THREE

Yuri Yudkin told my father about a Moscow clinic, a showcase for Russian youth, hosted by some local tennis organization. You know the drill: send your kids, the wannabes and strivers and champions. My father was determined to get me there. I’m not sure how he paid for the plane tickets, but he had an almost magical way of making things happen. The event was in a huge hangar-like facility filled with courts and coaches, a cacophony of rackets hitting tennis balls. There were hundreds of kids, meaning there were also several hundred tennis parents. It was dizzying. Before that, I’d believed the players in Sochi were all the players in existence and that my father and I were special among them. I now realized there were dozens and dozens of such girls, each with a father who considered his daughter destined to be the best in the world.

I stood watching them hit. It was mesmerizing and humbling but also reassuring. I could already see that I was better than most of them, that we were not hitting the ball in the same way. The clinic was filled with tennis people, coaches and players who wandered around, watching us or giving advice. Martina Navratilova was there. It made me nervous—the greatest player ever, right in front of me. I thought we were going to get to play with the pros one-on-one, but I was only six, so I had no idea. It was more like an assembly line. You’d wait for your turn to hit two or three balls, then get back in line. On my second or third trip through, Navratilova spotted me. My arms and legs were too big for my body and my knees knocked. And I had that huge racket. In other words, I was funny-looking, which is probably why she noticed me. Then she saw that I could play. I was small, but I was already a good hitter, and so focused. When I finished, Navratilova pulled my father aside to talk. They sent for a translator, because my father didn’t speak English. I’m not sure exactly what she told him, nor is he, but the basic point was this: Your daughter can play; you need to get her out of the country to a place where she can develop her game. America.

My father started making plans as soon as we were back in Sochi. He was determined to get me to the United States, as he believed that was the only place my game could be developed. He became fixated on Florida. Why? I could give you a complicated explanation, comparing this region to that region, this academy to that academy, but the fact is that Yuri is superstitious and follows signs, and he’d seen a sign that pointed to Florida. It took the form of two magazine articles. One was about the Williams sisters and how they were training at Rick Macci’s tennis academy in Boca Raton. The other was about Anna Kournikova and how she was training at Nick Bollettieri’s academy in Bradenton. My father believed these articles had fallen into his hands at just this moment for a reason. He was being told where to go.

Nowadays, traveling to the United States is usually a straightforward proposition. You get a tourist visa, call the airline, buy the ticket, go. But this was not the case in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union was falling apart. It was just about impossible to find a job, which made it just about impossible to earn a living and support a family. It was hard to do anything. Even if you had the cash, you could not just get on a plane for America. Visas were impossible to come by—awarded only to those on government business. Knowing that he’d need some sort of official backing, my father wrote to the coach of the Russian Tennis Federation’s national junior team. There was no question of me playing for this team: it was for kids twelve and up, and I was six. But my father was hoping that the federation would sponsor me with an eye to the future. He explained our situation and described my talent, mentioning Yudkin and Navratilova. It worked, or seemed to. The team happened to be practicing in Florida, preparing for an American tour. The coach replied with a letter inviting us to visit and work out with the team.

My father went to the embassy in Moscow for visas. He was twenty-eight years old, wearing his only suit, the one he wore on his wedding day. He was willing to depend on luck and fate. (There are signs to tell you what to do if you learn to read them.) He had the coach’s letter and had worked out what he was going to say. He waited for hours, then finally stood across from an official. This man looked Yuri over carefully, then examined the letter and the other documents, pictures and pages with raised seals. My father was talking all the time, giving the speech, saying the words: Yudkin, Mozart, Navratilova, prodigy.

“I also have a daughter,” the official said finally. “She also plays tennis. And she is good. She’s eight. But I do not think she’s a prodigy. Your daughter is six. How do you really know that she’s better than my daughter? Maybe you’re just seeing her with the eyes of a father.”

“I don’t know your daughter,” said Yuri, “but I do know mine. What I’ve told you is true.”

“You want to take a six-year-old girl to train in the United States?”

“Yes.”

“And you have no doubt?”

“None.”

He looked my father in the eyes.

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

“And you know where you’ll go and what you’ll do?”

“Yes.”

