The quarterfinals rose before me like a palisade. Centre Court, television coverage all over the world, the true big time. Of all the hundreds and thousands of tennis players in the world, only eight remained. Among them, my name stood out. It’s like they ask on Sesame Street: Which one of these things does not belong? The other girls were champions and future Hall of Famers—Serena Williams and Lindsay Davenport. And… who? I mean, yes, yes, I was confident and knew exactly who I was and what I could do, but no one else did.
I played Ai Sugiyama in the quarterfinals, a gritty player who could get every ball back, no matter the speed. Playing against her is like playing ping-pong tennis. She stays low for every shot—a huge advantage on grass. And she can stay out there for hours. This match really did me in, wiped me out. I began to tire. Sugiyama was like me in a way—she refused to quit, even when she was beaten. That is, until she actually did quit.
I lost the first set but it was a close thing and I was determined to get back into it. I’ve seen pictures of my face during the changeover between the first and second. I look bewildered, confused. In a really tough match, there is usually a single moment when everything hangs in the balance—you either redouble and refocus and carry on, or you unravel. Either you break, or she does. When you both refuse to give in, that’s when you get the epic matches.
I won the second set 7–5. What made the difference was my serve. I seemed to come up with an ace whenever I was really against it. What’s more, even if I did not hit an ace, my first serve was strong enough to set Sugiyama up for a point that did not end in her favor.
Sugiyama almost broke my serve in the first game of the third set. That was her moment, but she let it get away. I hung on, turned around, and broke her serve instead. A three-game swing. That was the match right there. Instead of it being 4–1 Sugiyama in the third, it was 4–1 Sharapova. There was a point at the end of the fifth game when I could feel her buckle and give. She’d been broken, not in her serve but in her spirit. It was all mop up and close out from there. This was, in fact, the first time I felt like I was the fresher player at the end of the third set.
The last point?
I was wearing a white halter-top dress, a gold cross necklace that my parents had given me when I was a little girl, silver earrings a friend had given me for my seventeenth birthday, barrettes in my hair, short white socks, and white shoes. I swayed back and forth as I waited to serve. I walk around a lot between points. It stills my nerves and plugs me into a kind of inner rhythm. I served for the match at 40–0. I pushed Sugiyama back with that serve, grunting loudly as I hit the ball. She got the ball back over, but right into the strength of my backhand. I blazed a return, screaming as my follow-through carried my racket toward the sky. I hit it deep to her backhand. Her return sailed wide, and that was it: 5–7, 7–5, 6–1. I raised my arms, turned my face to the sky, and screamed something like, “Thank God!” I could see my box, where my team was celebrating. My father had his fists in the air, just like me. So that’s where I got it from!
Unbelievable. I was in the semifinals of Wimbledon.
As a rule, the task gets tougher as you get closer to the prize. Each round means higher stakes and more pressure and slimmer odds and fiercer competition.
It was my father who told me that I’d be playing Lindsay Davenport in the semifinals. I don’t remember exactly what I thought when I heard this news, but it must have been something like “Fuck.” I was a kid. Lindsay was a woman. I was weak. Lindsay was strong. I was stringy and narrow. Lindsay was powerful and solid. As I said, in many ways our games were alike. We went by power, played from the baseline, hit flat and low, without much spin, a style that both of us learned from Robert Lansdorp. She was twenty-eight years old, so far along there was talk of her retirement. She was not number one just then—that was Serena—but had been number one, off and on, for ninety-eight weeks. She was one of the greatest tennis players in the world. In other words, I’d hung on and hung on till I’d advanced myself right out of my league. I mean, how was I supposed to beat Lindsay Davenport? She was just like me, only bigger, stronger, older, and more experienced. She was just like me, only way more.
What’s that thing they talk about in school? The pathetic fallacy? When your internal mood is mirrored by the weather? The sky was overcast the morning of the match. Thunderheads were streaming in from the continent. Dark and gloomy everywhere. It rained off and on as I headed to the courts. I went through my regular routine—stretched and ran, then hit for about forty minutes on one of the practice courts—but my heart was in my mouth the entire time. This was the biggest test of my life, what my father and I had been working toward all these years.
Then, a moment later, I was on Centre Court, waiting for the first game to begin. The scene, the pomp and the show of it, dazzled me. I’m a master of high focus, but this was simply too much. For starters, there was the mystique of Centre Court. Every detail of it was like a revelation. The feel of the grass—it’s like nothing in the world. How it’s kept up and cared for but also left to run down ever so slightly. Parched at the edges, faded green and going brown, dilapidated in the way only rich people allow things to dilapidate. A tweed coat frayed at the cuffs: it does not say you’re poor; it says you’re sophisticated, evolved beyond green, green grass and other vain perfections. And the way that grass played, the trueness of the bounce and speed—there’s nothing in the world to match it.
And the people in the seats, the regular Wimbledon tennis crowd, who, on that day, struck me as the most knowledgeable fans in the world, a swarm of analysts who would x-ray through my skin and see I was a kid and did not belong here. And the Royal Box, where the Queen sat with the aristocrats and retainers. And the celebrities, the legends of tennis past; now I’m thinking of Billie Jean King, who was up there, watching me with eyes that had seen everything in this game. It calmed me down a bit when I looked at my box—each player gets a group of seats for her entourage—where my father sat with my trainer, my manager, and my coach. But it was not enough. Before I realized what was happening, I was through my warm-ups and serving to begin the match. My body felt tight. I was moving so slowly. My arm went up and my racket met the ball and my serve fluttered across the net like a butterfly.
I’d never played Lindsay Davenport before. I’d heard about her power, but there is hearing and seeing at a distance, and then there is being right in the firing line. It’s the difference between reading about a person stuck in the cold and actually being trapped in a snowstorm. Lindsay returned my serve like it was nothing, blazed it right past me. I barely had time to react. I went across the court to the ad box and got ready, bouncing the ball before starting into my next serve. There was that butterfly again. A moment later, the ball was behind me and I was down 0–30 in the first game. Something inside me shivered. Something inside me cracked. Something inside me said, “You can’t possibly win.”
Then, and this proves that even the best moments depend on luck, the dark clouds rolled in and it began to rain. The umpire threw up his arm and we ran off the court and stood beneath an overhang. But it was a short reprieve, as the rain quickly gave way to sunshine and I was back out there getting pummeled as if the first pummeling had never stopped. Davenport broke my serve in the first game—I got one point!—and it was downhill from there. I was overpowered, overmatched. She was a woman. I was a girl. She was big. I was small. She hit the corners. I hit the net. In that dazzling run of awful games, it seemed as if she did not miss a shot.