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.