I had begun my journey by picking up a tennis racket on that clay court in Sochi when I was four years old. My ability to hit a ball off the back wall of those courts brought me first the attention of the locals, then of people from all over the world. My father and I followed that attention from Russia all the way to America. It was an adventure that we shared, a dream that was a quest. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. It started in poverty and ended in fame. It led to a kind of city shining on a hill. The fabled city of the big win. In the weeks after Wimbledon, we looked at each other and almost whispered, “So the legends are true.” It was happy, but of course it was also sad. The end of a journey, the end of a quest, is always sad. There is a loss of altitude and of direction. Do we simply do again what we’ve already done, or is something else expected of us? My first existence—the days of me and my father alone, the two of us against the world—was over. And I had not yet figured out what would happen next.
TWELVE
And so began the crazy first days of being famous. The telephone rang, the agents called, the offers poured in. Everything was perfect and everything sounded great. How do you say no when the world is on the line? I would eventually become a great pitchperson, a master of selling products, a name in the corporate world. But it really began with a single company—Motorola.
It was the Wimbledon final that did it, not the match but what happened immediately after. I took my father’s flip phone and tried to call my mom but could not get a signal. From there, the ad wrote itself. It would be me on a tennis court after a big match, wanting to call my mom and this time finally having the right phone for the job. Motorola called IMG the day after Wimbledon, and we did the shoot. The ad shows me, racket in hand, chatting on the new Motorola RAZR phone, which wasn’t even out yet. They gave me some kind of prototype to carry around. It was so cool, superthin and sleek. I went from having a piece-of-crap phone to being like James Bond, flashing the newest piece of high-tech hardware. I remember eating lunch at a sushi place in New York right around this time. I was holding the RAZR phone, and a businessman was eyeing me, and the RAZR, like a hawk. Finally, he came over and said, “Excuse me, how did you get that phone?” I told him that I knew someone at Motorola. But I wanted to say: “Because I won Wimbledon, that’s how.”
They made me the face of Motorola, which itself became a story: that I was just a kid and yet was representing a huge brand, with ads everywhere. People assumed I was making millions of dollars, but it was really not a huge deal. Max’s idea was to go with a cool, quality brand—we’d gotten bigger offers from competing phone companies—and let other work flow from that. “We don’t want to tarnish your name by going downscale,” he explained. And he was right. The offers flooded in after Motorola. I was soon working for half a dozen blue-chip companies. TAG Heuer. Land Rover. I’d had a sponsorship deal with Nike since I was an eleven-year-old junior, as many tennis players do, but now I actually started doing commercials for the company. Bleacher Report put together a slideshow of my greatest commercials. They’ve got Nike on there, Canon, Head rackets, and a funny thing I did for ESPN. I never planned to become a big pitchperson or public face, it just happened. It was more like a side effect of what I was doing at the tournaments, but it made me famous. All of a sudden, writers were more interested in my life off the court than on the court. I went to the beach, someone snapped a picture of me in a bathing suit, and the next day it was all over the Internet. How crazy is that? And there were rumors. Ridiculous rumors. Every day, they had me dating someone else. It was weird. Irritating. Everyone thinks they want to be famous, but let me tell you, a little goes a long way, especially for a seventeen-year-old girl.
And your life changes. It’s not the money or the fame, but the way the money and the fame separate you from other players. They see it as a zero-sum game. We are all competing for the same dollars, so this reasoning goes, so if Maria gets them, they don’t. If you are a certain kind of person, you will really dislike me for that, though you never will admit it to my face. Jealousy became a new thing I had to deal with on the tour. If they resented me, it was not because I was beating them on the court, or because I was a better player, but because I was getting all those goddamn ads. It drove some girls crazy. Elena Dementieva, a Russian who traveled with her mother, was always giving me dirty looks, laser beams. Then, one day, her mother complained to my masseur, a Russian who worked with a lot of Russian players. She told him, “Elena can’t get any deals in Japan because Maria has taken them all.”
How does the world change when you win Wimbledon?
Of course, the most obvious thing is the money. At some point, and it must have been later, I heard a reporter say that I was the highest-paid female athlete in the world. I don’t know if that’s true, or has ever been true. I have never cared enough to look into it. But things did change, and fast, after I beat Serena Williams. I first became aware of it a few weeks after I got back from England. I was in Florida, shopping at the T.J.Maxx in Bradenton, standing there alone in the aisle with my cart, looking at all those discount pants and shirts, and I had this sudden realization. I thought, “My God, I can buy whatever I want.” A few years back, standing in this same store, I’d actually thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to buy anything in here?” And now I could. I could probably buy the whole store!
Then, a few weeks later, we went to Los Angeles so I could get back to work with Robert Lansdorp. There’s always something else to work on, prepare for, improve. Even the biggest win gets you just a moment of celebration, then it’s right back at it. The wheel never stops turning. Stay off too long, you’ll never get back on. I’d usually stayed in a crappy hotel in Torrance, a motor court, a roadside ruin. Max did not even tell me that he’d switched hotels, just gave us a name and address. It was the Beach House in Hermosa Beach, which—well, Hermosa Beach is like heaven, miles of boardwalk and stores and shops beside the Pacific. The room itself was much smaller, and there was no kitchen, but the view! It was ocean till the water met the sky, and then the sun went down, and the moon came up, and the stars came out. I could stand on that balcony for hours and hours, thinking about nothing. And the bathtub! It actually had a little yellow rubber ducky next to it! I called up Max as soon as I’d unpacked. I was laughing. I said, “Max, winning Wimbledon is the greatest thing in the world!”
Not long after that, we bought our first home. My parents and I chose a house in Longboat Key, Florida, because that’s what Yuri loves—the shoreline, the harbor where the sharks swim at night. A year later, we bought a house in L.A., for all those trips to see Robert. My crappy hotel days, the days of motor courts and dorms and second bunks in shared rooms, were over. It was an upgrade—not just in room or class of hotel, but in life.
Yet, at the same time, seen in a different way, things did not change that much. It was still tennis, tennis, tennis. It was still practice, practice, practice. It was still run, hit, play, stretch, run, hit, sleep. Or else it was life on the tour, the endless merry-go-round of airports and hotels and buffets in the lobby, the same tournaments, the same girls, only now they had an extra motivation when they played me. If they won, they’d not just be beating a girl from Russia, they’d be beating a Wimbledon champion.