This man gave us a three-year visa—my father would have to come back to Russia to get it renewed—but there it was, that rare, invaluable thing. A golden ticket, the freedom to come and go. It’s hard for an American, or even a person in Russia today, to imagine the miracle of this. It was almost impossible to get the sort of document that Yuri scored. This man, this official, whoever he was, wherever he is, made the whole thing happen. Without him, who knows? Why did he do it? It’s a question Yuri still asks himself. It was not about me, of course. It was about Yuri. He recognized something in my father, a determination. Or maybe he just felt generous. Or maybe it was just the way the sun hit the road that morning. Whatever the reason, we were lucky. So lucky. But also unlucky. As rare as that visa was, it was also limited, good for only two people: me and Yuri. Using it would mean leaving my mom behind for who knew how long. Yuri thought over what he’d say to her, how he’d get her to go along. He’d be taking me away from school and from my family and from her, and I was only six years old.

When I ask my mother about it now, she shrugs and says, “Your father knew what he was doing.” Grandma Tamara is more open. “I think your mother went along with it because your father is such a good talker,” she tells me. “He’s convincing and your mother is so positive. It’s these things together, I think, that made it happen. Maybe your mother didn’t really want it to happen, but she believed that it was for your own benefit. Your father was not thinking only of you but of himself and the family. Russia was falling apart. Tennis might be something for you, but it was also a way out for the family. If he could secure your living, the entire family could live at the expense of the daughter. And he succeeded. It worked. He was very smart in that respect. But your mother didn’t think about that, even if, deep down, she understood what was really going on. Or, who knows? Maybe your father did discuss it with her. Of course, for me and your grandfather it was terrible. Yuri suddenly says that he’s taking our granddaughter to America? In those days, people who went to America were never heard from again.”

My father gathered all the money he had, then borrowed some more—something like seven hundred dollars, wound into a roll, carried in his front pocket, so that, whenever he got nervous, he could make sure it was still there. He’d gotten tickets on an afternoon flight from Moscow to Miami, where someone from the team was to meet us. It’s a blur. I don’t remember what I was wearing or how I felt. I must have been sad saying goodbye to my mom, but I probably didn’t realize what was happening, that I would not see her again until I was almost nine years old.

It was Aeroflot, one of those big old jets with about fifteen seats in a row. We sat next to a Russian couple. My father spoke to them the whole way. I picked up pieces of the conversation as I drifted in and out of sleep. He told them about me and tennis and our plans and the junior team and the coach and the academies. I wondered why he was saying so much. My father is normally pretty quiet. The plane refueled in Shannon, Ireland. I didn’t know what to do with myself for that long period of time, in one place, in one seat. It was the first long flight of my life. I remember looking out the window at men and trucks. Then we were in America. Two or three in the morning. We went through customs, then out to the curb. I remember how the air felt that first time, like a damp hand, rich and tropical, so different than in Sochi. I remember the palm trees. I remember how dark it was. And waiting. After everyone had gone, we were still on the curb, looking for the car that was supposed to have been sent by the team coach. My father must’ve been panicking. He spoke no English, knew no one in the country, was alone with his six-year-old daughter in the middle of the night. But he kept his cool, resting his hand gently on my shoulder, saying, “Don’t worry, Masha. Don’t worry.” But I’m sure his other hand was thrust in his pocket, his fingers wrapped around the money. What should we do? Hire a car? Take a bus? Even if he could find someone willing to help, they’d never speak Russian. Finally, a man and woman came by. It was the couple from the plane. My father explained the situation—“If I could just call the coach.” The man told him nothing could be done in the middle of the night, “and you have a little girl that needs to sleep.” He had a hotel room in Miami Beach. He offered to take us along. “Sleep on the floor,” he said. “Tomorrow you can make your phone calls.”

In the morning, even before I opened my eyes, I knew I was in a strange place. I could hear my father talking quickly, quietly, with frustration. He’d been up for hours. Maybe he hadn’t gone to bed. He softened when he saw that I was awake, sat with me, and tried to give me a sense of what would happen next. I was just happy to be with him, far from home, on this adventure. It was us against the world. He’d not been able to reach the team coach, or our family in Russia. The lines were busy, or down, or something. The few people he had reached were not helpful. But we had our routine and we had to stick to it. I put on my tennis clothes. Sneakers. Skirt. I always practiced in a skirt to replicate a match environment. (You want to practice exactly like you play.) I tied my hair back and followed my father out the door. Of course, there was one big change in that routine: my mom was not there to give me a hug before I headed out. My father carried two rackets, his and mine, and a can of balls. The man from the plane came along, probably just to see what would happen. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“We must train,” said Yuri.

