My life as a professional tennis player really began in the spring of 2001, soon after I had turned fourteen. The first tournaments were small-time: a court on the outskirts of some medium-sized city, a few thousand to the winner. I won several of these and began to move up the ladder, to bigger showcases and larger stages. First were junior national tournaments, then the junior Grand Slams. I was flying commercial airlines all over Europe, as cheaply as possible, flying, as Yuri would say, “in the toilet.” We’d also travel by train, in the rear cars, with our cash and passports safely out of reach of any potential thieves. To prepare, I would get to town a couple of days before the tournament. I was almost always playing girls who were older than me, which was really nothing new. At thirteen, I’d reached the final of the Junior Italian Open, where I lost to a seventeen-year-old.
I made my WTA debut as a fourteen-year-old in 2002. This was the Pacific Life Open, now Indian Wells. I beat Brie Rippner in the first round, 5–7, 6–1, 6–2. In the second round, I got to play Monica Seles, which was a big, big moment for me. I was fourteen, and Seles had just turned twenty-eight. She’d been the greatest player in the world. She was also a hero, less for me than for my father, who’d studied her two-handed game for hours and hours on videotape. It was close to ten years beyond the terrible stabbing she had suffered between games in Hamburg, but it was still Monica Seles—one of the best in the game. She’d won nine Grand Slams and spent months and months at number one. I could not keep my eyes off her. It was so strange, being on the same court. It was almost like I had fallen into the television set. I was surprised to find myself on the wrong side of the screen! I was dazzled, too, which might help explain the beating I took, 6–0, 6–2. I won only two games that afternoon. But there were moments when I forgot who she was and who I was and just played. It was a huge match for me because it taught me two important things: one, that I could in fact play with the best of them; and two, that I belonged. It also showed me just how far I still had to go, how much better I still had to become. Seles made it to the semifinals of that tournament, losing just a handful of games along the way. She lost to Martina Hingis in the semis, who then lost to Daniela Hantuchová in the final. There were so many levels, so many people to beat. I don’t remember much about that match except the score line and Mary Joe Fernández giving me a hug in the locker room after the match when she saw me crying.
I spent most of 2002 and 2003 as a junior because there were only a limited number of pro tournaments I was allowed to play. I was still too young to play a full WTA schedule. By the end of the season, I was number six in the junior ranks. People were starting to know my name. Coaches would show up at my matches to watch me play and search for weaknesses. They devised strategies to beat me. My big weakness at that time? I was slow and not powerful enough to make up for that lack of speed. I needed to get stronger. I needed to mature.
As I became known, so did Yuri. This is just the way of things on the tennis tour, especially in the juniors. It’s the mothers and the fathers you remember, the tennis parents, each of whom seems to stand for their kid. Yuri struck many people as a typical crazy Russian father, hypercontrolling and iron-willed. This was not true, or not entirely true. It was just a caricature that came across in newspaper stories.
Yes, my father did pace on the sidelines. He did whisper in my ear as I came out of the stadium tunnel. He did sit in the stands, giving me signals, which pissed off everyone—coaching is not allowed during games, especially not from the stands. But he wasn’t coaching from the stands, not at all. He was giving me reminders. I’d get so caught up and focused during matches that I’d forget to drink and eat, and my blood sugar would crash and I’d get dehydrated. By late in the second set, the world would start to reel and my stomach heave. So, during the changeover, when I looked up at the stands to see my father, he might hold up a bottle of water, which meant “Drink,” or a banana, which meant “Eat.” For the most part, my father was just a classic tennis parent. And, the fact is, you probably need someone like that if you’re going to make it to the top. Maybe that’s the case with every sport, but it seems especially true of the non-team sports, those games to which you have to dedicate your life when you are still too young to really know anything. It usually takes a strong parent. Who else is going to get out there day after day and make the kid work when the kid only wants to go back to sleep or play video games? No seven-year-old in the world will do that on her own, and no twelve-year-old will stay with it when things go bad, as they always sometimes do, unless someone is right there cheering them along. In other words, you might not like all the antics and the TV time of the tennis parent, but, without those parents, you would not have the Williams sisters or Andre Agassi or me. The tennis parent is the will of the player before the player has formed a will of her own.
When I look back, it’s the big moments that stand out, the turning points. The rest of it fades into a kind of gray wash—statistics on a scorecard, numbers on a page. For me, the first big marker—it stands like the entry gate to my adult career—was the 2002 Australian Open.
I was playing in the junior tournament. I did not go in with a spotlight on my back. I was very young and skinny and people did not expect much from me on a stage that big. They knew I was good, but considered me more of a prospect than a threat. I still seemed to be about two or three years away. But I knew something that the sportswriters and tennis people did not. I knew that something had happened to me, something had changed. It was a deep-down thing, like the gears had shifted in the dark and I woke up in the morning thinking, “My God, I can beat anyone.”
This was my first Grand Slam in the juniors, one of the four major tournaments you must win to be at the very top of the game. (The others are the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open.) It was the first time I’d experienced the electric atmosphere of the big time. All those people and all those reporters and all those players, the best in the sport, gathered together for a week of the roughest sort of competition. I loved it. It made me nervous and it made me excited. And happy, because I knew I was exactly where I belonged. My early matches flew by like a dream. It seemed as if I won them all in straight sets, though that can’t be true—I can’t remember the last time I got through a tournament without a three-set match. But there was a lot of winning, and it left me with a lot of time to explore and soak up the atmosphere. Between matches, I watched the best games of the main draw, the pros. I loved the energy of center court ten minutes before the start of a big contest. Jennifer Capriati, Kim Clijsters, and Monica Seles. But even then, a million years ago, the dominant players—here they are again!—were Venus and Serena Williams. The sisters. But even if I watched them play, which I hardly ever did—unless I was on the other side of the net—it was in an abstract way, not all that interested. I looked at their game the way you might look at a tough math problem that somebody else has to solve. I’d yet to realize that all these players, all these problems, were my problems. It was personal. I’d have to solve every one of them if I wanted to get where I needed to go.
I kept winning my matches, that was the main thing. A week went by and just like that, I was in the final. I later learned that, at fourteen years and nine months, I was the youngest player to ever make it to any final in the Australian Open.
I played Barbora Strýcová in the final. Not only did she beat me, but she was dating my first-ever junior crush, Philipp Petzschner. I didn’t like that—at all. Barbora was a tough Czech who’d later climb as high as number nine in the world. She was a whirlwind, coming at me from every part of the court, returning every flat, hard ground stroke with a little dink that grew maddening as she won more and more points. It’s amazing. You spend months and years getting yourself into a match, and then, if you don’t slow down the world and really grab hold of the moment, it’s over before you know it.