“We must train,” said Yuri.
We were in Miami Beach, probably on Collins Avenue. I’m also not sure what my father had in mind. Did he just assume we’d find a tennis court? This was Florida, after all, the training ground of the Williams sisters and Anna Kournikova, a tennis paradise. We walked on and on, block after block, scanning. Now and then, Yuri spotted a court—through the hedges, over a fence—grabbed my hand, and made a run for it. Each time, the Russian from the plane stopped him. “No, Yuri, you can’t. That’s a private court.”
My father had the Soviet idea that everything belonged to everyone.
“No, Yuri. Not in America.”
We kept walking, finally spotting several courts beside a swimming pool. It was a hotel, with people lounging in chairs. My father spoke to the man in charge of the pool and the courts as the man from the plane translated. He explained our situation, how he had just arrived from Moscow with his daughter, a potential member of the Russian junior national team, and she needed to practice. The man looked me over. I was really cute. He said OK. We set up on a court and went through our routine—stretched, jogged, prepared, then began to hit. Half speed at first, the ball traveling in lazy parabolas. Then we began to go at it, zinging the ball back and forth from the baseline. It was early morning and I was tiny, but I was really driving the ball. I finished each forehand with a little loop, like Yudkin had taught me. Was I already grunting at the moment of impact? Probably. It’s unconscious, and has always been part of my game. It was unusual to see a kid that small hit that hard and with consistency. It was a circus act. People came over from the pool to see what was happening. Then more came. Before long, we’d drawn a crowd, a few dozen tourists who stood watching the ball go back and forth.
That was my first morning in America.
We worked out for about an hour, then sat in the shade under an umbrella, cooling off. People stood around, asking questions. There was an older Polish couple at the back of the crowd. They introduced themselves, but I don’t remember their names. My father doesn’t either. Funny, not remembering the names or much else about the people who would be so important in those first few hours. Without them, without the good luck of meeting them, who knows what would have happened. I’d like to tell you what they looked like, how nice they were, but honestly, I remember only one detail, and it was key. They spoke Russian. Yuri was so happy to find people he could talk to. They told him they were tennis fans, that they loved and followed the game. They said they’d seen Monica Seles and Andre Agassi when they were my age, and that I was just as good as either of them. This meant a lot to my father. They asked about his plans, where we’d go from here. My father told them the whole story—the flight from Moscow and the early morning arrival, the junior team and the coach who did not show, the hotel room floor, the phone calls. “So what’re you going to do?” My father said we’d make our way, somehow, to the Rick Macci Tennis Academy in Boca Raton. “The Williams sisters were there,” Yuri explained. “Once they see Masha, we’ll be fine. The only problem is that I have no idea where Boca Raton is, or how to get there.”
“Don’t worry,” said the Polish woman. “We’ll drive you.”
You hear a lot of bad things about the world and the people in it. When you are a kid, they warn you about strangers. When you are an adult, they warn you about criminals. But the fact is, in the early days, we were repeatedly saved by strangers. It was not part of our plan, but we were willing to depend on good luck.
We got our bags out of the hotel, said goodbye to the people from the plane, and went out to the street, where the Polish couple was waiting in some big, springy, air-cooled American car. It was Sunday morning. My father talked with the couple as I stared out the window. We crossed the causeway and drove up the coast. It was beautiful and new. People later asked what I was thinking in those first hours. Was I scared? Did I miss my mother, my home, my own bed? Not really. To me, at this point, and for a long time, it all just seemed like an adventure, a fairy tale. I was just waiting to see what would happen next.
My father still talks about how disappointed he was in the Rick Macci Tennis Academy, and how we were greeted, but think of how weird it must’ve been for the people at the desk. One Sunday morning, in the middle of everything, this man who speaks only Russian walks in with his six-year-old daughter, who carries an oversized racket. He is followed by a couple from Poland, offering to translate. My father asked to see Rick. He was told that Mr. Macci was away, not available. The person he was speaking to, eyeing us suspiciously from behind the desk, turned out to be Macci’s wife. She sized us up, then turned away. My father asked if we could just go out to one of the courts and hit. He just wanted someone there to see me play. “If you want to use one of our courts,” the woman said, “you have to sign up for a program, and that costs money.”
“How much?”
“A thousand dollars. And you have to pay in advance.”
At this point, we had only seven hundred dollars—that was all the money in the world to us—in a roll in my father’s pocket. Yuri began to argue through the translator. He told the lady at the desk that I was special, that they’d want to see me play, that, if they turned us away, they’d regret it later. Someone happened to be walking by, an instructor. She defused the whole thing, saying, “Let me go and hit with her a bit—let’s just see.”
We played as my father waited. When we came back, the instructor talked to the woman at the desk. Whatever was said, her attitude changed. No final decisions could be made until Rick was back, but they said they could offer us a place to stay for a few nights while they figured things out. No promises. One problem, I later learned, was that they found Yuri’s story hard to believe. That he’d come from Russia by himself with this girl, that he just walked in off the street with a world-class tennis-playing kid. They didn’t buy it. They wanted to know who Yuri really was. And what was his game? And what’s the story behind the story? And where’s the mother? And what about school? It’s something we would run into again and again. No one believed our story.
By this point, my father had soured on the whole scene. He did not like the way we were greeted, the questions, the suspicion. “Nyet.” That’s what he said when the offer of two nights was made. “We’re out of here.”
If one characteristic defined my father, it was his willingness to say no. He did it all the time. He said no to the easy thing because he believed a better thing would come along. It was stupidity—and faith. He believed in my ability and in his smarts. It determined what happened as much as anything. Saying no put him in a position to later say yes.
The Polish couple was confused. We’d been offered a place to stay and a session with Macci. Who knew where that would lead, but my father just walked out. They asked what he wanted to do now, where we’d go next. Yuri had only one other place in mind: the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, on the west coast of Florida, close to Sarasota and Tampa Bay, which he’d read about in that magazine back home. Kournikova was there, so they must understand Russians. The Polish couple said they could not drive us that far, took us to the bus station, and bought us tickets. They looked up the phone number and address at Bollettieri’s and wrote them down for us on a piece of paper, then handed it to Yuri, saying, “Call this number and go to this place when you arrive.” Then we said goodbye. We never saw them again.