Getting a Grip Page 11

  The life that I knew before had ceased to exist. I couldn’t see tomorrow, let alone a four-month plan for making a comeback. I started to cry a lot. My surgeons suggested I get some psychological therapy, so at their recommendation I flew to Lake Tahoe to see Dr. Jerry May. I’d never been to that kind of therapist before and I was very nervous and self-conscious. Opening up to my friends and family is hard enough for me so it felt really strange to be talking about my problems with a total stranger. I just wasn’t ready for it. So after a couple of weeks I went back to Vail and continued to avoid the treadmill. The only solace I found was going on hikes with Astro. Walking through the woods with my quiet, steadfast friend was the only thing that calmed me down. At nineteen, I was facing the frightening prospect of a life without tennis. What if I couldn’t make a comeback? Tennis had consumed me from the time I was six years old, and I was scared that I didn’t have an identity without a racket in my hand.

  Who was I without tennis?

  16

  Keep Running

  Home: an elusive concept for a professional tennis player. From the time I left Novi Sad with my Walkman and two suitcases, I’d lived like a nomad. For six years I’d rarely been home for more than a month straight. I’d become halfway decent at making hotel rooms feel like home. I’d unpack my things the second I walked in the door and mess up the bed so it looked more like me. And as long as I had my parents with me, I always felt a connection to home. A sanctuary to return to at the end of a bad day. But I’d longed for a real place to call home for years. Not a rental house or a hotel room: those wouldn’t do anymore. It was time to put down some roots, especially because my whole family was feeling so vulnerable. We needed to sit on our own couch, put our feet up on our own coffee table, and let the storm pass over. We got lucky on this one. By the time I finished with my therapy and my dad finished with his chemo, we moved into the house we’d been building in Sarasota for the past year. It felt good to have a real home again. Finally.

  My parents and I fell into this strange rhythm of “normalcy” we hadn’t had since I was little. We hung out around the house, reading books, watching movies, cooking . . . normal stuff. But the reality was anything but normal. All of this togetherness was thanks to tragic circumstances and an unmistakable heaviness hung in the air. I was terrified that my dad’s cancer would come back—it would take a year to know if the chemo had been successful—so it was like waiting for the bomb to drop every time I asked him how he was feeling. I’m sure I drove him crazy. And I was dealing with my own demons. Food became the only way to silence them.

  I began to eat a lot. I’d walk into the kitchen, grab a bag of chips and a bowl of chocolate ice cream, then head to the couch and eat in front of the television. I’m surprised I didn’t wear a deep groove in the hardwood floor between the fridge and the couch. I still don’t know why my anguish found solace in food that summer. Other than my brief peanut butter phase when I was thirteen, I’d never used food as a crutch before. Maybe I was bored and I kept finding myself wandering into the kitchen, scanning the cupboards, even though I’d just eaten an hour before. Maybe I was subconsciously reacting to Parche’s angry comment that “women shouldn’t be as thin as a bone.” If I padded myself with extra weight, I’d be protected from being hurt again. Maybe I was scared that my comeback would fail, so by eating myself out of shape I could guarantee I’d never do it. I’d never have to be on the public stage again. I may never know what started me down this dark path; it could have been all or none of those things. But that summer what would turn out to be a decade-long battle between my mind and my body began. I wish I could have stopped myself. I wish that I’d paid better attention to what I was doing, acknowledged the bad habits that were forming, and corrected them before they got out of control. But I didn’t. I was too depressed to think deeply about what I was feeling and I was too lost in my own head to take a step back and see the kind of damage I was inflicting on myself.

  By the middle of September I’d gained over fifteen pounds and I was briefly shocked into action. I still had just enough willpower left to say to myself, Stop! This isn’t helping. In May my goal had been to be back in playing shape by the fall, and I was far from it. My dad and I decided to pull out all the stops. My slothlike behavior had to come to an end. We called Bob Kersee, Olympic fitness trainer extraordinaire. My dad and I flew back out to Vail to meet with him and I was hit with ten weeks of the hardest workouts of my life. My dad’s inner track-and-field athlete came alive watching me sprint down the straightaways. He was in heaven watching all of Bob’s innovatively grueling workouts. It was total hell, especially because I was hauling around the extra weight—a daily reminder of what had happened to me in Hamburg. I wasn’t the same person I’d been on the morning of April 30.

  Despite the pain, I loved working out with Bob. Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Bob’s multiple gold medal-winning stud athlete of a wife, frequently joined us on the track. Watching her explosive power and indefatigable work ethic spurred me on. She was superhuman and an inspiration to me. She could take the most torturous workouts, ask for more, then do them even faster. Seeing Jackie whiz by me in a blur stoked my competitive fire. I’d never done workouts like that in my life, and I was running like a madwoman. I was running like I was trying to get away from something dangerous, and back then my mind was a very dangerous place to be. Sweating out my rage, confusion, and frustration did more for me than one hundred hours of talk therapy.

  The ten weeks I spent training with Bob were the only time that my depression lifted an inch. I was too busy surviving another round of interval sprints around the track to flounder about in my own messed-up head. Who has time to delve into the abyss of Why me? when you’re trying to churn out ten 400s in a row in under one minute and twenty seconds each?

