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.
SEVEN
I was still living at the academy. And hating it. There might have been a great new deal, but I still had the same old life. I want to call it a prison, but I guess it was really just a tennis prison. All the academies are like that—laid out like prisons, with the stout buildings and the neat paths, the curfews and yards, the food lines, the bragging and the arguing, with the women over there and the men over here. The tennis courts and workout rooms are always very close, waiting like a row of coffins. You get up, and there they are. You lie down, and there they are. Even when you can’t see them.
I lived in a suite in one of the big dorms. There was a bathroom and a living room and two bedrooms, each with two sets of bunk beds. Four girls in a room, eight girls in a suite. I kept losing roommates and getting new ones as girls cycled in and out—did well, struggled, broke down, went home. In the morning, the bed would be stripped and prepared for a new girl.
I was lonely. I barely saw my father, who had struggles of his own. Now and then, I took classes at the nearby public school. This was a requirement, probably. They’d drop a bunch of us off in vans, then pick us up late in the day. We’d sit there with the local kids, like freaks dropped from another planet, but I enjoyed it. I’ve always loved school, and it was an escape—something different. Life in the dorm was no fun. I was younger than the other girls—for a while, I was the youngest kid at the academy—and the others punished me for it. I went to bed earlier than the rest because I was younger and practiced longer hours and needed more sleep. They’d come in late, hopped up on candy, talking and laughing loudly on purpose, waking me up and mocking me. It was not just my age that separated me—I was on a completely different track. I was there on a mission, bound for a different kind of tennis life. These were rich kids for the most part, spoiled and sent down to live out a parental dream. I was a player—one of only a handful on scholarship—who attracted the attention of those parents and got them to fork over all that money for tuition. That was our job, how we paid back Bollettieri. We were the advertisement. We attracted the deluded, wannabe tennis parents.
These girls, they’d go through my stuff when I was out on the courts. I’d notice it when I got back—that everything had been overturned and rifled. The joke was on them: I had nothing to steal, nothing to see. What was I? A poor Russian girl who loved to hit tennis balls. When they weren’t going after me, they were making poster-board collages. It was the thing to do at that time. Elmer’s glue, cutouts of David Hasselhoff (I didn’t know who that was) and Janet Jackson, and LOVE and FRIENDSHIP written in blue and yellow and pink bubble letters. If that was what it meant to have a real childhood, to be a real American girl, you could keep it. I had only one good friend in the suite. Her name was Priscilla. She was a little chubby, with the brightest American smile I’d ever seen. I think she liked me because we were both a little awkward. She didn’t feel like she fit in, and I knew I didn’t. We were outcasts together.
The routine never changed:
5:30 a.m. Wake up
5:45 a.m. Breakfast
6:15 a.m. Practice on Nick’s court
7:30 a.m. Clinics and drills
12:30 p.m. Lunch
1:30 p.m. Practice
4:00 p.m. Fitness
5:00 p.m. Dinner
7:00 p.m. “Schoolwork”
9:00 p.m. Bed
At Bollettieri’s, they never really worked on the technical aspects of my game. When I asked Nick about this, he shrugged and said something like “If it ain’t broke.” He said I came to them, that second time, fully formed. “Yes, there was work you could do on your serve, covering the court, but you already had that thing, that desire, that makes good players champions. We did not want to do anything to screw that up. It’s like a fire. You try to light a fire. But if that fire is already going, your task is to get out of the way and let it burn, feed it maybe, but by God don’t smother it and put it out!” I wasn’t too sure I agreed with that philosophy.
I worked my way into Nick’s “elite group,” boys and girls of different ages, the best young players at the academy. There were six to eight of us at any one time. Todd Reid, Jelena Jankovic, Horia Tecau, and Tatiana Golovin were kids Nick had pegged for the pro tour, the standouts. We played with one another and against one another, ate meals at the same table, warmed one another up before matches, and traveled to tournaments together in a single van. Nick tried to make us into a team, to instill an esprit de corps, which is why he gave us the nickname: the Tigers, I think. Or maybe it was the Cougars? The fact that I can’t remember it shows how little that team meant to me. He might have called us a team, but we knew, deep down, that our teammates were our competitors, not our friends. If you wanted to be number one, these were in fact the girls you would have to beat, and being friends would only make that harder. For me, it helped to turn them, in my mind, into the enemy. I imagine it’s how everyone who really plays has to play, because it’s how you win. Other girls just might be better at hiding it than I am. People say that I’m a bad sport because I don’t seem to be friends with the other girls on the pro tour. Well, I just don’t buy into that locker-room small talk. It feels forced. Fake. There are so many times when you see two players in the locker room, two girls, just chatting away like they’re best friends, about personal lives and boyfriends and “I’m going on this vacation” and “I bought this dress” and “Oh my God, it was how much money?” Listening to them speak, they sound like best friends. And then, a few hours later, one of them is playing a match and the other is in the locker room watching the match on TV, looking pleased when her friend loses the point. That’s how it really is.