SIX

Yuri and I would head to El Conquistador together each morning. Sekou would drive us over, or we’d get a ride from one of his instructors. We split at the gate. Yuri went to the back courts, where he spent hours practicing with kids, or else ran errands for Sekou. Now and then, Sekou had him do something that felt like busywork to my father. If Yuri questioned a task, Sekou would snap. He could be insulting. As the boss, he’d say, he was due obedience—absolute obedience. Yuri found it humiliating, which seemed to be the point. This was about dominance. Sekou wanted Yuri to fight back, but Yuri would not. He just took it. For the greater good. My father is a believer in getting through. This was a bad time, but he knew he had to keep his head down and ignore his feelings.

In the meantime, I was on the front court, training. There were workouts, drills, games, and matches, pounding shot after shot into every corner of the court. At such times, it was actually impossible to think of tennis as a game, as a pastime, as something somewhere in the world someone was doing for fun. Tennis is not a game. It’s a sport and a puzzle, an endurance test. You do whatever you can to win. It has been my enemy and my friend, my nightmare and the solace to that nightmare, my wound and the salve for my wound. Ask anyone who has made a life in this game, who was been out on the clay before they were old enough to understand the consequences of a strange early talent. I know you want us to love this game—us loving it makes it more fun to watch. But we don’t love it. And we don’t hate it. It just is, and always has been.

There were some things I liked about El Conquistador. I liked the low-key atmosphere of the place. It was not Bollettieri’s. There was not that kind of pressure and the players were not as driven or as good. I liked the routine, the low stakes, the way the water pooled on the back courts after it rained, giving a player a rare chance for a break, five minutes staring blankly in the sun, not a thought in your head. But mostly I liked having my father there—knowing he was around, even when I did not see him. He would warm me up before the afternoon matches, hitting and talking as we worked. We would talk about home, or we would talk about tennis, or we would talk about my mother and how good it would be when she joined us in Florida. If I had a problem, if I had played badly, if I had been insulted or treated unfairly, I could run to him and he would help me.

But mostly I hated El Conquistador. Because it felt second-rate to me, shabby. Because my father was always there, which meant I could never be on my own. But my main problem was Sekou. I felt like he was using me to pump up his fledgling little academy, and I think he resented me for it. I worked like a dog—all day, every day, hitting and running and getting screamed at. And he was cheap. If we stopped for a snack on the way home from a tournament, he’d bill my father for the chicken nuggets and the Sprite.

But I was getting better, more and more confident in my game. I was learning new strategies and new techniques and never forgetting that the purpose of each new weapon was not to win tournaments, or be ranked in the top hundred, or make money. It was simply to beat them all.

This is when I really started to work on my serve with my father. I feel like I’ve had two different serves in my career. You can date me by them: serve one and serve two—which, for an athlete, almost always means before and after the injury that changed everything, that turned what had been instinctual and childlike and natural into something adult and learned and difficult.

I had a real whip to my serve. My arm went all the way back, nearly touching my spine before it came forward. No one had seen a shoulder so loose, so flexible. People said I was double-jointed. It turned my shoulder into a slingshot and gave me power, but it was an unnatural motion that put stress on my shoulder, the sort of stress experienced by a pitcher.

In those years, size was a big problem for me. I was just so small, often as much as a foot shorter than the kid I was playing. It was like that for years. People would ask, “Who is that blond pip-squeak running here and there with a racket she must’ve stolen from her father’s bag?” My size affected my game. As the other girls grew, it became harder and harder for me to keep up, or to generate the kind of power I needed to hit a winner. It’s the first big challenge for an athlete: What happens when the weapon you’ve relied on, such as speed, is neutralized by a bigger or faster player? That’s when a lot of people quit, because it’s not working; what had been easy is suddenly hard. But it’s really an opportunity, a chance to win. And meanwhile, you just hope and pray that you will grow.

Every night, as my father read his books on tennis, I’d hang from the clothing rod in the closet. I’d do this for as long as I could stand it. Then I’d walk around the room, shaking my arms out and muttering as the blood returned. When I recovered, I’d take a deep breath, grab the rod, and do it again. I was trying to stretch my body, make myself taller. There is zero history of great height in my family. I have mentioned that my mother and father are not short, but they’re not tall. If my father is five foot eleven, he’s wearing thick orthotics. My mother is five foot seven. I’m proud of being six foot two. It’s meant that size and power have been an important part of my game. Yuri says I should be proud because I made it happen, “by hanging from that bar in the closet.” He believes that I made myself tall by force of will, that I grew because I needed to for my game. Maybe it was just luck, or a recessive gene. The point is, before I grew, I’d been preparing for life as a short player, acquiring and sharpening certain skills that turned out to be especially helpful when I turned out to be one of the tallest.

Sekou was using me as a show pony, a human advertisement that he could parade around tournaments. If I won, it was because of Sekou’s academy, which means I never stopped playing: all week at the academy, all weekend at the tournaments. We traveled across Florida, then across the South, Sekou and me and a few other players in that dirty white van. In this way, I actually made some friends. I hung out with the kids; Yuri hung out with the fathers. He became especially close to a man named Bob Kane, who knew Yuri as a pro because his son Steven took lessons at El Conquistador. They would sit together at tournaments. Some men don’t like my father. They think he’s too driven, too tough. Some men, however, love him. He quickly forms a bond with them. He is sympathetic—not as a tennis parent but as a person, on a human level. It’s the old Russian in him, the Russian of Tolstoy novels. If he likes you, he feels for you and you feel him feeling for you, and that makes you love him. That’s what happened with Bob Kane.