  Bob got my heart rate pumping to 210 up in the high-altitude Colorado mountains. But ultimately I was just replacing the torment in my mind with torment in my body. I was too exhausted to think about what had happened to me in Hamburg, but it was just a temporary solution—a flimsy Band-Aid that could fall off at any moment, leaving a gaping wound. I was still wildly out of whack and my life was off-kilter. The damage to my psyche was hiding behind sit-ups, push-ups, plyometrics, and supersets with twenty-pound dumbbells. Extreme nightmares were replaced with extreme exhaustion. How long could I keep that up?

  As soon as the Kersees left Vail to spend the holidays at their home in Illinois, my dad and I went back to Florida and I ate for two weeks straight. Pasta, burgers, potato chips, and late-night runs to Taco Bell. My mind was no longer being quieted with workouts, so I kept it busy reading fast-food menus. In ten days I gained back all the weight that I’d lost with the Kersees. Poof! Ten weeks of Olympic-caliber training gone just like that. It didn’t help that during my training I received some shocking news—it almost knocked the wind out of me when I heard it. The man who stabbed me had gone to trial on a charge that was ridiculously less than it should have been: “bodily injury.” In front of thousands of spectators, the guy attacked me, and was trying to go back for more when he was wrestled to the ground. “Attempted murder” would have been a much more accurate description. The German court didn’t agree with me, my lawyer, or the court-appointed prosecutor. He was charged with the lesser offense, to which he pled guilty. His sentence? Two years of probation.

  When my brother told me the news, I was stunned. I called my lawyer and told him to urge the prosecutor to file an appeal immediately.

  17

  Happy?

  Sometimes when life comes at you, it comes at you full throttle. It comes at you with a vengeance to see just how much you can take. After many years of being tested, I can now take misfortunes and turn them around into opportunities for growth. I can look at something bad and think, What is this trying to teach me? How am I supposed to grow from this really awful situation? But in the winter of 1994, all I felt was overwhelming frustration and sadness.

  We didn’t have to wait a
year to find out the status of my dad’s cancer. The wait ended up being a few months. During a routine checkup, he was told it hadn’t gone into remission. Instead, it had spread to his stomach. Another operation was immediately scheduled and it left him with a crescent-moon-shaped scar running across the width of his torso. My family was camped out near the Mayo Clinic while he recovered and underwent another round of chemo. I spent a lot of time under fluorescent lights, either in the hospital or in the grocery store.

  After spending the day with my dad, I’d trudge through the mid-January Minnesota snow in my brand-new snow boots and make a late-night stop at the local Hy-Vee mega grocery store. The rush of air from the heating vents and the steady roll of my shopping cart’s wheels were a form of meditation for me.

  Spending a month braving a harsh midwestern winter doesn’t sound appealing to most people, but it was a refuge. The stress of my dad’s illness had put another fifteen pounds on me. I had reached the mid-160s, a solid thirty more than I’d ever weighed before, and the freezing-cold weather meant I could hide my expanding waistline under layers of sweaters and baggy track pants. Relieved to be away from sickness and the constant thinking about the worst version of “What if . . . ?” I’d lose myself in the cookie and cracker aisle. I’d load up with Oreos, Pop-Tarts, pretzels, and barbecue potato chips.

  As I filled my cart with junk food, I knew what I was doing was wrong. First, I knew it wasn’t going to help get me back on the tennis court; second, I knew it wasn’t going to save my dad. I knew my behavior was extreme and unhealthy, but I just couldn’t stop myself. Every evening, the moment I walked out of the hospital, I’d head to the market and load my cart. When I reached the checkout line, I’d unload my purchases onto the conveyer belt with my head down, hoping nobody would get in line behind me to gawk at the junk. Not one nutritious calorie among my loot. I felt empty and damaged inside, and all I wanted to do was stuff myself with empty, damaging food.

  While driving back to the hotel, I’d rip into the bag of potato chips and within a few minutes it would be empty. We had a kitchenette in our suite to make things easier during our long stay, and I’d wait anxiously by the toaster as my frosted Pop-Tarts turned a perfect golden color. The moment they were finished, I’d grab them. I burned my fingers countless times because I couldn’t wait another thirty seconds for them to cool off before fishing them out of the toaster. My binges were done in secret. My mom, brother, and I took turns visiting my dad, so as soon as my shift was over I made a beeline for the nearest food store and was careful to discard the empty bags and grocery store receipts. My family had no idea how much I was eating. I started having uncontrollable crying episodes, and I did these in secret too. When I couldn’t sleep at night—which was becoming more and more often—I’d get up and lose myself in another bag of cookies. My dad was sick and I couldn’t make him better. My career was in tatters and I couldn’t make it better. My eating was getting out of control and I couldn’t stop it. By February we were back home in Sarasota and I was exhausted. Mentally and physically I didn’t have anything left. My insomnia had grown worse and I felt like a shell, a big, unhealthy, hopeless shell. I was tipping the scale at 174. I’d gained forty pounds in less than a year.

