Meanwhile, we were trying to survive as immigrants and new residents of Bradenton. My lessons were paid for by the academy, the tournaments were arranged, and two meals a day taken care of, but otherwise we were on our own. Rent, spending money, food, all the rest of it—that, we had to pay. Yuri, who was learning English quickly by necessity, had to find work—anything that would pay cash. He was on a construction crew, did yard work and odd jobs, and cut lawns. It must have been a lonely time for him, but he was driven—for years, it was his will that powered both of us. He was making money, managing my career, being my father, and learning, or trying to learn, the game of tennis. One night, when I stuck my head into the living room, I saw him, in reading glasses, buried in a pile of strategy and how-to books.
When I first saw the title of the movie Mr. Mom, I assumed it was about my father. Yuri did everything back then. For days and days, years and years, it was just him and me. We slept in the same creaky fold-out bed, shared the same goals and plans. At times, I could not tell his dreams from my own. Or his dreams became my dreams. He woke me each morning, before first light. As I said, he did not need an alarm. Five o’clock, his eyes just opened. He made me breakfast and helped me get ready. He told me what we needed to do that day, where my attention should be focused. You have a good day, it’s a good day. You put together a string of good days, you have a good career.
That’s what he believed.
While I was playing, Yuri worked. Whatever he did, the work had to be flexible because he had to be back at the apartment each afternoon before I came in the door. I was dropped off by an instructor or some kid’s parents. Yuri and I would sit and talk through every moment of the day as he prepared me for the day to come. He dealt with my equipment and clothes. For years, most of my clothes were hand-me-downs, skirts and shorts and shoes that once belonged to Anna Kournikova. The first thing my mom did when she finally arrived in America was go through my closet and throw all that stuff in the trash. But what did Yuri know about clothes? He fed me and dressed me and cut my hair. I remember sitting on the toilet in the bathroom as he brushed out and trimmed my bangs, straight across, like a kid in a cartoon.
Was I lonely? Was I sad? I don’t know. This was my life and I had no other life to compare it to. I spoke to my mother once a week on the phone. The calls were short, because of the rates. She asked what I was doing and told me that she loved me. She still managed my education, even though she was so far away. That was what mattered to her—that I remember my Russian heritage, that I be able to read and write Russian, that I know the Russian writers and their important books. She said I was never to forget who I was and where I came from. “If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know who you are,” she said. I don’t really remember the conversations, but I do remember the letters. I wrote to her every day. I’d scribble at the bottom: “I love you, I love you, I love you!” One day, a Russian boy I was friends with—he had a brother and his family was rich—grabbed one of my letters and ran with it, reading it out loud. He made fun of me. “Why do you write ‘I love you’ so much?” he asked.
“It’s my mom,” I said, pleading.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said. “It’s so cheesy.”
I remember looking at him and asking, “Don’t you tell your mom you love her?”
He said, “Well, yeah, but not as many times as you do.”
“Well, probably because you have your mom and I don’t.”
I had tears in my eyes when I said this, so maybe I was sadder than I want to admit.
When I was a little older, I took classes at a public school near the academy, but at the beginning, when I hardly knew any English, my only teacher was an old Russian lady, a tutor who came to the apartment a few times a week. She taught me the basics—math, history, English—though I learned more by watching TV. These early years toughened me up. In fact, I think they explain my character, the style of my game, my on-court persona, why I can be hard to beat. If you don’t have a mother to cry to, you don’t cry. You just hang in there, knowing that eventually things will change—that the pain will subside, that the screw will turn. More than anything, that has defined my career. I do not bitch. I do not throw my racket. I do not threaten the line judge. I do not quit. If you want to beat me, you are going to have to work for every point in every game. I will not give you anything. Some people, especially the sort that grew up in country clubs, on manicured lawns, are not used to a girl who just keeps coming.
