I played Svetlana Kuznetsova in the fourth round. It was tense, even before the match began, mostly because this, too, was Russian versus Russian, and who would be the best, who would carry the banner and so on. Svetlana was a few years older than me, and her father had been an Olympic athlete and an Olympic coach, which is not nothing. She had access to the kind of experience that most of us have to acquire through years of heartbreak and defeat. I had come into the tournament as a wild card, but I surprised her. That was turning out to be the theme of the week. I was surprising everyone, especially myself. It was supposed to be a walkover for Kuznetsova, because she was a counterpuncher and would retrieve every powerful shot I would hit, and I had real problems with counterpunchers when I was young. It was supposed to be a walkover but it turned into a dogfight. You might beat me, but it won’t be easy. It came down to the third set. She won the match, but it was one of those rare times I was not crushed by the defeat. In fact, I was encouraged, even invigorated. It was one of those strange matches where the loser actually comes away more satisfied than the winner, thinking, “I can win,” while the winner is thinking, “I’m not so sure.” Kuznetsova was knocked out by Justine Henin in the quarterfinals. Henin then lost to Serena Williams, who once again beat her sister Venus to become Wimbledon champion.
I had made it into the second week of Wimbledon, which was a huge accomplishment for a sixteen-year-old. Much of the frenzy of the first week has died down by the quarterfinals. As players lose and leave, Wimbledon changes, becomes calmer. My memory of leaving the complex for the last time that year is still vivid. It was quiet, the buildings and the courts and the paths were empty. In the daytime, with all the crowds, you really don’t get a good look at Wimbledon; all you see is people. But I saw it now, I really saw it. It must have been 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. I remember turning around and looking back and just taking in the green ivy on the fences and the brick and the lawns and being in awe of how still and beautiful it was. I was just standing there, the seconds going by, and the mood of the place overwhelmed me. I felt its specialness deep in my bones. I didn’t compare it with my expectations, because I had no expectations of Wimbledon—nobody had really painted this picture for me. None of my coaches, not my parents. My father had always told me this is the top, this is where you want to be, but he never really managed to explain why. Likely, he couldn’t put it into words. But now I understood what he meant.
I won my first tournament as a professional that September. It was the Japan Open. Betsy Nagelsen had won the tournament in the first year that women competed, 1979. There was a beautiful symmetry in that. In the final I beat Anikó Kapros in a third-set tiebreaker, suitably dramatic for that first big win. I won the last tournament of the year, too—the Bell Challenge in Quebec—and was named WTA Newcomer of the Year. Winning as a pro turned out to be a lot like my father said it would be. You hold up the trophy and the people cheer, but only for a moment. Then you are right back out on some nowhere court, running wind sprints as the mosquitoes swarm.
There’s a short off-season in pro tennis, so short that it’s almost a joke. For women, it runs roughly from the end of October to the warm-up tournaments that precede the Australian Open in January. When it comes to actual downtime, you are really talking about two months that run from Halloween through Christmas. The most I’ve ever taken off during that time is ten days, because as soon as I hit the last ball of the season, I’m already thinking about how I will improve the first ball of the upcoming season. In 2003, I spent those months in Los Angeles, working with Robert Lansdorp almost every day. I needed to build on this previous season, improve every part of my game, if only by small margins. I also needed to get stronger, much stronger. I was now playing against grown women, though in many ways I was still a kid. Skinny arms and skinny legs. I may have been sixteen years old, but I still looked like I was twelve.
Though I’d finally begun to make some money, it was still a bare-bones operation. My parents and I were staying in a cramped two-bedroom apartment on the edge of Torrance, and we tried to spend as little money as possible. Our only luxury was renting a car so I could get to practice and back. Robert still jokes about it. “I went by that apartment—it was in the middle of December—and I thought, ‘What a dump!’ Christmas was just a few weeks away. The glittering displays were up in the store windows all over L.A., but your family didn’t even have a tree! I was feeling very sentimental at the time, and I thought it was a shame that this child would have no Christmas. So I went out with my now ex-wife and we bought a big evergreen tree and ornaments and presents and tinsel and a star and set it all up when you were out somewhere with Yuri. Your mother let us in. She was looking at us like we were crazy. I don’t know if you remember any of this, but we made it perfect, so perfect, so that no matter what you did not have, you would at least have a Christmas tree.”
I did not have the heart to tell Robert Lansdorp that we had no tree because we’re Russian Orthodox. Our Christmas comes in January.
Lansdorp was not big on strategy or traditional coaching. “Don’t fill her head with all that nonsense,” he’d say to my father. “Just let her hit the goddamn ball!” Lansdorp was all about instinct, letting me go out and play my game. “The hands will know what to do, even when the brain is not sure,” he told me. I always responded best to this type of coaching, which is minimalist, the coaching of no coaching. Less is more. Most coaches love to scout out your opponents and devise some complicated strategy, but I’d rather be the player that gets scouted. Let them devise and overthink. I just want to play. So yes, give me a few tips on how to win the match. Tell me to hit it to her backhand, or to make her run, but more than that and I’m thinking when I should be playing. That’s one reason I worked so well with Lansdorp. He was all about the hitting. If you asked him what strategy he had in mind for a particular match, he’d say, “My strategy is to hit until you win.”
ELEVEN
A year on the professional tour plays out as a series of seasons. You start in Australia in late December or early January with a tournament or two—if you want to watch them in America, you have to wake up in the middle of the night—leading up to that year’s first Grand Slam, in Melbourne.
The year 2004 would turn out to be one of the best of my life. Just two years before, at the end of 2002, I’d been ranked number 186 worldwide. By the end of 2003, I was ranked number 32. My progress on the ranking board was going in the right direction, and this year would continue that trajectory.
The season began with a solid performance at the Australian Open, so much better than my previous washout. In the first round, I beat Conchita Martínez Granados (now that’s a name!) in straight sets. I’d come in as the twenty-eighth seed, which meant I was not at the top but was high enough to be scouted and gamed. It was the first time I entered a Grand Slam tournament as a seeded player and not just a wild card. Even then, my best quality was my focus, the steel in my stare. You could beat me by moving me forward, or by making me hit an extra ball, but if you looked in my eyes you didn’t have a chance. That comes from Yuri. That game face.