“Wait! The what?”
“There’s a locker room for the top sixteen seeds,” said Lindsay. I had come in ranked thirteen. Lindsay was five. Venus was three. Serena was one. “Didn’t you know that?” said Lindsay. “You really should go have a look.”
My Russian friend was not ranked above thirty-two. And so I said goodbye, leaving her to her strawberries and crossword puzzles. This is where we must part, I thought, perhaps for only a time, perhaps forever. Then I went up to the members’ locker room. And up is the word, because it was as if I’d gone up to paradise. I mean, this locker room, the members’ locker room at Wimbledon, is the absolute ultimate. When you walked in, you were in a little hallway with paintings from the ’80s. To the right was a cozy lounge with two big comfortable couches, and straight ahead was the most beautiful locker room in the world. There were only something like eight lockers in there, but they were the best, like little cabanas you have all to yourself. They have large white wooden French doors and no locks because you don’t need locks—it’s basically your own private locker room. I maintained my composure, but my insides were screaming with joy.
I was still smiling from this discovery when I finally got onto the court for my first match, which I blew through, defeating the Ukrainian Yuliya Beygelzimer in straight sets. But for me, the real highlight came after the match, after I left the locker room. I was going down a back hall or up a staircase. I don’t remember exactly, but the sense I had was of going up—which is why, in my mind, it’s a staircase—running into someone coming down, someone who, as we talked, was standing a few feet above me. It was Juan Carlos Ferrero. He’d won his early match and had that cool, pleasant, end-of-the-day-and-nothing-to-do glow about him. He’d just come from his press conference, which, as I’ve explained, is shit no matter if you win or lose. I was now seventeen and he was now twenty-four and all the other feelings were still there. My tremendous crush on him—in a way, it was not even about Juan Carlos Ferrero but about being in love with love—made everything he said seem funny or important. He smiled at me. “Maria, Maria,” he said, “it’s so funny to see you here, to see you now. I was just inside with the reporters and they asked me who I thought would win on the women’s side and I told them no doubt it would be Maria Sharapova. I put my reputation on the line for you, Maria,” he added, laughing, “so don’t let me down, or make me look like an idiot.”
It was magic to hear Juan Carlos say my name, especially in that Spanish accent of his. It’s silly, but I kind of hung on to that memory for the rest of the tournament. It gave me a little extra confidence and motivation. I was not just winning. I was proving that Juan Carlos Ferrero had been right to believe in me.
I played Anne Keothavong in the second round. She was a local player, a hometown favorite, one of the best in Great Britain, but everything was starting to work for me. When I look at films from that tournament, I am always surprised by a few things. First, by how young I am. No longer a kid, but still in the process of becoming an adult, not yet who I am today, sort of half formed, in between. And two, the look on my face, like the person I am playing, whoever that happens to be, has done me personal wrong and now it’s payback time. My brow is furrowed and my eyes are hooded. A lock of hair swings across my face. I hear nothing. That’s the way you gear yourself up: convince yourself that there’s been an injustice and it’s your mission to avenge it. In other words, Anne Keothavong did not have a chance in that match that year. Straight sets, 6–4, 6–0.
Now, here’s a funny thing. I went on to win Wimbledon that year, and there were many great matches and big moments for me along the way, but I did not play my best tennis in the finals or in the semi- or quarterfinals, though each of those is a highlight of my career. My best tennis was played in the third round, during my first match ever on Centre Court, in front of a small crowd, against Daniela Hantuchová, a Slovakian who, at one point, had been ranked in the top ten. Hantuchová had won the Masters in Indian Wells and had made it as far as the semis at Wimbledon. She was a very good player on grass. This is when you play your best tennis. A good player can push you to make shots that you never believed yourself capable of making.
How’s this for motivation? When we met for the coin toss, I realized: Shit! We’re wearing the same dress! To my horror, Hantuchová and I were wearing the same Nike dress. It was not her fault, but I absolutely hated it, and I’d make sure it never happened again. How? When it came time to sign a new contract with Nike, they included a clause that said I will have an exclusive outfit at every tournament I play—no other girls can wear it, not if they’re sponsored by Nike. But the irritation I felt that night added a nice, useful edge to my game.
The points I played against Hantuchová that day, the endless rallies—I still feel them, the pressure of the ball on my strings, the crosscourt winners that barely caught the line. It had been a long trip to this point. I had started off in Spain, played tournaments in Germany and Italy, gotten further than I’d ever gotten at the French, won in Birmingham. I’d put in the time in practice and in matches and now everything was clicking. It felt like the most perfect tennis of my life, by which I mean I made very few errors and executed every shot, the ball landing exactly where I wanted it to land. And it was not just the points or the serves that rang true. It was my state of mind, the intensity of my focus. I’d hit a groove. Remember, focus is not merely about zooming in, it’s also about shutting out, eliminating the rest of the world—eliminating and eliminating until there is just this court and this girl standing on the other side of it, waiting to be moved from here to there like a puppet on a string. At such moments, and they come rarely, and you pray for them, you are so sharp, you are dumb. There is nothing but this and this means nothing but this. I won in straight sets—6–3, 6–1—but those numbers don’t really capture the great thrill of that match.
I played Amy Frazier in the fourth round—straight sets again, not much more to say. But as soon as the last point was over, my world began to change. I had never gotten this far—the quarterfinals!—on a stage this big: Wimbledon! It was as if, all at once, the entire world, or what felt like the entire world, swung around to take a good look at me. It was as if I were a blank spot that needed to be quickly filled in or explained, a character who wanders into a movie at the start of the third act and you can almost hear the producer calling for a rewrite, shouting, “Who is this? Give us some goddamn background!”
This is when my story started to be told. Of me and my father, Yudkin and the court in Sochi, Martina Navratilova at the clinic in Moscow, the years of struggle—on television, one of the announcers said my father had waited tables to keep me supplied with balls and rackets!—Bollettieri and Lansdorp. It was all written up in the newspapers, told in quiet tones on television as I played. “She’s got quite a story…” There’s nothing like hearing the story of your own life as told by John McEnroe. I recommend it to everyone. Of course, that was a danger, too. That all of this attention would mess up my head, break the spell, destroy that trance of deep focus, and, like a bubble popping in a bathtub of bubbles, this dream would end. I remember sitting with my coach in the dining hall at Wimbledon. Normally, we sat quietly, undisturbed—undisturbed because who would want to disturb us?—eating and talking tennis. Suddenly, it was as if every eye was on us—or was I just imagining that? People kept coming over to congratulate me, and ask how I felt, and give me advice. A group of tennis nuts—I don’t know how they got in, but they were from Japan—asked if they could take my picture. When they left, I could see my coach, sort of smoldering. He gripped my wrist. Looking into my eyes, he said, “I understand there is a lot going on, and that a lot of this is new, but you need to do me a favor. For the next five days, you need to put on the horse blinders and look only at the road ahead.”