It was always the same faces at the tournaments. It’s a hundred people all pursuing the same dream. It seems like a big world, but it’s tiny. Just a few of us, meeting again and again. People ask, “Was it scary when you turned pro?” That’s laughable. What really happens when a tennis player turns pro? I’ll tell you. You get dressed up and go out and play the same girls you’ve been playing all along, only now you’re pros. The crowd might be bigger, the referees might be getting paid more, there are advertisements on the banners, but it’s still the same girls you’ve been playing since you were ten. I played Tatiana Golovin when I was eight at Bollettieri’s, and I played her again eleven years later at the U.S. Open.

I kept winning those tournaments. At first, I was a seven-year-old playing in the under-nine division. Then I was an eight-year-old playing in the under-ten division. I was small and not very fast but I had laser focus and hit hard, and my ranking kept climbing. By my ninth birthday, I was among the best under-twelve players in America. This is how I got back on Bollettieri’s radar. He’d kicked us out for whatever reason, but how could he forget me?

I kept beating his best players.

* * *

In the fall of 1995, things were going well. Too well. I was set up at El Conquistador, Yuri was earning money, my mother was making progress on her visa, and I was winning.

Which meant something had to give—something had to go wrong.

Sekou called my father into his trailer one afternoon.

“I’m sorry, my friend, but you can’t work here anymore.”

Sekou was firing my father? Why?

Sekou told Yuri that his presence at El Conquistador was disruptive. Because, in addition to being my father, Yuri was supposed to be a tennis pro, and the other girls were jealous that my father was one of the instructors. Yuri spent more time with me, showed more concern. Girls had complained to their parents, and the parents had complained to Sekou. That’s what Sekou told Yuri, anyway.

He gave my father a second reason for the firing, and I think it was closer to the truth. With Yuri around, Sekou said it was hard to control me—well, that’s not the word Sekou used; the word Sekou used was coach—as my father’s presence constantly undermined Sekou’s authority. When Sekou went to me, I went to Yuri. Even if I did not mean to undercut him, Sekou said, I did. Even if I did not say anything, he could see it in my eyes. As long as Yuri was around, I’d belong more to him than to Sekou.

Looking back, it seems obvious this was about power. I had demonstrated my worth as a player. I had won tournaments. I had climbed the rankings. It was clear, to anyone who had spent time around the junior tour, that before too long I would turn pro. After that, money would start coming in. Sekou had to attach himself to me now, while I was still at this early stage, if he wanted to be a part of the team later, if he wanted to hook on to a percentage of the big reward. For a person in his position, this would mean getting between the player and the parent. Sekou said that if I wanted to stay at El Conquistador, my father would have to find another place to work.

Seeing as my father would no longer be working at the school, Sekou said we’d have to start paying just like everyone else. I’d be picked up and driven to El Conquistador each morning, taken to events and tournaments, then dropped back at the apartment each night. Yuri would be billed once a month, the amount determined by just how much Sekou and his staff worked with me, which was even worse. Not knowing how much we’d have to pay made it impossible for us to plan or prepare. Even worse, Sekou was also still holding Yuri’s visa and passport. He just kept finding reasons not to give them back. As long as he hung on to them, we were trapped. I don’t know what was in his mind, of course, but it seemed as if Sekou was trying to make us feel insecure and off balance, as if he were ripening Yuri like an apple on a tree, preparing him for the harvest.

In other words, Yuri had to find work again. Immediately. He went here and there, before finally bringing the problem to our landlady, the Russian woman who rented us her living room and part of her kitchen. She had an obvious interest in my father’s financial security: come the first of every month, we owed her $250. Meanwhile, she was dating a man who was a kind of contractor, a big guy who owned a landscaping company. He rode around in a clanking white pickup truck, dropping off and picking up his crew of workers, guys who weeded and planted and cut grass and fertilized flower beds in parks and at country clubs—the sort of work my father had done before. The man offered my father a place on his crew. My father jumped at the job. He needed money to keep me in shoes and tennis rackets, and to keep both of us housed and fed.

The work started at once. It must have been so hard for my father. He’d wake each morning at 4:00 a.m. and get dressed in the dark, make me breakfast, and leave it on the table with a note, just a few words, a bit of instruction. On those days when he had to leave for work especially early, he’d wake up, cook me rice, and put the pot under his pillow to keep it warm—that’s what I would eat when I woke up. Like Yuri, the other guys on the crew were immigrants who spoke little English. Only they were not Russian, but Mexican and Honduran and Guatemalan, and the language they spoke was Spanish. They were also much younger than Yuri. Ten years or so, in better shape, with better joints and better knees. But they were friendly and warm and took to my father, and he actually came to look forward to riding with them through the cool Florida dawn. He laughed at their stories in broken English and told stories of his own. He learned to swear in Spanish and came to love his little group. Among them, he was the mysterious Russian.

