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.
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.