We were in Miami Beach, probably on Collins Avenue. I’m also not sure what my father had in mind. Did he just assume we’d find a tennis court? This was Florida, after all, the training ground of the Williams sisters and Anna Kournikova, a tennis paradise. We walked on and on, block after block, scanning. Now and then, Yuri spotted a court—through the hedges, over a fence—grabbed my hand, and made a run for it. Each time, the Russian from the plane stopped him. “No, Yuri, you can’t. That’s a private court.”

My father had the Soviet idea that everything belonged to everyone.

“No, Yuri. Not in America.”

We kept walking, finally spotting several courts beside a swimming pool. It was a hotel, with people lounging in chairs. My father spoke to the man in charge of the pool and the courts as the man from the plane translated. He explained our situation, how he had just arrived from Moscow with his daughter, a potential member of the Russian junior national team, and she needed to practice. The man looked me over. I was really cute. He said OK. We set up on a court and went through our routine—stretched, jogged, prepared, then began to hit. Half speed at first, the ball traveling in lazy parabolas. Then we began to go at it, zinging the ball back and forth from the baseline. It was early morning and I was tiny, but I was really driving the ball. I finished each forehand with a little loop, like Yudkin had taught me. Was I already grunting at the moment of impact? Probably. It’s unconscious, and has always been part of my game. It was unusual to see a kid that small hit that hard and with consistency. It was a circus act. People came over from the pool to see what was happening. Then more came. Before long, we’d drawn a crowd, a few dozen tourists who stood watching the ball go back and forth.

That was my first morning in America.

We worked out for about an hour, then sat in the shade under an umbrella, cooling off. People stood around, asking questions. There was an older Polish couple at the back of the crowd. They introduced themselves, but I don’t remember their names. My father doesn’t either. Funny, not remembering the names or much else about the people who would be so important in those first few hours. Without them, without the good luck of meeting them, who knows what would have happened. I’d like to tell you what they looked like, how nice they were, but honestly, I remember only one detail, and it was key. They spoke Russian. Yuri was so happy to find people he could talk to. They told him they were tennis fans, that they loved and followed the game. They said they’d seen Monica Seles and Andre Agassi when they were my age, and that I was just as good as either of them. This meant a lot to my father. They asked about his plans, where we’d go from here. My father told them the whole story—the flight from Moscow and the early morning arrival, the junior team and the coach who did not show, the hotel room floor, the phone calls. “So what’re you going to do?” My father said we’d make our way, somehow, to the Rick Macci Tennis Academy in Boca Raton. “The Williams sisters were there,” Yuri explained. “Once they see Masha, we’ll be fine. The only problem is that I have no idea where Boca Raton is, or how to get there.”

“Don’t worry,” said the Polish woman. “We’ll drive you.”

You hear a lot of bad things about the world and the people in it. When you are a kid, they warn you about strangers. When you are an adult, they warn you about criminals. But the fact is, in the early days, we were repeatedly saved by strangers. It was not part of our plan, but we were willing to depend on good luck.

We got our bags out of the hotel, said goodbye to the people from the plane, and went out to the street, where the Polish couple was waiting in some big, springy, air-cooled American car. It was Sunday morning. My father talked with the couple as I stared out the window. We crossed the causeway and drove up the coast. It was beautiful and new. People later asked what I was thinking in those first hours. Was I scared? Did I miss my mother, my home, my own bed? Not really. To me, at this point, and for a long time, it all just seemed like an adventure, a fairy tale. I was just waiting to see what would happen next.

My father still talks about how disappointed he was in the Rick Macci Tennis Academy, and how we were greeted, but think of how weird it must’ve been for the people at the desk. One Sunday morning, in the middle of everything, this man who speaks only Russian walks in with his six-year-old daughter, who carries an oversized racket. He is followed by a couple from Poland, offering to translate. My father asked to see Rick. He was told that Mr. Macci was away, not available. The person he was speaking to, eyeing us suspiciously from behind the desk, turned out to be Macci’s wife. She sized us up, then turned away. My father asked if we could just go out to one of the courts and hit. He just wanted someone there to see me play. “If you want to use one of our courts,” the woman said, “you have to sign up for a program, and that costs money.”

“How much?”

“A thousand dollars. And you have to pay in advance.”