Most days they worked on the golf course at a big country club—a fancy place. The crew would split up when they arrived, head off in different directions. Yuri would walk the fairways and the greens, planting sod, replacing divots, weeding, whatever—I am not an expert in any of this—early in the morning, before the sun came up. It all had to be done before the first golfers teed off at around 6:00 a.m. Then he continued to work throughout the day, sometimes with other members of the crew, sometimes alone. He was back home by 5:00 each night, in time to make me dinner. It was a weird period in our lives that went on for months and months. He was gone each morning when I woke up, then home to feed me each night, then in that fold-out couch, where he spent hours reading books about tennis and taking notes.

He’d always had trouble with his back. It started in Russia, when he was working on those smokestacks. He would forget about it for weeks or even years, then, out of the blue, the pain would return. Working on that landscaping crew was probably not the best sort of job for a man in his condition. One day, and it was very early in the morning, when he was working on a green at the country club, his back went out. It’s easy for me to write that, of course. “His back went out.” But I can’t really understand how it felt. He said it was excruciating, the most pain he’s ever experienced in his life—bolts of lightning burning through his spine. It knocked him to the ground. Literally. All he could do was lie there, flat on his back, muttering and grimacing, alone in the dark, getting wet from the dew and the sprinklers, which never let the grass dry. He does not know exactly how long he lay there. He was in a delirium, fading in and out. The sky turned pale. Then he saw the trees. Then he saw the leaves on the trees. Then the sky turned blue and it got very hot. Finally, a man spotted him—this lone figure, stretched out on the green, groaning—and raced over in a golf cart. He tried to talk to Yuri and get him up, but Yuri just muttered in Russian and could not be moved. At first, the guy assumed my father was drunk. Look what turned up on the fifteenth green! A drunk Russian. Probably one of the oligarchs! He finally realized that Yuri was not drunk—he was in pain and asking for help. The guy went and got some of the other workers from the landscaping crew. They stood around Yuri, trying to help. They finally lifted him off the ground, put him in a cart, and brought him to the clubhouse, where he was laid out in back, moaning.

One of Yuri’s coworkers called the boss. He told him that Yuri was in bad shape and needed to get to the hospital. He wanted to call an ambulance. The boss said no—ambulances are expensive. He said he’d be there soon and would take Yuri to the hospital himself. In fact, he did not show up till the end of the day. Yuri lay groaning in that back room for hours and hours.

He was in and out of the hospital in a few hours. They let him go with a bottle of painkillers, instructions for rehab exercises, and an order to stay off his feet as much as possible. I did not learn about any of this until later, when Yuri called from the hospital. It must have been 7:00 p.m. The whole time, one of the workers told me, he’d been saying, “Masha, Masha, I’ve got to get home to make dinner for Masha.”

Yuri spent two weeks in bed. He was in the worst shape. We hid all this from my mother. When she called, we pretended everything was good, fine, perfect. Meanwhile, I was doing my best to take care of him. I did the grocery shopping, made the meals, fed him. I made breakfast before I left for El Conquistador in the morning, then came straight back to the apartment following my afternoon match. It seemed to me that what he really needed was a swimming pool. That would be the best place for him to exercise, stretch his back, and recover. I went up and down the street, knocking on doors, asking whoever answered if they had a swimming pool and could we use it. It sounds like a crazy strategy, but I finally found a nice old lady who agreed to let us use her pool several times a week. That’s when Yuri finally began to recover. After three weeks rehabbing in that pool, he was good enough to stand and walk and shop and so on, but I didn’t think he’d ever be able to do manual labor again.

In the meantime, we’d stopped making money. You’d think the boss of the crew, who was, after all, dating our landlady, would have at least paid Yuri for the time off, or covered some of the medical bills. After all, he’d been injured while working for this man. Nope. Nada. Nothing. In fact, my father thinks he actually prorated the day Yuri got hurt, paid him for just the two hours when he’d been pulling weeds, not the six other hours he’d been stretched out groaning. Very soon, we had to stop paying bills. That’s when the landlady began looking at us in a new, unfriendly way. We stopped being tenants and started being a problem. One afternoon, she walked a strange man through our rooms, showing him around but saying nothing. A few days later, she reminded Yuri about the rent. “If you can’t pay me, you and Maria will have to leave,” she said. “I have another tenant ready to move in.”

“How can you kick an eight-year-old girl out on the street?” asked Yuri.

“That’s your fault, not mine,” said the landlady.

Of course, this was the moment that Sekou picked to deliver his bill, which he must have known we’d never be able to pay. He made it his business to know our situation. In this way, he’d crank up the pressure and increase our sense of insecurity. In other words, it was harvesttime.

Yuri got himself together and went in to see Sekou, who was holding our bill in his hand. He said, “Sekou, you know I can’t pay this right now. Maybe if you give me some time…”

“No,” said Sekou, “there is no time. Either you pay what you owe El Conquistador, or Maria has to leave.”

Then, as Yuri stood there, burning with anger, Sekou said, “Unless… well…”

“Unless what?”

“There may be another type of deal we can reach.”

Sekou opened a drawer in his desk and handed Yuri a contract.

“If you sign this,” he said, “Maria can stay and I will see to her development personally.”

