One day, on my way to practice, I stepped on something. I did not know what it was, only that there was a strange squish, then an extra something on my shoe that felt wrong. When I got to the clubhouse, I noticed the smell, this terrible, terrible smell. A bowels-of-hell kind of smell. I looked accusingly at the other players in the room before coming to a terrible realization… I bent my leg and looked at the bottom of my shoe. The treads were packed with what I assumed to be the richest, blackest, most pungent dog shit the world has ever known. I cursed under my breath. So that’s clearly what we were dealing with, I thought, the most powerful animal contaminant: corgi shit.
There’s a kind of locker-room attendant at Wimbledon. She sits in the locker room, ready to help you with your stuff. She’ll wash or stitch your clothes, whatever. I felt bad doing it, but brought her my shoes anyway. “I stepped in dog shit and I’m not really sure what to do,” I told her. “I need this pair. Do you have a hose or something?”
“No problem,” she said. “It’s Wimbledon. It happens with great frequency.”
I went to my locker and started to change for practice, digging around for a spare pair of sneakers. As I stepped out of the locker room, this old guy came up to me, a maintenance attendant. He was missing a few teeth, prominent ones, but was smiling anyway. He spoke in some sort of brogue. He said, “Hey there, Maria. I heard you stepped in it out on the lawns.”
“Yes,” I said groaning. “I stepped in dog shit.”
“That isn’t dog shit,” he said. “I gave it a good look-over. It’s fox shit!”
“Oh my God!” I said. “That’s awful.”
“No,” he said, laughing. “The opposite. It’s wonderful! Stepping in fox shit is the best kind of good luck. The best! It probably means you’re going to win the whole thing.”
That was the first hint I had that this Wimbledon was going to be different.
The week leading up to the first match was long and easy. You want to go into the big tournaments with a calm mind, and the hours of doing nothing, or reading, or just hanging around with your working family, are a big part of that. In other words, as hard as I practice, I have learned that doing nothing is just as important as doing everything.
We ate at that same Thai place almost every night. It’s where we’d gone the night after I upset Jelena Dokic the previous year, so it became more good luck for us. There is no one more superstitious than an athlete on a winning streak. It got so we did not even have to look at the menu. We could order by number. For me, it was always 8 and 47—spring rolls and sizzling beef with onions. And a side of 87, fried rice.
I spent almost every moment of that week with my team—my father, my trainer Mark Wellington, and my coach Mauricio Hadad. It was Maria and the men! We got so loose and easy, we began playing games and making bets, the sort you make when you know your side has no realistic chance of winning. There was, for example, what I call the bald bet. We were walking to the practice courts one day and out of nowhere I said, “OK, we have to make a deal. If I win, you guys have to shave your heads.” At first, they were like, “No way!” Then my trainer said, “OK, but if you don’t win—” I interrupted him before he could even get going. I said, “No, that’s not fair. You know I’m not going to win.” Then we continued on in silence, thinking. Finally, my coach said, “You know what, Maria? If you win this tournament, if you win Wimbledon, we’ll shave everything, even our you-know-what.” Everyone agreed. Then they forgot all about it. But I didn’t.
I was seventeen years old. I’d grown up in tennis, become an adult on the professional tour. I was at the start of my life, but I felt like I was a hundred years old—so much had happened to me already, there’d already been so many adventures, crises, ups and downs, reversals of fortune. I had already played so much tennis, hit so many balls, been to so many towns and cities. It’s why a tennis player at twenty-nine can seem like the oldest person in the world. She’s been through an entire life span already, from youth to middle age to “get off the court, you’re too damn old.” A pro athlete really dies twice. At the end, like everyone else, but also at somewhere closer to the beginning, when she loses the only life she’s ever known.
Of course, in other ways, I was a typical teenager. I was a girl becoming a woman, prepared for none of it. That year at Wimbledon was the first time I realized I might be pretty. It was nothing anyone said to me, or anything I noticed about myself. It was the new looks that I was getting from the men on the tour, even those men who seemed crazy old.
I wrote about this moment a few years later in my diary, which I quote here without comment:
So all of a sudden I have all these 25-year-old men looking at me and it makes me feel deaf and blind. I couldn’t tell what they were looking at. At this point I had to start hiding my blond hair and hiding my long legs. Let me tell you something—it doesn’t help! Nothing helps and there’s no way out of it. The best part is when they point a finger and yell “There’s Sharapova” and the whole village freezes. I might be exaggerating but it’s how I felt. I guess they’re just too excited to hide it, but please, I was only 17.
Before I knew it, the week was over and I was in the locker room getting ready for my first match. The sky was blue in the morning, but now the wind picked up and it started to rain. That’s always a danger at Wimbledon. If Serena Williams doesn’t get you, the weather will. I settled in for a long delay. I wasn’t scheduled to play till after the men’s match and there was no telling how long that would go. Since they play three out of five, you know you’re in for a long wait. And of course these guys went into a fifth set, which everyone knew they would—because neither one of them had any consistency. Why even bother playing the first, when you know you’re going into a fifth? I was bummed initially, but it turned out to be a good thing because it was during the delay that I found one of my favorite places on the Wimbledon grounds, the Wimbledon’s members’ locker room. Yes, a locker room that I actually liked!
After warming up and getting a snack, I went to the regular locker room to wait because the players’ lounge was a zoo: parents, agents, reporters, and lots of others with questionable credentials. There were only two couches in there, so I took a seat and did nothing for an hour. Maria Kirilenko was waiting for her match, so we chatted and did the Russian crossword puzzles she’d brought. We had about three cups of strawberries in the meantime, without cream. Cream is too heavy before a match. Time went slowly, so slowly. Finally, we got bored and went back to the players’ lounge to see what was going on. We found a bench and just sat there, watching the world go by. Lindsay Davenport sat next to us and started talking.
Lindsay is a tall American girl, a top player, with some of the most powerful strokes in the game. I admired the way she played. She had worked with Robert Lansdorp before me. It was, in fact, because my father so admired her game and spotted certain similarities to my own that he first sought out Lansdorp. It gave us a kind of connection. Lindsay spoke to me in a confidential, almost conspiratorial way. After putting in the obligatory time talking about “this crazy English weather,” she leaned close and asked, as if I had a secret strategy of my own, “Why aren’t you in the members-only locker room?”