Eighteen years later, Estelle and I still plan our trips to Disneyland and still pick apart Harry Potter. It is a deep friendship. We are loyal and rely on each other. We may not be in the same city, or even in the same country, but nothing separates us.
Staying at her house made those trips fun and gave me something to look forward to—it wasn’t going to be all torture. Estelle really helped me through those years. I love her, and will always be grateful.
Robert’s practices were pretty much the same every time. That was the point of them. He believed in repetition. Doing the same thing again and again and again. Do it till it’s second nature. No matter what, he just kept feeding those balls. Forehand to backhand. Side to side. No mercy. When you’re hitting one ball, he’s already feeding you the next—it’s speeding toward the opposite side of the court and you have to run to get it. On some days, he was an absolute asshole. He would just pound and pound that ball until you thought you would die. He’d end each practice by feeding ten quick balls side to side, running you back and forth, back and forth. He called it “ten at the baseline.” We’d do that six or seven times. Then, just as I was heading off court, he’d say, “Where do you think you’re going, broad?” He loved that word, broad. Then he’d make you do another dozen from the baseline.
Lansdorp was not a sadist. There was a point to all that torture. Everything was done in the service of a philosophy; every drill had a reason, was taking the player somewhere. When I asked him to explain that philosophy, he laughed. “Well, you know me, Maria,” he said, smiling. “I just hate spin on a tennis ball. That’s what most modern players use. They hit the ball hard, then put a lot of spin on it to keep it in the court. It drops, like a sinker ball. I hate it. What I want is a good, hard, flat stroke. That’s what all that repetition is teaching. A flat stroke doesn’t have a lot of topspin. Flat strokes were big in the 1970s and 1980s, into the early 1990s, then a new, terrible style came in. I think it had to do with the new rackets and new grips. It changed everything. With the new grips, it’s easy to put a lot of spin on a ball. Too easy. The spin gets on there even when you don’t want it to. The kids who thrive on that can be hard to beat, but when they get to be fifteen or sixteen they hit a wall, because now they have to hit the ball harder and suddenly they can’t control the spin. You have to learn to hit flat when you’re young because you need to be fearless to do it, and the older you get, the more fear gets into your game. That’s why we did it again and again. You were learning to hit that hard, flat stroke.”
Once I’d acquired what Robert considered a suitably hard, flat stroke—it was all about getting into a nirvana-like hitting groove—we began to work on my accuracy, my court placement. There was nothing high-tech or modern about his method. There were no video cameras, or lasers, or algorithms. Robert simply taped empty tennis-ball cans a few inches above the net on either side of the court and told us to hit those “targets” as many times as we could. It was like trying to drive a tennis ball through a keyhole.
“You know, you have the record,” Robert told me recently.
“The record for what?”
“For hitting the target,” he said. “I put them just above the net because that really gives you a sense of the sweet spot, where the zone is. You didn’t like doing that in the beginning—no one does. Then, after about a year, you started getting into it. You’d actually ask me to set up the targets. That was very unusual. When you were maybe fifteen, you hit the target eight out of ten times. That’s still a record. Eight out of ten forehands. Justin Gimelstob hit eight out of ten backhands. One day, Anastasia Myskina, who later won the French Open, was at the club. She had a lesson, and, Maria, you were three courts away, playing a practice match. Myskina’s hitting the target, and, the way I worked, each time a player hit the target, I’d bang a tin can, ring it like a bell. One for one. Two for two. I get to four for four and you start screaming, ‘I know she’s not hitting the target! I know you’re faking it.’ Meanwhile, you never missed a beat in your own match. Crazy concentration. We were laughing so hard. You knew we were faking it—and we were! No other girl could hit that target eight for ten forehands.”
These drills gave a new pace and consistency to my game. It got to where I could just drive that ball, hard and flat, over and over again. This puts tremendous pressure on opponents. The assault never stops. I did not have a lot of court speed, but these shots could make up for it. Working with Lansdorp also gave me a new attitude, a terrific confidence. Robert was so certain about what he was doing that it made you just as certain. He was a guru. You could feel his presence in your head. It was a voice that said, “This is how it should be done. There is no question and there is no doubt.” And he’s proved it. Lansdorp has trained three world number ones. The fact that he could be such a difficult man only made it more special. I loved him partly because I felt like I could break down that cold barrier.
Once, at the end of a long practice, as I was leaving the court, he called me back.
He said, “Hey, broad.”
“What is it, Robert?”
He handed me a package.
“It’s that thing you won’t shut up about,” he said, frowning.
That’s how I got my first iPod.
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, why the hell not?” said Robert.
That’s the thing about that man. He’d always surprise you.
When Robert Lansdorp celebrated his seventieth birthday, a bunch of his old students came back to pay their respects. Lindsay Davenport and Tracy Austin were there. Several of them got up to make toasts, to offer little tributes. They spoke about what they got from Robert. The ground strokes were mentioned of course, but the main thing, what people kept coming back to, was the attitude and confidence, the toughness, the determination to fight back even when everything looks bad. If you can survive Robert Lansdorp, they joked, you can survive anything.
It took two years, but Robert remade my tennis game. Or maybe remade is the wrong word. Maybe he just helped me find what had always been there but was dormant. I emerged from those lessons with a new confidence and a new mind. That’s how I made the transition from kid to adult. By age fourteen, I was already playing the game I play now.
Those years were marked by a failed experiment that still haunts me. It’s the kind of thing you dwell on late at night, asking yourself, “What if?”
Yuri believed a mistake had been made right at the beginning, when I first started playing. As I worked out with Lansdorp, as Yuri watched me hit forehand after forehand, backhand after backhand, he became convinced that I was by nature a lefty. “If you had been playing lefty from the first days, no one in the world could beat you,” he said.
On a visit to Sochi, he tracked down Yudkin and asked him, “How did you miss it? Couldn’t you see that she should be a lefty?”
“What do you want from me?” said Yudkin. “She came out on the court hitting the ball with her right hand. So, she was a righty. End of story. She decided that herself when she was five years old. No one knows anything better than a five-year-old knows herself.”
But Yuri only became more and more convinced: “You should be playing lefty, and there’s still time to fix it. It’s simply a question of will.”
Now and then, when I played lefty goofing around, it did feel natural. It was just so easy, so normal. It was ZING! The world humming, the gears turning, the stars lining up for the solstice. Then again, I do hold a pencil and a fork with my right hand. So maybe, or maybe not. The more I thought about it, the more confused I became.