“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.