But you know what they say about too much of a good thing. I was suddenly in possession of an entirely new body, but it was gangly and out of my control. And it hurt! Adding all those inches in such a short period of time made my bones ache. And suddenly I was looking down at everyone. I felt awkward, even embarrassed about this at first. I later came to love my height and see it as a gift. I love being tall. That’s probably why I wear high heels. Also because I love the shoes. I am not going to let my height prevent me from wearing exactly what I want to wear. If you have a problem with a woman who towers over you, it’s your problem—not mine. But it was not easy at first. I had a new body and had yet to figure out how to control it. I was uncoordinated, not in command of my own limbs. I could still practice with intensity, but in matches, my body would betray me, go haywire. And this was at a time when I’d started to get wild cards into the big professional tournaments. Because IMG sponsored certain tournaments, they had wild cards to give to clients. With a wild card, I could skip the qualifying rounds and jump directly to the main draw. So, bang! I was on the big, big stage, but I felt so disoriented in my body. I’d have a goal and know exactly what I had to do, but I just couldn’t execute. It was as if my hands and legs, my arms and feet, were not connected to my brain.
The inevitable result was a string of embarrassing defeats, my first real losing streak. I lost, and lost everywhere. I lost in front of small crowds and big crowds. I lost in the daytime and I lost at night. I lost on hard courts and clay. I’d feel fine in practice and then go out for the match and everything would fall apart. I remember losing so many matches in a row, one after another after another. I remember walking through the halls of stadiums, hotel corridors, crying. I remember the way the other girls looked at me—less with respect than with pity, with joy disguised as compassion, looking down on someone they had once feared. I remember thinking, “What’s happening?” My parents were aware of it, too. I had done so well up to this point, risen through each age group ranking, into the final rounds nearly every time. Now this! What a struggle. They tried to help me, but there is only so much another person can do. In the end, it’s something you have to figure out yourself. Many promising careers have ended this way. You probably don’t know their names, or their sad stories. You worry that your name will be added to that list. It was a nightmare, full of uncertainty, but, looking back, I can see that it was ultimately advantageous. Anyone can be composed and cool while winning, when everything is going according to plan. But how do you deal with a losing streak? That’s the big question—that’s what separates the professionals from the cautionary tales.
There really is so much more to learn from losing than from winning—about the game and about yourself. Do you get up when you’ve been knocked down? Do you have it in you to press ahead when your work suddenly seems pointless, when you are playing the game just for the game itself, when you worry that you are letting everyone down? Do you get up one more time than you’ve been knocked down? Or do you quit? That’s the toughness that Yudkin had been talking about all those years before. No one really knows how they will react to disaster until the disaster is on top of them.
I never lost confidence, not entirely. I guess I was too young to fully understand confidence as a concept, to know it was a thing to be had—I just had it. There was never a match I entered not believing that I would win. Even when I lost, and I lost many times, I still believed I was moving ahead, on the path, following the plan. Just keep hitting—that’s what I told myself. Flat, deep strokes, quick feet before every shot, game after game. Eventually, something will break.
I don’t know exactly how long it went on like this—I could probably look it up and count the losses, but who’d want to do that, even in the spirit of being complete? It’s enough to say it felt like forever. It seemed like nothing would ever change. And then, one day, it did. My brain finally began to understand my body. It didn’t happen during a victory, and it didn’t happen all at once. It happened during a loss. To a spectator, it would have looked like just another failure, but something important had changed. It was the kind of subtle shift you’d have to really know tennis to notice.
Robert Lansdorp can name the match, or thinks he can. We’d been working together all along. If he was worried about my losing streak—he later told me that he was—he did not say so at the time. He didn’t back off either, or let me resort to the topspin that could probably have made my life a lot easier. He was like a guy whose car has overheated halfway across America: we’re closer to the Pacific than to the Atlantic, so let’s just keep on keeping on till we get there. “You were fourteen years old and struggling,” he told me. “Your father was worried and IMG was worried and everyone was thinking, and then you got into this big tournament at this crucial moment and I just wanted to fly out there and see for myself. Was it really as bad as they all said? It was in Sarasota, your first professional event with prize money. I flew out on my own dime, which, if you know me, tells you something.”
I remembered the exact tournament Robert was talking about. It was probably my first as a pro. I actually had a chance to win some money! That might seem like a big shift, but you hardly notice it when it happens. It’s still the same courts and the same players and the same everything. Robert and I sat down before the match, but he did not want to talk about tennis at all. He talked about music instead, iPods, and the beach. He asked, “What do you want for your birthday?” He said it was important, now and then, to stop caring. Then he gave me a guitar. I still have it, a beautiful little acoustic guitar that I never did learn to play. And a gift certificate for lessons. He said, “That way, instead of getting yourself all wound up about a match, you can just pick up the guitar and play.”
“You were playing an older girl, much older, bigger and stronger and seasoned and all of that,” Robert told me. “This was on clay. I watched each point very carefully. Nowadays, someone watching those games would tell you that you played dumb, because you hit every ball just as hard as you could, low and flat, exactly like I taught you. There’s a lower margin of error with all that topspin. I call it Academy Ball. It’s all about the averages. ’Cause anytime you go to an academy, I don’t care whose academy it is, when you hit the ball hard and low or make an error, they’ll tell you to hit it high over the net with a lot of topspin, especially on clay. But you’d have none of it—you kept hitting those blazing low-margin, high-reward shots. It took guts and the kind of stubbornness that’s all-important. It took the very best kind of stupidity.”
I was in a funk after the match—I’d lost in three sets—but Robert was smiling when he came into the clubhouse.
He said, “Maria, if you keep playing like that, you have nothing to worry about.”
I said, “What are you talking about? I lost.”
He said, “You lost only because you made a few too many errors, you were slow getting up to a few balls.”
“You had no fear, even at fourteen, when you were playing your first match on the professional tour, at night, on a bad clay court, and things weren’t going well,” he said not long ago. “You were not choking, you were not getting nervous. That loss told me more than any victory could have. Because you did not back off or give in. You did not say, ‘Oh, let me hit some high balls with topspin.’ You just kept going for it and going for it. That’s when I knew that Yuri was right. You were going to be the number one player in the world.”