“What is it?”

“A very standard agreement.”

“Can I take it home and read it over?”

“Yes, why not, but quickly. It doesn’t really matter to me what you decide. I am being very generous. Probably too generous. I have developed a fondness for Maria. But the deal will not be on the table for very long.”

My father looked through the contract as he walked back to the apartment. He read the clauses and phrases, but it was hard to follow. He was not good at reading English, and, even if he were, the pages were written in a kind of circuitous legalese you’d have to be a lawyer to untangle.

Back at home, he handed the contract to the landlady. “Can you make sense of this?” he asked.

We were not on the best terms at the moment—she’d been threatening to kick us out, after all—but she was one of the few people we could think to turn to. What’s more, if it said something about a scholarship in there, or work for my father, maybe she’d lay off about the rent. She read it at the kitchen table, carefully studying each line. You could see her lips moving as she sounded out unfamiliar phrases: “in lieu of future earnings,” “dependent on post-expense gross.” She put away her reading glasses when she finished. Handing the pages back to Yuri, she said, “You can’t sign this.”

“Why? What does it say?”

“Well, for one, it seems to say, in return for a scholarship at El Conquistador, Maria will be required, for as long as she plays tennis, to give some percentage, a large percentage, of all her earnings to Sekou. If you sign this contract, that man will own your daughter.”

“You’ve got to be wrong,” said Yuri, shocked. “I’ve had my arguments with Sekou, but he wouldn’t do that.”

“That’s how I read it,” said the landlady. “All I’m saying is: be careful.”

Yuri thought about this for a long time, sitting in the chair, staring out the window, looking at the pages, checking and double-checking the Russian–English dictionary.

What was I? Eight, nine years old? I had been playing well and it had attracted a vulture. This put my father at a crossroads. If the landlady was right, he could not sign the contract. But if he did not sign the contract, we’d be out of school and without court time or coaches, which meant I’d not stay good for long. It was a paradox. If I wanted to be good, I had to sell my soul. If I sold my soul, there was no point in being good. If I didn’t sell my soul, I wouldn’t stay good.

Yuri wanted another opinion, another set of eyes, someone who really knew the language and the law—the landlady was not a native English speaker—to look at the contract, but he did not have money for an attorney. Then he remembered the man he’d met at several tournaments, his sideline friend Bob Kane, whose son had played at El Conquistador. Bob was an oncologist, and he must have been a good doctor, because he was clearly wealthy. He lived in a house on the water in Venice, Florida, which is not cheap, and he drove a beautiful sports car.

Yuri tracked down a phone number, called Bob, and explained the situation.

“I’ll be right there,” said Bob, “and we’ll get someone to look at that contract.”

Bob picked us up later that day and drove us to see a friend of his, who handled these kinds of deals. It took this man about two seconds to dismiss Sekou’s agreement. As he read through the pages, he kept marking them with red pen, saying, “Nah, nah, nah.”

“You can’t sign this,” he finally told us. “It’s indentured servitude.”

This was the key moment. If we signed, at least we’d have somewhere to work and to train, somewhere to go. If we did not sign, we’d have no place to practice and eventually no place to live.

I give my father tremendous credit: he never lost faith, he never gave up, never took the easy way out. What saved us? What made my career possible? It was not all those times he embraced challenges and said yes. Way too much credit is given to the art or act of saying yes. It was all those times he said no that made the difference. Up to this point, yes—beyond this point, no. That was his rebellion, his revolt. He simply refused to let me be part of another person’s scheme. It was me and him and it would stay that way until he found a person he could truly trust. At the moment of temptation—by which I mean the appearance of an easier path—he always said no. And he did not despair about it. Because he’s determined, and because he believed. He believed that his dream for me was destined to come true. That’s what he saw and that’s what Yudkin had told him. All he had to do was stay on the path and take one step at a time and everything would work out. All he had to do was say no when it would be so much easier to say yes. He had a plan, after all, and it did not include selling out to Sekou.

We went to see Sekou in that little trailer on the edge of El Conquistador’s courts. He had a mocking look. He knew he was putting tremendous pressure on Yuri, who was still injured and could not work. Sekou was in tennis whites and his eyes flashed and he smiled big and phony.

He got right to the matter at hand.

“Have you signed the contract?” he asked.

“No,” said Yuri.

“You have to sign the contract,” said Sekou. “As soon as it’s signed, we can get back to business.”

“I don’t think so,” said Yuri.

He handed the pages back, signature line blank. Sekou was irritated. Yuri ignored this and told him about the people we’d been to see and what they’d said about the contract, how Sekou would own me if Yuri signed. Sekou said the people we’d spoken to were misinformed, stupid, or lying. The contract was fair—not only fair, generous. Too generous. Yuri said he was happy to hear it and suggested we sit with the lawyer we had seen—“Me and you and this man,” said Yuri—and go over the clauses and make sure we all understood them to mean the same thing. “If he’s wrong, let’s show him where he’s wrong,” said Yuri.

Sekou’s eyes flashed, then went flat, blank.

“Will you sign it or not?” he asked.

“No,” said Yuri. “I’m not going to sign anything.”