At this point, we had only seven hundred dollars—that was all the money in the world to us—in a roll in my father’s pocket. Yuri began to argue through the translator. He told the lady at the desk that I was special, that they’d want to see me play, that, if they turned us away, they’d regret it later. Someone happened to be walking by, an instructor. She defused the whole thing, saying, “Let me go and hit with her a bit—let’s just see.”

We played as my father waited. When we came back, the instructor talked to the woman at the desk. Whatever was said, her attitude changed. No final decisions could be made until Rick was back, but they said they could offer us a place to stay for a few nights while they figured things out. No promises. One problem, I later learned, was that they found Yuri’s story hard to believe. That he’d come from Russia by himself with this girl, that he just walked in off the street with a world-class tennis-playing kid. They didn’t buy it. They wanted to know who Yuri really was. And what was his game? And what’s the story behind the story? And where’s the mother? And what about school? It’s something we would run into again and again. No one believed our story.

By this point, my father had soured on the whole scene. He did not like the way we were greeted, the questions, the suspicion. “Nyet.” That’s what he said when the offer of two nights was made. “We’re out of here.”

If one characteristic defined my father, it was his willingness to say no. He did it all the time. He said no to the easy thing because he believed a better thing would come along. It was stupidity—and faith. He believed in my ability and in his smarts. It determined what happened as much as anything. Saying no put him in a position to later say yes.

The Polish couple was confused. We’d been offered a place to stay and a session with Macci. Who knew where that would lead, but my father just walked out. They asked what he wanted to do now, where we’d go next. Yuri had only one other place in mind: the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, on the west coast of Florida, close to Sarasota and Tampa Bay, which he’d read about in that magazine back home. Kournikova was there, so they must understand Russians. The Polish couple said they could not drive us that far, took us to the bus station, and bought us tickets. They looked up the phone number and address at Bollettieri’s and wrote them down for us on a piece of paper, then handed it to Yuri, saying, “Call this number and go to this place when you arrive.” Then we said goodbye. We never saw them again.

The ride to Bradenton was dark and blurry, like something out of a Van Gogh painting. We got in at around 9:00 p.m. My father called the academy, and, however he managed it in Russian, made our situation clear enough that a shuttle was sent to pick us up from the station. It was pitch-black when we arrived. I remember blocky buildings and dark courts, palm trees swaying. A man at the gate heard us out, wrote down what we told him—a message would be delivered—then sent us away. It was Sunday night, he explained. Everyone was gone or asleep. He called a cab, which took us to the closest hotel, a Holiday Inn Express. First lesson: If there’s anything worse than putting “Inn” after a hotel’s name, it’s adding the word “Express.”

My father was very careful, very suspicious. He triple-locked our hotel room door, shut the dead bolt, and hooked the chain. When we got into bed, he took the money out of his front pocket and put it under the pillow. He was sure someone would come in at night and take everything. “This way,” he explained, “the robber will have to wake me to get the money, and that will be his last mistake.”

We lay in the dark, talking. I was not scared, but I was nervous. Here I was, in this strange hotel room, in this strange place, waiting only for the moment when I could go out on the court and hit. When I hit, I would relax. When other people saw me hit, everything would be OK. I knew exactly what I had to do. My part was clear, which allowed me to relax and leave the rest to others.

Yuri was in a big rush in the morning. Packing our bags, gathering our gear. We called a taxi and checked out. We were in the cab, heading back to the academy, when Yuri started to freak out. He’d felt so settled in the hotel, slept so deeply, that he’d forgotten all about the money. He started cursing in Russian. The driver had no idea what was going on. Yuri got him to turn around and race back. We pulled up right outside the room, Yuri jumping out even before the car stopped. The door was open and the cleaning cart was outside. Yuri burst through the door. The maid was in the bathroom, the bed was unmade. He turned over the pillow, and there, thank God, was the money. He slid it into his pocket, and soon we were back on Highway 41.

When I asked Yuri if he remembered this incident, he laughed, then sighed, saying, “Masha, Masha, Masha. When you think of all the crazy luck we had, some of it bad but most of it good… We crossed this river like people who think they are walking on logs only to learn, on the far side, it’s been crocodiles the entire time.”

Our message had been delivered. They were expecting us at the academy. There was even a Russian translator.

And a plan. I would be sent onto the courts with a group of girls my age. I’d do drills, hit some balls, and an assessment would be made. I felt like a freak amid all those American girls. First of all, I was younger than any of them by at least two years. Second, they stood together in a circle, laughing and gossiping, and I couldn’t understand a word of it.