  March went by in a blur. After filling up every hour of every day of my life with tennis for years, I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to keep myself occupied during the day. I walked around the house looking for things to do, never finding anything that held my interest, and invariably ended up on the couch watching daytime TV. Finally, one afternoon, my dad, who was determinedly getting stronger every day, reached his breaking point. While he was working on regaining his health, I was passively destroying mine. He told me I had to go back to see Dr. May in Lake Tahoe. After a week of dragging my feet and making excuses, I finally got on a plane. I underwent two weeks of intense therapy and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, something I’d never heard of before. I didn’t know what it meant or how to get rid of it. I just knew that I wasn’t the same person I used to be and I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to get back to my old self.

  I learned that after a traumatic event it was possible to be haunted by intense anxiety that can leave you feeling emotionally numb. No amount of food or sitting on the couch was going to make it go away. Dr. May suggested techniques for cutting off my negative thought patterns and a few relaxation methods to calm me down when faced with anxiety-producing situations that freaked me out—which was pretty much everything at that point. Maybe if I’d been ready for therapy my condition would have improved, but I wasn’t in that place yet.

  While it was somewhat of a relief to have an official name for what I was going through, I was hoping for a quick fix and that wasn’t it. What had happened to me had never happened in any sport, so there wasn’t a rulebook for getting better. It was hard to get the “right” advice from anybody because the “right” advice didn’t exist. I was muddling through uncharted territory. I just wanted to get better, and every day I was getting more frustrated because I wasn’t feeling “normal.” What I didn’t yet understand was that I would never be who I used to be.

  There was something that I knew for certain and I was having a hard time moving past it. There was an indisputable fact that no amount of therapy would change: the man who stabbed me was still walking around free and there was nothing I could do about it until the appeal was brought before the highest court. I’d just have to wait it out. Maybe then, maybe once justice was served, I’d be able to move on.

  At the end of the year I turned twenty-one. My friends tried hard to plan something, but I refused to commit to anything. I felt horrible about myself and I wasn’t in a celebratory mood. The last thing I wanted to do was stay out all night barhopping with friends and flirting with guys. I hadn’t felt good about my body in almost two years. Besides, I didn’t have anything in my closet that fit anymore. All of my cute going-out clothes were four sizes too small! I’d spent almost the whole year in athletic clothes: oversize T-shirts, track pants, and sweats. I rang in the big birthday sitting on the couch with a bag of peanut-butter-filled pretzels. I turned off my phone so nobody could reach me and I watched television until I fell asleep. I didn’t feel sorry for myself; in fact, I didn’t feel anything at all.

  The next day my dad sat me down for another talk. Talk therapy in Tahoe hadn’t done much good, and I could tell he was desperate to do something—anything—to bring his daughter back to life.

  “What do you want to do, Monica?” he asked me. I knew where he was going with this but I didn’t feel like getting into a deep conversation. I just wanted to watch my lineup of television shows.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “Just hang out at home, I guess.” I was flipping through the channels on the remote control. He gently took it from me.

  “You know I don’t mean that,” he said. He knew I was in a crisis. I used to be happy. I used to bounce around the house and the tennis court with a spring in my step. All of that was gone and it was getting worse.

  “I know what you mean,” I replied.

  “Are you happy?” he asked. Before his illness, my dad thought he was superhuman. He hadn’t been sick a day in his life. My stabbing and his cancer had been a shock to our family, a devastating realization that we weren’t invulnerable. While I couldn’t pull myself up out of my misery, I knew that his priorities had changed. He didn’t care anymore about improving my game, he just wanted me to get back into life. Happiness had become the most important thing to him.

  “No, of course I’m not happy. You know that.” An infomercial for a super-powered blender was on TV. My dad turned the television off.

  “I know.” He nodded. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you had to guess, what do you think would make you happy? College? Retiring? Starting something new?” He was really trying, but his suggestions weren’t helping.

  “I have
no idea. I really don’t.”

  “It’s okay. There is no pressure. Do not go back to tennis unless it is for the right reasons. It’s just a game, it’s not your life. You don’t have to decide today or tomorrow or next year.”

  “I know,” I mumbled.

  “Your only obligation is to do what makes you happy. It is that simple.” He was right. Financially, I didn’t have to ever set foot on a tennis court again. I could do whatever I wanted. Most people would love to be in that situation; why couldn’t I appreciate it? My dad made it sound so easy—just do what makes me happy.

  18

  Baby Steps

  A few weeks later, when New Year’s resolutions were being made by optimistic people everywhere, I made my own: Find out what makes me happy. After twenty months of almost total seclusion I vowed to get out of the house more. I said yes to more invitations. I visited Betsy and Mark McCormack in Orlando and spent hours swimming in the ocean, whipping around on a Jet Ski, and doing my best to learn how to water-ski. One day, Shaquille O’Neal, a neighbor of theirs, joined us out on the water. While I was hesitantly learning to ski, Shaq got behind the wheel of the boat and took off. I did my best to hold on but I didn’t have a chance. He took a corner fast and I went flying in the opposite direction. By the time I surfaced, the boat had doubled back to pick me up and everyone was cracking up. I laughed along with them even though I didn’t find it quite as hilarious as they did.