Of course, this is what Yudkin was talking about, that unnameable thing, that doggedness that is so Russian. My father tells a few stories, of key moments when he realized I was a tough player. There was one time, when I was six years old, before we left for America. I woke up with a bump on my eye, like a pimple on the cornea. At first, OK, no big deal. But it started to grow. One day, I woke and it was killing me. Wow, the pain. Yuri took me to the hospital. They called for a special doctor, an eye surgeon, a woman. She looked me over, then came back and said, “We have to cut away that bump immediately. Right now.” OK, said Yuri, do it. “But it’s near the eyeball, which means we can’t give anesthesia,” she said. “I won’t be able to make the eye numb. Your daughter will feel every cut.” OK, OK. Just do it. She took me into a room and somehow I got through it. Twenty minutes later, we went back to see Yuri. The doctor was white and speechless. Yuri was scared. He said, “My God, what’s happened?”
“Don’t worry,” said the doctor. “Everything is fine. I did a good job. No problem, no big deal. But something does bother me—Masha did not cry. That’s not normal. That’s not good. You’ve got to cry.”
Yuri said, “What can we do?”
The doctor said, “I don’t know, but it’s not normal. She’s supposed to be crying.”
“OK,” said Yuri, “we can’t change her. She wants to cry, she will cry. She doesn’t want to cry, you cannot push her to cry.”
We took the bus back home, and I didn’t say a word. When we got into the house, and my mother embraced me, that’s when I cried. Oh my God, did I cry!
Another time: We were running for a bus, late for a practice. And I fell. Hard. Very hard. The fingernail on my pinkie ripped off. Completely. I was bleeding all over the place.
“Holy shit,” said Yuri, “we need to get back home.”
I said, “It’s OK, Pop. We’ve got to practice.”
Meanwhile, my game was developing. It came from repetition, hitting the ball again and again. I was getting stronger. My shots were becoming harder and faster. From the start, my game was all about hitting that ball, low and flat. To put the other girls back onto their heels. I was playing in tournaments and was quickly ranked number five in Florida for age ten and under. I was developing the persona that would become such an important part of my game. I was grunting when I hit the ball. Even then, I tried to set myself apart. No emotion. No fear. Like ice. I was not friends with the other girls, because that would make me softer, easier to beat. They could have been the nicest girls in the world, and I wouldn’t even have known it. I chose not to know it. I figured we could be friends later, after I retired, and they retired, when we were all older and content. But not now, not yet. My biggest edge is that persona. Why would I give it up? Before I even go out onto the court, some of the other players are intimidated. I can feel it. They know that I’m strong. I have no interest in making friends on my battlefield. If we are friends, I give up a weapon. My former coach Thomas Högstedt told me that his advice to players going against me was this: “Don’t look Maria in the eyes before, during, or after the match.” When I asked Nick about my early days, he said, “Well, there was your game, then there was your game. That’s what people don’t understand about tennis. You do not have to be the best player in the world to win. You only have to be better, on that day, than the person across from you. And that’s something you understood from the start.”
“You scared the shit out of the other girls,” he added. “Especially Jelena and Tatiana. You intimidated them. I don’t know whether you did it deliberately, but you had an air about you: this is a business and you are in my way.”
And then, just like that, I was kicked out of the academy. For Yuri, it was like being exiled from Eden, or slapped awake in the middle of a beautiful dream. I’d only been there for a few months, but I’d been improving, advancing, moving up the ranks. Why did they boot me? What reason could possibly be given?
It was never very clear, but it had to do with my age. I was too young to be playing with those other girls. The fact that I was beating kids three or four or five years older than me caused unhappiness. Parents paying the full fee did not like to face the limitations of their prodigies. But my father felt that it was more than that. After all, they knew my age and situation when they made the offer. Yuri did not blame Nick. He blamed Anna Kournikova’s mother, Alla.
Tennis is a sport populated by fierce parents. Before my arrival, Anna had been the only Russian prospect at the academy, a cute blond prodigy. Then I turned up, just as blond, hitting just as well, but even younger. And getting better every day. Yuri came to believe Alla might possibly be floating certain ideas, mainly the notion that something was not quite right about the story we told. This father and daughter turn up in the middle of the night, from nowhere? Does that sound plausible to you? She seemed to suggest that I’d been kidnapped by Yuri, that he grabbed me and took off. And what about school? Is the girl even going to school? What kind of mother lets her daughter be taken away like that? Something is funny about this. In other words, Nick got the idea that we were trouble, and as much as he might want me to be at the academy, he would not risk a scandal.