In a situation like that, you think whatever is being said is being said about you. And that it’s not nice. These were rich girls who, for whatever reason, had been judged by their parents to have talent that could be brought out at the academy. And they paid for that. Big money. A year at Bollettieri’s is probably more than a year at college. Unless you’re on scholarship, you come from money, with the best rackets and best shoes and best gear. And here I was, with a single change of clothes, an oversized chopped-down racket, and shoes from a factory in Minsk. I looked weird. And they laughed. And continued laughing, right up to the moment that I got to hit. First off, it relaxed me. I calmed down, remembered why I was there. Then, almost at once, the instructor could see, “This girl is not like the others.”

I spoke to that instructor about this years later. He said, “Well, you know, the deal is, I was half asleep, early morning, going through the drills, thinking about my lunch break, and you came up, smaller than everyone, and just basically knocked my head off.”

He took me to an empty court so we could hit alone, me and him, back and forth, five, ten minutes. Then he went to a phone at the side of the court and made a call. (A phone on a tennis court? I had never seen anything like that.) He was calling Nick Bollettieri. He said, “Hey, boss, I got something here you need to see right away.”

He walked me to center court, ground zero at the academy. At this point, we had to leave Yuri behind. That’s the rule: no parents on center court. It was the first time I remember being separated from my father since we’d left Sochi. I did not like it. Then I was scared. Who were these people, where was I going, would I make it back?

It’s hard to untangle my first impression of Nick from the way I came to feel about him later. He wasn’t tall or short, and what you noticed was that crazy gray hair and those teeth so bright you could see them a hundred yards away. His arms were thin and sinewy and his skin so tanned it was purple and leathery. Here was a guy who’d clearly spent too much time outdoors. Nick grew up in the Bronx, New York, the youngest son in a big family. Tennis was not their sport—New York meant basketball. Nick went into the military after college, then moved to Florida. He had wanted to be a lawyer, but was at the University of Miami for less than a year. Still, that is where he picked up tennis. He played, then taught friends who wanted to play, and realized he was a better instructor than player. He began giving lessons, then made his way through the hotel circuit as a tennis pro. He saved money, honed his sales pitch, gathered investors, and opened his school.

By the time I got there, Bollettieri’s academy was a campus of low-slung buildings and dorms, hard courts and clay courts, center court burning under stadium lights. It was already famous, the breeding ground for Andre Agassi and Jim Courier and Anna Kournikova, Monica Seles and Mary Pierce. Nick had become a legend, almost a cartoon tennis guru. He’d been through something like seven wives and so many players. What did he care about a little girl from Russia? He was probably signing divorce papers as I walked up. At heart, he was really just a businessman. He’d built a great industry. When you think of the tennis academies in the United States, you think of Bollettieri’s. There’s nothing else like it. I never thought of him as a coach. I thought of him as a teacher, even a kind of mentor.

I did not hit with Nick that day. I hit with an instructor as Nick stood in the shadows, watching. He is a great watcher, a noticer of tendencies and habits and character and other things, big and small. It’s his talent. Vision. He sees the end in the first moment of the beginning. When putting together this book, I went back and spoke to people who were important in my life. I spoke to Nick in his office at the academy. He is older now, a little frail, but still 100 percent Nick. When I asked him about that first meeting—“Do you remember it?”—he laughed. “Of course, I remember it,” he said. “I’d heard about you—someone had called and told me, ‘There’s this tiny girl from Russia, and the way she plays!’ But, honestly, I get a call like that every few days, so usually I do not pay too much attention. Then you showed up and my instructor called and said, ‘Nick, you’ve got to see this.’ That was unusual. And I could see it, right away, as soon as I watched you hit two or three balls. You were just six years old but you were hammering it. And it was not just the power—it was your footwork, your grip. Perfect, all of it just perfect. Of course, a lot of that can be taught. The amazing thing was your concentration. You never lost focus, you could just do it again and again. You didn’t have all the moves at first, you didn’t have the strength, but you did have the mentality. And that can’t be taught.”

Nick asked to see my father. The translator came along. An offer was made. I was still too young to live at the academy—you had to be at least ten years old—but I could train there. I would have practice all day, every day. No fee. A kind of scholarship. I could eat lunch and dinner in the mess hall. Yuri could eat there, too. They’d even find us a place to stay. For a moment, the future seemed assured.