“All right, then,” said Sekou, turning cold. “You have the rest of the day to use our facilities. In twenty-four hours, you’re on your own. Your daughter cannot train here unless you pay me. And, from now on, you have to pay the actual rate, which is much more than you’ve been paying. That will be five hundred dollars a week.”

Yuri spoke to the landlady when we got back to the apartment. He told her what had happened and what it would mean. He asked if we could have a few more weeks to pay the rent—we were already behind—just long enough for Yuri to find a job, make some money, come up with a plan. She said no. Either we could pay or we could not pay. If we could not pay, we had to leave. She did not say exactly when we had to leave, but the impression Yuri got was now.

Yuri called Bob Kane in Venice. He told him everything that had happened.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do,” said Yuri.

“Just pack up your things and wait outside,” said Bob. “I’m coming to get you.”

He sent a car to pick us up and bring us back to his house—a beautiful house a few miles from the beach, with a big lawn and a swimming pool and a tennis court. It was the first time I’d been in what you’d call a rich guy’s house. It made me laugh. I couldn’t understand it at all. Why would a person need their own tennis court? And what about all those extra rooms, what would you do with them? You can only be in one room at a time, right? I’d been in America for months and months but still didn’t really understand anything.

We moved into a guest bedroom. Bob said we were welcome to stay for as long as we needed. We could take whatever we wanted from the kitchen and join the family for meals. Then he gave Yuri some cash—“for walking around, just till you’re back on your feet.”

“What can I do for you?” asked Yuri.

“Well, if you feel up to it and have some time, you can hit some tennis balls with my son,” said Bob. “But if not, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to do anything.”

“Why are you doing this?” asked Yuri.

“Because if I was in the same situation,” said Bob, “I’d want someone to do the same thing for me.”

That’s just what life was like for us in those years. Salt and sugar, bad luck followed by good luck. Every now and then, some bit of greed put us up against it. When that happened, more often than not, it was some person who, for no other reason than just because, saved us with a drive, or a bus ticket, or a place to stay.

* * *

We lived at the Kanes’ house for close to a year. We ate dinner with the family and I played tennis with Steven when I wasn’t practicing or doing drills with my father, who’d once again become my coach. This was like an oasis, a cool interlude in the middle of a long trek. It was almost like being part of a normal American family. But I never stopped working and I never stopped training. Most important, I was playing in tournaments, as many as I could qualify for and travel to. I was growing and getting stronger and my game was improving in ways that had little to do with the drills. I was coming to feel the sport, see the angles, get the game. I began to understand how each shot sets up the next shot, how you have to anticipate and plan for the kill. It’s a lot like chess. Every shot should set up something else. You have to be in the moment and concentrate on this shot if you don’t want to lose, but you also have to live in the twenty seconds from now if you want to win.

My mature game had begun to emerge—not completely, but on the best days you could see it. I was playing mostly from the baseline, meeting the ball on the rise, driving it back with a scream. I could hit just about as well with my backhand as my forehand, although my forehand was my weakness. I could turn every movement of my body into kinetic force. Even when I was too small to ride the roller coaster, my game was about power and depth. My serve was a work in progress, but it was progressing. When I could get to the net, I finished the point off with a swinging volley. I was not fast but anticipated the ball well, which made me look faster than I actually was. In other words, I was deceptive. But the best parts of my game, those things that made me hard to beat, were mental. They were my intensity, my focus. I could stay after my opponent shot after shot, game after game, never fading, never losing hope, even when I was behind. If there was still a point to play, even if I was down two breaks and facing someone twice my size, I went after it as if I were serving for the match. I’m not sure where this quality came from—my mother, my father, my crazy childhood? Maybe I wasn’t that smart. Maybe, in sports, you have to be dumb enough to believe you always have a chance. And a bad memory—you need that, too. You must be able to forget. You made an unforced error? You blew an easy winner? Don’t dwell. Don’t replay. Just forget, as if it never happened. If you tried something and it did not work, you have to be dumb enough, when the same chance comes around, to try it again. And this time it will work! You have to be dumb enough to have no fear. Every time I step on a court, I believe that I’m going to win, no matter who I’m playing or what the odds say. That’s what makes me so hard to beat.

This game, this sport, this life on tour, is a kind of carnival carousel—always the same horses and unicorns, always the same sad bench, always the same girls and coaches going around and around. Do I recall any of the early matches or tournaments? To be honest, most of it’s a blur, but here and there a memory shines through. A perfect point on a perfect morning, the smell of the ocean, the evening sun, holding the trophy, its weight, raising it up, but just for a moment, as then it’s on to the next practice, the next tournament. I was winning—that’s what mattered. And it wasn’t just that I was winning, but who I was beating: the best players in my age group in the world, including Nick Bollettieri’s prodigies. He’d send them over; I’d dispatch them and send them back. This must have bothered Nick. It meant he’d kicked me out of his academy but could not forget me or move on, because there I was, screwing up his plans.

