“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.