Of course, there’s the spirit, then there’s the body. Which is just another way of saying: yes, my attitude was important in the turnaround, but not as important as my serve. To that point, my serve was the same as it had always been. It was the same serve I’d had since I was eight or nine years old. I didn’t know it, but it was about to change. This happened after a Challenger in Pittsburgh. Challengers are second-tier tournaments put on by the ITF, the International Tennis Federation. If you win enough Challengers—it’s all about accumulating points—you can earn a place on the WTA tour, which is the big time.
I had just turned fifteen and things were starting to fall into place. As Robert promised, my ground strokes were becoming a weapon. I’d lost in the final in Pittsburgh, and afterward, I saw a look on my father’s face that could not have meant anything good. I was talking to Max when Yuri burst in, almost shouting. “Masha,” he said. “You will never serve like that again.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Your serve is weak,” said Yuri. “It’s fine for a little girl, but you are no longer a little girl. You are growing into a powerful woman and you must serve like one. Your game is not finesse. It’s power.”
“Why now?” asked Max.
“Because now she is strong enough to have a real serve,” said my father.
In the following days, we flew back to Florida and started working on my serve with one of the academy coaches, Peter McGraw, an Australian. We worked at Bollettieri’s, as the sun went down and the bugs swarmed, hitting baskets of balls. The fear of their stingers gave an urgency to the sessions. We spent hours and hours adjusting my serve—hitting the ball, then figuring out what I’d done right and what I’d done wrong by watching me on video. We made changes, then changed those changes until the serve that would define the first part of my career finally began to emerge. It was not an entirely new serve, of course. It was a refinement of the serve I’d developed with Yuri years before. But it made use of my new body—height, strength, broad shoulders and arms, flexibility. I’m strangely flexible, especially in my shoulder. This let me reach so far back when winding up to serve that my knuckles occasionally brushed against my spine. I turned into a human slingshot, arm whipping forward. It generated a kinetic energy that sent the ball whistling. I had a second serve that was slower and more certain for when I needed it, but it was that first serve that really enabled me to win. I had transformed a shot that was mediocre, neutral, into a weapon, one that I could rely on when I found myself down in a match. Struck just right, it was devastating. It meant free points. It meant starting each service point from a position of power, dictating what happened from there. It meant my service games were quicker, my matches shorter. To beat me, you had to break my serve, which did not break as easily as it had before. That’s when I became dangerous. That’s when all those defeats turned into victories. At age fifteen, I began to win, and win consistently. My serve propelled me into a golden era, some of the best years of my career. But I would eventually pay a price for that serve and the tremendous pressure it put on my shoulder.
My father had been waiting for a new sign—some indication that I was ready to compete in the big tournaments on the big stage of the professional tour. Technically, I was already a pro. I’d played for money. I was ranked and I was known in the world of junior tennis. But I’d yet to play in the top-tier tournaments, the majors covered by the press and followed by the fans. More money, more pressure. You fail there, it’s a whole different level of complication and consequence.
The sign came on a trip we made back to Russia. It probably wasn’t my first trip back, but it was the first trip I really remember. We visited Moscow and stayed in Sochi. And we traveled. We saw my grandparents, friends, and relatives. It was strange to stand in those little houses and little apartments again. Everything was so much bigger in America. I will always be Russian in my heart and in my soul, yet there is no hiding the fact that I spent many of my key early years in Florida and California, watching American TV and wanting American products. Some part of my identity will always be from the USA. It’s the most comfortable culture for me, where I really feel at ease. I understood this only when I went back to Russia. That’s the thing about living life on the circuit, training from such an early age—you make a dozen different hotels and apartments and countries your home, which is another way of saying you kind of live nowhere. Everything drifts by. You never let yourself get too deep or have too much fun because you know that the day after tomorrow you’ll be gone. Only the tennis rackets remain, always by your side. People think it’s a glamorous life. And, in a way, it is—maybe it is. I am not convinced. It can also be confusing and lonely.
I played tennis every day on that trip back to Russia. Yuri made sure of that. We had to stick to the schedule, the regimen. That meant waking up just after dawn, stretching and running, then finding a court. I’ve always believed that you have to train harder than you play. That’s how you win—so that the match, when it comes, comes as a kind of break. And you train, in this world, not for one match or for one tournament or for one season, but for an entire career, which will continue until they make you leave the last court on the final day.
At the time, it was still just me and Yuri, out there each morning, hitting. We went back to Gomel at the end of the trip—the land of radiation. We stayed with my grandparents, walked through the streets of the little town, wandered in the park and forest. Yuri arranged a match for me at the public courts where he’d first started playing. He set me up to play against this big guy who was studying me from the far court, waving a big hand in a big greeting. I don’t really remember what he looked like, but he was tall and square-jawed with a five o’clock shadow and thick black hair. I did not know it at the time, but this guy had been the standout on Yuri’s old tennis scene, the unbeatable star. Yuri had been defeated by him and had seen him defeat every other good player in the area. I did not know any of this until later, much later, but this man stood as a kind of benchmark for my father, a symbol. He was to be my test. How would I stand up against this old-time hero? “If you can play with him, Masha, you are good,” Yuri told me. “If you can take more than five games off him, you are ready for whatever is waiting for you.”
I was fifteen years old, or close. This man must have been forty. He had an old-fashioned racket and a big ground stroke that started at his heels and ended in the sky. The court was scuffed and slow and the man grunted as we played, but I grunted louder. He was not a pushover, but he was also not all that my father remembered. I took his best shots and returned them on the rise, hitting the ball just as Robert Lansdorp would have wanted me to—hard and flat and just a whisker above the net. As the games went by, the man became agitated, then annoyed, then angry. He could not believe what was happening. Was he really losing to this kid, this girl?
We played two sets. I won them both. It was close, something like 7–5, 7–6. The angrier this man became, the happier my father got. It was as if that anger were a gauge. Yuri watched the needle climb and smiled. When it touched the red, he was fully satisfied. As we left the courts, in a dank building with weak yellow lights, echoing with the sound of balls, he put his arm over my shoulder as if to say, “Masha, you are ready.”