In the end, the best solution for Nick was just to get me back into his academy. That way, when I won a tournament, it’d be a victory for Bollettieri’s. And, of course, he knew my situation; everybody knows everything in the gossipy world of tennis. He knew I was without a coach, without a school, without my own place to stay. The situation had changed for him, too. I had been too young to attend the academy when I first turned up at his gate, and definitely too young to live there. I was older now. Whether or not Nick had once been convinced there was something not quite kosher about us turning up from nowhere, all that changed, too. Now we were better than kosher. We were bagels and lox. Nick offered a scholarship. Fees would be taken care of, room and board, everything. But we still needed money, an income, so for Yuri, that meant finding a job. Which he did—he actually went back out with a landscaping crew, but was careful about lifting and straining. A person with a bad back looks at the world with an appraising eye—what are the chances?

I moved into a dorm at Bollettieri’s, which I hated. More on that later. For now, it’s enough to say that my suspicions were correct: I was an oddball, different from the other girls, another type altogether. Meanwhile, Yuri was living with the Kanes in Venice and working like a dog, earning money. I talked to my mother once a week and wrote her letters frequently. She was still working on her visa, trying to put together the papers so she could join us in Florida. She’d been working on this all along. Back then, it was just about impossible to get the right documents. There was a long waiting list and a lot of corruption and a lot of money that had to be paid, and if you didn’t pay the right amount to just the right person, the line could get longer as you waited on it. But she was finally making real progress. Whenever Yuri had the chance, usually on the weekends, he’d visit and watch me play. He took a bus from Venice. It was sad when he left and I had to go back to my room alone. I missed him, he missed me, and the absence of my mother was becoming more intolerable by the day. I was still just a kid. I needed my family.

For me, the good things have always happened on the court. That’s how I finally attracted the sort of help I needed to get to the next level. I was playing in a tournament down the coast, on the Gulf side of Florida. All the elite players were there, the coaches, too. I was probably the youngest player in the tournament—eleven years old and going up against players who were two or three years older, most of them much taller and stronger than I was. I was small for my age, knock-kneed and slight, legs too big for the rest of me, swinging from the heels. I cruised through the early rounds. A cheer went up whenever I won a point. Hearing applause from around the court was new for me. I sat in a chair during changeover, looking to Yuri on the sidelines. He always had words for me, messages. Sometimes it was as simple as him holding up a bottle of water, which meant “Drink, Masha! Drink!” Often, in the midst of a match, I forget to drink, a fact I become aware of only at the end of the day, deep in the third set, when nausea washes over me and the world tips on its axis. Whoa. The bleachers around the small center court were filled. It was a typical collection of parents and siblings and, here and there, anonymous tennis fans.

Among them, unbeknownst to me, was a woman who would change my life. Her name was Betsy Nagelsen. She was in her late thirties or early forties, a handsome woman with short choppy brown hair who had retired from pro tennis not long before. She’d been a top player in the 1970s and ’80s, reaching the rank of twenty-three and winning a handful of singles titles and many more in doubles. Nagelsen had played a game not unlike my own, a baseline power game. Her mom, who lived in Venice and had seen me playing on a local court, noticed the similarity and called her daughter and said, “You’ve got to see the tiny Russian girl. She plays just like you did at that age. It’s like looking back in time.”

Nagelsen worked for one of the TV networks as a commentator, so had seen more players and games and can’t-miss talents than she could probably remember, but still she came down. She sat there all afternoon, watching as I advanced from match to match. What most struck her, I later learned, was not merely the similarities between our games, but my doggedness, the anger with which I played, the way I chased down every ball, driving opponents to the corner of the court. At a few key moments, I have been spotted and championed by powerful women who came before me. They did not do it for a reward. In fact, they did it anonymously, just interested in giving a leg up to a girl who could play. They did it in service of the game. Navratilova sent us on our way to America. Nagelsen sent us on our way to stability.

Betsy Nagelsen was married to Mark McCormack, founder and owner of the premier sports agency in the world, the International Management Group, IMG. Not only did IMG represent the best tennis players in the world—it put on and produced some of the greatest tennis tournaments, including Wimbledon. IMG would eventually come to own Bollettieri’s academy and other academies and schools involved in other sports, including football and baseball. These days, IMG is much without peer, representing some of the best athletes in the world.

McCormack, who was almost thirty years older than his wife—he was in his seventies when I came into the picture—had built the agency from scratch. It grew out of two friendships. In the 1960s, McCormack was friends with the golfer Arnold Palmer. They were among the top athletes in the world, at the peak of their sports, yet, McCormack noticed, they had trouble making real money. McCormack, who was a lawyer and a financial guy as well as a sports nut, talked it over with Palmer. He believed he could use their fame as leverage, and get them paid. It was this sort of basic transaction that built IMG in its early years. In the end, Palmer, greatly enriched by IMG, would serve as the best possible advertisement. Other athletes saw what McCormack had done for them, then came along looking for the same kind of help. And he signed them up. And IMG grew and grew until it became what it is today. It was headquartered in Cleveland, where McCormack had his office. No matter how big his firm grew, no matter how many clients he took on, it remained rooted in that first simple idea. You invest in athletes when they are young, put them on a firm footing, and let them blossom. When they succeed, IMG prospers. For every ten kids they scout and sign, only one might make it—but that’s enough.

Nagelsen did not come down to meet me after the tournament, or talk to Yuri. She went home and called her husband instead. She said, “There’s a girl here in Florida, a tiny little Russian girl—you’ve got to send someone down to see her. She’s going to be a star.”

