My father asked Lansdorp: “You’ve been working with Maria, what do you think? Should she be playing righty or lefty?”
“I remember Yuri asking me this question,” Robert told me. “And I remember my answer. I said, ‘I don’t know, but she probably should be a right-hander because then her backhand will be world-class.’ Because you really could hit left-handed, Maria. Your ability to hit a left-handed forehand made your two-handed backhand look natural. Some people are not pure two-handers, that takes time to develop. But you were a pure two-hander from the first day I saw you. So what did I tell your father? What I tell everyone with an interesting idea: ‘Why not try it?’”
A few days later, my father told me to switch to my left hand.
“Why?”
“Because Yudkin messed it all up,” he said. “You really should be a lefty.”
“Yeah, but I play with my right hand,” I said.
“Look, Maria,” said my father, “if you play left-handed, you’ll be impossible to beat.”
I resisted for a few days but finally decided to give it a try. A real try. At the time, my father was sort of obsessed with Monica Seles and Jan-Michael Gambill. Each of those players had a crazy method. Instead of hitting a traditional forehand and backhand, they relied on two-handed backhands from both sides. When they approached a ball on their left, they would hit a left-hand dominated backhand. When they approached a ball on their right, they would hit a two-handed forehand. Yuri wanted me to play that way. It extends your range. You get to more balls in a position of strength. That’s what Yuri had in mind. He spent all his free time watching videos of Seles and Gambill.
So began this strange period when I played tennis as a lefty. Well, it was really a progression. At first, I tried playing as a pure lefty—a one-handed left-hand forehand and a two-handed backhand—but I just didn’t have the arm strength. So I went with all two-handers, that is, two-handed backhands on both sides, like Seles and Gambill played. It turned out that I could do it. Robert Lansdorp was impressed, and Yuri was happy, but Nick Bollettieri and many people at the academy were irritated. They’d spent so much time working with my right-hand forehand and my two-hand backhand and now it was suddenly back to square one. And I was confused. Not in my mind, but in my body. North was south, back was front. Arms and legs, feet and hands—I did not know what to do. This went on for three or four months, endless days of my father videotaping my practices followed by endless nights of my father watching those videotapes over and over again. It exists in my memory as the time I spent in an alternate reality, in the future that never happened, on a train that never left the station. What would life have been like as a lefty? Maybe worse. Maybe better. McEnroe, Connors, Laver—all lefties. I had to decide.
One night, at the end of a practice match at the academy, playing under the big lights, a smattering of people in the bleachers, Nick Bollettieri took me and my father aside. Nick had mostly left my game alone, but now he had something on his mind. He said, “Look, I don’t care what you do about this—not really. I think Maria will have great success lefty or righty. But you have to make a choice. Otherwise, she’s going to be half as good at both and not nearly as good at either.
“Maria, I know this is a very hard choice,” he added, looking only at me, “but you have to choose now or else it’s going to be too late. It’s not a choice for me, or your dad, or your mom, or Robert. It’s for you—only you.”
I was speechless, devastated. At that moment, I thought Nick was the meanest man on the planet. I was only twelve years old and I had to make a decision that might impact my entire future. I was crying when I got home. My mom asked me why. When I told her, she said, “Just remember which people make you cry.”
It shook my father up, too. It was as if he’d been slapped awake. Was he screwing me up? Was he putting everything in jeopardy? That’s the impression we got from Nick. Yuri was bugged, but he knew that Nick was right: a decision had to be made.
My father and I remember the next part differently. As I remember it, the decision, as Nick said it had to be, was left to me. Who else could know what it was like from the inside? I spent days and days going back and forth, choosing and then reversing that choice. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. Lefty or righty? Righty or lefty? To be or not to be? My mom and dad would come out onto the court and videotape me from different angles, helping me examine the question in every possible way. In the end, I decided to stick with what I knew, with what I am, with what I’ve always been. I’m a righty. If I’d been seven instead of twelve years old, maybe I would have chosen differently. But if I switched hands at twelve, then I’d really have been going back to square one. I would lose all those seasons and all those years of work and development, all those hours with Yudkin, and Bollettieri, and Sekou, and Robert, all those matches on all those blistering days. I just didn’t have that much strength in my left arm. I had never developed it. That was especially evident when I hit a lefty serve. I’d be taking a big step back. In the end, I just did not have the energy or desire or faith to make such a radical change. I told my father, and Nick, and Robert, “I’ve always been a righty. That’s what I’m going to keep on being.”
“Good choice,” said Nick. “Now let’s get back to work.”
This lefty-righty adventure, even without the permanent switch, did actually affect my game. First of all, it really built up my backhand. In the old days, a coach would tie a young basketball player’s right hand behind his back to develop his left. That’s what it was like for me: all those weeks of playing lefty really worked up and developed my backhand. Like Robert said, it became my weapon. Backhand, down the line, my favorite shot.
My father remembers the decision being made in a different way. (At times, when we talk about the past, it’s as if we’ve been living in two different worlds.) He says the choice was made not by me but by him. By him! “How could such an important decision be left to a child?” he asks, shrugging. He had indeed been shaken by Nick Bollettieri and what he said on the court that day—“You have to make a choice. Otherwise, she’s going to be half as good at both and not nearly as good at either”—but he couldn’t make up his mind. Lefty was like the moonshot—it could transform everything—but righty was logical and smart. Look at how much success I’d already had with my right hand. So he hesitated and delayed.
“What were you waiting for?” I asked.
“What I’m always waiting for,” he told me. “A sign.”
It finally came at the end of dinner at a friend’s house—a tennis friend. Yuri held a dessert dish in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. He wandered into the living room, put the dish and cup on the coffee table, and sat on the couch to look at a stack of tennis magazines. He flipped through one at random. It fell open to the horoscope page. “Astrology Corner,” he told me. “And it said, right there, in black and white, I swear, Maria, it said: ‘The number one women’s tennis player in the world will have the initials M. S. and she will be right-handed.”
Yuri never mentioned my left hand again.
NINE
I started playing in big tournaments—all over the world. I was still an amateur, but I was on the road to the pro tour, a few steps away. Only the best youth players in the world make it into these tournaments. Only the best of the best make it out. It’s like the eye of a needle. Just a handful get through to the next stage. It was a crucial passage that, for me, could not have come at a worse time. I was fourteen and one of my biggest dreams was about to come true. I began to grow. And grow. And grow. It seemed to happen all at once, in the course of a long summer night. You go to bed in one body and you wake up in another. Stretched out. Long and clumsy and thin—eight inches added just like that. I’d top out at six foot two.