We were told to clear out. Good luck and goodbye. Did my father freak out, or consider going back to Sochi? If he did, I saw no sign of it. Through it all, he remained steely. There was no bad news. Everything had its positive side. There was always another way to look at things. There was always a Plan B. Because this was fate. All we had to do was find the path and keep on it. “Masha, look at how far we’ve come! Why would we turn back now?” Yuri went to Nick and worked out terms, a gentle parting of the ways. “Come on, Nick, how can you just throw a little girl out on the street?” He agreed to let us stick around for a few more months, use the courts and the mess hall, just until the kids turned up for the autumn session. All the while, Yuri was looking around, coming up with a new plan. He finally settled on a guy named Sekou Bangoura, an African-born tennis pro who for years had worked at Bollettieri’s. In the early 1990s, Sekou started his own academy, a tennis school called El Conquistador, scattered across a handful of hard courts a few miles down the road from Bollettieri’s.
It was one of the innumerable Florida tennis factories fronted by a guru who cast his nets wide, hoping to snag a star and establish his name. Sekou was trying to build an empire and follow in Nick’s footsteps. I did not like him. He was a screamer, a tantrum thrower. He had a sly smile that I couldn’t stand. I did not trust him. But Yuri was convinced Sekou was the answer. Maybe we were just out of better choices. And money.
It started with me and Sekou hitting early one morning. He was medium-sized and athletic, a former pro player who’d never been good enough to make it on the tour. He must’ve been thirty-five or forty. He took my father aside afterward and they talked.
Sekou said, “Yes, yes, she can play.”
“Well, do you have room for her at your academy?” asked Yuri.
“Yes,” said Sekou, “but she’ll have to pay. A little bit of money. Not much. Something.”
“That’s the whole thing,” said Yuri. “We can’t pay. It has to be a scholarship.”
Sekou thought a moment, then said, “In that case, I need to see her play in a tournament. There’s hitting on a practice court,” he explained, “and then there’s playing when it counts. You can’t really know about someone till you’ve seen them compete. Some players who look great in practice fold up as soon as anything goes wrong.”
There was a tournament that weekend somewhere up north, a few hours away by car. Sekou wanted to take me with some of his other students, put me in the draw, and see what happened. The catch? Yuri could not come along. No parents. This bothered my father tremendously. He thought about it and thought about it—he checked with our Russian landlord and with my Russian tutor—before finally agreeing. What choice did he have? Besides, there’d be other kids along.
I don’t remember the particulars. There were so many tournaments. They bleed together. What I do remember is the look on my father’s face when Sekou dropped me back at the apartment that night. We were hours late. My father had been pacing the floor, watching for headlights and checking the time. He’d handed his daughter to a man he did not really know, did not really trust. But we had a good reason for being late. I’d won! Not just a match but the entire tournament. I got a trophy. My picture was taken, then it was over. Sekou seemed pleased. He asked my father to come and see him at El Conquistador in the morning.
They met in his hot little trailer office, the roof ticking in the sun. Sekou said, “OK, she is good. We will arrange something. Just tell me how much you can pay.”
Yuri explained our situation again—“We can’t pay anything.”
Sekou sighed his world-weary sigh, looked at my father, the old up and down, then asked, “Can you at least play tennis?”
“Yes.”
“Can you really hit?”
“Yes, of course. Who do you think hits with Maria?”
“OK,” said Sekou. “Here’s the deal. You will work for me. You will hit with the students before they start their drills, before they play. You have to do everything I tell you—everything I say. In return for that, we will take Maria as a student on scholarship. Do you agree?”
“Yes.”
Sekou had my father fill out forms. In the course of this, he asked for my father’s travel documents. As I remember it, Sekou took and held on to these documents, which made my father feel helpless, as if he did not have complete control of his own life. His passport, his visa. Sekou was himself an immigrant from Africa, so he knew just how important these documents were. They were the right to be here, the ability to pursue the dream. They were everything. He told my father that he would copy the documents and give them back, but he never did. Or not for a long time. He was always just about to or didn’t have the key to the safe or whatever. This was important. As long as Sekou held those documents, he controlled my father. As long as he controlled my father, he controlled me.