McCormack contacted Gavin Forbes, the tennis guru at IMG, who had been a good player and was known for his terrific eye for talent. He could discern the great from the seemingly great player, could tell who had that extra gear, that other thing.

I’ve asked Gavin if he remembered the first phone call about me. He laughed and said, “Not only do I remember it—I wrote about it in my diary.

“One afternoon, Mark McCormack’s wife, Betsy Nagelsen, called me out of the blue and said, ‘Gavin, there’s a Russian girl playing tennis down here in Florida—she’s beating all of the other players. You’ve got to send someone to see her right away, before word gets out. She’s sensational. She’s going to win Grand Slams.’ Betsy had been a world-class player and she knew the game inside out, so of course I took that call very seriously,” Gavin told me. “But, to be honest, I get dozens of calls just like that every week. Somewhere, someone has always just discovered the next great player, and she’s gonna do this, and she’s gonna do that. And I get myself out of the office and go and I see them, because you never know, but ninety-eight percent of the time what you see are nice kids and good players, maybe very good players, but there’s a big, big difference between very good and extraordinary.

“When I asked Betsy for more details, more information, her answer was strange,” Gavin went on. “It was just different than what you normally get with the young female players. Most of them are managed by their mothers—tennis moms. But Betsy told me it was your father who worked with you, that his name was Yuri, that you’d come from Russia, just the two of you, when you were very young.”

“Where’s the mother?” Gavin had asked.

“She is still in Russia,” said Betsy. “Come down and see this girl,” she added. “You won’t regret it.”

“I set up a kind of audition for you at Bollettieri’s academy,” Gavin explained. “You would hit back and forth with some of the pros, then play a few points with another girl, an older girl we had picked out. The first thing I really remember is seeing your father walking down a little path at the back end of the academy. I introduced myself, and we started talking. Yuri kept calling me ‘Mr. Gavin.’ And I kept telling him my name was Gavin. ‘Just plain Gavin.’ I asked him, ‘Yuri, how did you end up here, so far from home?’ And he said, ‘Well, Mr. Gavin, I will tell you. I realized, when my daughter was very young, around four, five, six years old, that she had a very special gift and a passion, and I could not ignore that. So I left everything behind and went along as she followed her dream. I have moved to the United States and I want her to be a tennis player and not just any tennis player. I want her to become the greatest tennis player in the world.’ That’s how it started. I said, ‘OK, great. Let’s go watch your daughter play.’

“I stood against the fence, in the shade. It was hot as blazes down there. I got a hitter set up, and here comes this little girl with long blond hair and clear green eyes. Your knees were bigger than your legs. That’s the stage you were in. Little knobby knees and thin little legs. But your eyes! They were just so sharp, so intelligent. You were wide awake. That’s what really stood out. So you got out on the court and literally did not miss a ball, not a single ball, for the first five or six minutes. I’d never seen anything like it. Five or six minutes? That’s an eternity in a tennis rally. And you were always hitting the same ball. Flat and hard. And I’m watching you, thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this really is extraordinary.’ I watched you play for thirty to forty minutes and I was just blown away, not only by the way you struck the ball but by your understanding of the game and the way the tennis court works. You were thinking five or six shots ahead, setting up your opponent, moving her around, using the court like a chessboard, and I don’t think that kind of vision and skill can be taught. You either see that way or you don’t. It was your eyes, like I said. You just understood everything that was going on, the tennis angles and all of that.

“So we come off the court and sit down and start talking. That’s when I really introduced myself for the first time. You were very polite, but a little shy. But not too shy—you know? I asked you, I said, ‘Maria, what is it that you want to do?’ And you looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I want to be the best tennis player in the world.’”

Gavin Forbes went back to his office in Cleveland and sat down with a bunch of colleagues from IMG. He told them all about me, how he planned to sign me and how they would need to work with me to support me. A short time later, IMG hired a young sports agent and sent him to Bradenton to work with the elite group of players. His name was Max Eisenbud. He’d been a division one college tennis player at Purdue. He was not good enough to make it on the professional tour, so he’d gone into the business side.

Max Eisenbud would become one of the most important people in my life, a reliable constant. He’s one of Yuri’s closest confidants, too, the one person, other than members of the family, who’s been beside us for nearly the entire ride—close when things have gone right, even closer when things have gone wrong. Everyone wants to be with you when you are winning Grand Slams, but who will stick close when the whole world turns on you? That’s the question.

I remember the first time I was really aware of Max. He was outside the court, just standing there, watching me play. He was impressed by my style in a way maybe only another tennis player can be. He could see through all the little details—my gender and size, the color of my hair and my age—to what was really driving me, to the core of my game. “It was all about focus,” Max told me. “It was about how you locked in on that ball, stayed focused on the task. There was nothing but that ball and that shot and that game. The rest of the world just vanished. Even during the changeovers, you were locked in. You’d sit down to rest, but your feet would still be moving, your eyes staring straight ahead. If you have talent plus that kind of focus when you are a kid… As an agent, you have an experience like that—of walking on a court and seeing something like you at that age—maybe once in your career. If you’re lucky.”

Gavin Forbes made the same point: “That’s the thing that really stood out,” he told me. “When you walked on the court, it was one hundred percent focus until you walked off. It was beyond maturity. That level of concentration for a person your age—what were you? Ten? Eleven? The focus was just unreal.”

Max sat and talked with me and my father and it clicked right away. Yuri called Gavin that night and said, “Max is our guy.”

Max sat down with his colleagues a few days later and they came up with an offer, a plan. In the meantime, word got out: IMG was trying to sign this Russian girl. Just like that, I became a hot property. Agents who knew nothing about me were ready to draft a document and make a deal. Even if they’d never seen me play, IMG had, and wanted me, and that was enough. That’s how the world works. My father, who’d been kicked out of El Conquistador and sent into exile a few months before, was suddenly getting phone calls from agents and managers from all over the world.

Yuri made a trip to New York to meet with a famous agent named Paul Theofanous. Yuri did not sign with Theofanous, but he was wonderful to me and gave my father a key piece of advice that got us through the coming period, which was tumultuous. His words would be a kind of guide for Yuri as our relationship changed. “Until now, it has just been you and Maria,” Theofanous told my father. “But that has got to change. If your daughter becomes really big, you cannot do this all on your own. You cannot give her everything that she will need. It’s impossible for one person, no matter how good that person is, to provide everything. You are going to need to step back, let go, and let others come in and help you. It will not hurt your relationship with your daughter. I promise. It will only make it stronger.”

In the end, after hearing many offers, we decided to go with IMG, because they came down and paid attention first, and because they were at the time the best for us. As I said, the agency started with Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer, and that intimate sense of partnership and “we’re in this together” has never gone away. The details were worked out between Gavin Forbes and my father one afternoon. I think it was just a phone call.

Gavin said, “Yuri, tell me, what do you need?”

“Money,” said Yuri. “I need money. I can do a budget for you.”

“Well, what do you think it will be?” asked Gavin. “And be smart about it. You need to be realistic but you also need to make sure you can actually survive on your budget, because I need to go to my bosses and I’m going to recommend that we fully support Maria. But I only want to go to them once.”

Yuri said he’d need around fifty thousand dollars. He wanted to buy a car so we could travel from tournament to tournament, and he wanted to rent an apartment near the academy. “I’ve already found the place,” said Yuri. “I think it’s very reasonable.” Gavin told him he’d need more than that. For coaches and equipment, court time and travel and trainers and specialists and whatever. Altogether, the budget amounted to something like a hundred thousand dollars a year—money that IMG would get back if I ever made it as a pro.

* * *

I was invited with a few other players from the academy to Mark McCormack’s house soon after we signed with IMG. It was a mansion in Orlando. He worked out of Cleveland, but Florida is the capital of tennis, which is why he had a second home there. Bob Kane—that was the first time I’d ever been in a rich guy’s house. Well, this was the first time I’d ever been in a really rich guy’s house. I was mesmerized and giddy. I could not stop laughing. The size of the rooms, the garage with many doors, all those big windows, its own trail through the trees, and a guesthouse? Who’d ever heard of that? A second house on the grounds of the first and itself a bigger house than anyone could ever possibly need. It’s like that house gave birth to this house but this house had decided to skip college and just live near home.

But the more important thing that happened right after signing with IMG was this: Gavin set up a showcase with the top Nike tennis executives at the time, Riccardo Colombini and Chris Vermeeren, at the back courts of the Ritz-Carlton in Miami. A few weeks later, at the age of eleven, I signed my first Nike contract for fifty thousand dollars a year, plus bonuses. I didn’t realize at the time how abnormal that was—Nike was investing in an eleven-year-old girl. Like Gavin and Max at IMG, Nike believed in my talent. They were betting on me, even when I was just a kid.

Being at IMG really changed everything for us. For the first time, we did not have to worry about food and rent. If something went wrong, we could go to a doctor. If there was a tournament, we had our own means to get there, so I could focus on tennis. This money coming in—it taught me something. It was like I suddenly woke up to the truth of the world. For the first time, I sort of understood what it was all about. Tennis is a sport but it’s not just a sport. It’s a passion but it’s not just a passion. It’s a business. It’s money. It’s stability for my family. I got it now. You might think this would upset or disillusion me, but the opposite was true. I finally knew why I was doing what I was doing. I finally understood the stakes. It finally made sense. From that moment, my task became clear—just go out there and win.

It was the end of an era. My father and I had been living in a kind of dream. It had been me and him against the world. It made us close in a special way. We were two people who had only each other. There was no one else we could trust, or even completely understand, so we relied on each other. That changed when IMG and Max entered our lives. We were no longer alone. It was the end of the first great act of my career—the me-and-Yuri-and-no-one-else part was finished. I was happy but also sad to see it go. There were hard times, but, looking back, I can see that some of those hard times were the best times. It formed the bedrock, the basis for everything that would follow. It made me lonely, but it also made me independent and strong. When the money came in, that was over. What had been confusing became clear. What had been crooked became straight. Yuri stopped working—no more need to cut lawns or carry flower boxes. His life was now only tennis. He took to studying, really reading those tennis books. He rented the apartment he’d mentioned to Gavin. It was in the complex where we had lived with the Russian lady, only now we had a place of our own, a two-bedroom unit big enough for all of us—me, my father, and my mother, who just about had those visa issues resolved.

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