Getting a Grip Read online

  Wimbledon, 1997. The dawn of a new era of hotness on the court. Hotness as in sex appeal and marketability. Martina Hingis, Venus Williams, and Anna Kournikova arrived at the All England Club and turned the old guard of tennis on its head. While I’d been off the tour, the game had not only become faster and more powerful, it had also become sexier and perfectly toned. For the first time in my life, at twenty-three I was the “old” player who was on her way out to make room for the pack of new and improved girls.

  I’d spent all of March at the Mayo Clinic with my parents as my dad gave his battle against cancer one last courageous shot. One more round of pumping poison into his body, destroying his healthy cells along with the cancerous ones. My mom and I rented an apartment nearby as we waited to hear news about the three surgeries he had to undergo. He never uttered a word of complaint. In between sessions of chemo he’d come back to the apartment to rest and watch the Food Channel. The sounds of sizzling pans and voices giving gentle cooking instructions were soothing to him. He couldn’t keep anything down, but he got his food vicariously through the television. While he was learning how to bake the perfect blond brownie, I was sneaking into the tiny kitchen to stuff my face with real ones. If I kept my hands busy with opening wrappers and crumpling up empty bags into tiny balls that could be hidden in the trash, I could keep the tears at bay.

  By the time Wimbledon rolled around, I could barely run a mile without killing my knees. Playing a Grand Slam at my heaviest, I was lugging a 174-pound body around the fast-playing grass courts that were a challenge even when I was in the best of shape. And the all-white rule did not help matters much. An all-white ensemble is about as slimming as walking around in a jumpsuit with huge fluorescent horizontal stripes.

  Every morning on my way to the stadium, I’d catch a glimpse of the London tabloids as I hurried past the Wimbledon Village newsstands on my way to get coffee. For two weeks they plastered a photo of all the top players’ butts lined up next to one another and asked the public who had the best one. Needless to say, I wasn’t a winner. I looked enormous next to the tanned and toned backsides of the other women. And I wasn’t a winner on the court, either. After a bad line call ruined my chance to serve for the match, I lost in the third round to Sandrine Testud, a player I’d beaten twice before the stabbing. After we shook hands, I fell apart inside and rushed off so I could be by myself. When I got to the locker room I called my dad. He was at home in Florida watching the match on television, and even though he sounded weak, he spent the whole conversation trying to cheer me up. My dad’s health was deteriorating at the same rate as my inner strength. I hated being on the tour without him and felt guilty not being home with my family where I belonged. I wanted to be there, but my dad’s wish was that I go on and live my life.

  I didn’t want to. I flew back to Florida the next day.

  21

  On My Own

  The rest of 1997 went by in a blur of plane rides and postmatch phone calls to my dad. He was on heavy doses of morphine and there was nothing the doctors could do anymore. He’d already outlived his prognosis by several months and it was just a matter of time before I’d have to say good-bye. It was excruciating. My dad kept his sense of humor through it all and continued to coach me via hurried cell phone calls and faxes to my hotels. I flew back home every chance I got but I felt torn apart by guilt. I was traveling to Los Angeles, Toronto, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Tokyo for matches, but my head wasn’t 100 percent in the game and it wasn’t 100 percent with him. I was floundering in the middle, not doing a good job with either.

  I was doing my best to keep up with my business responsibilities. In 1996, I’d become an investor in the Official All Star Café chain, which meant going to new restaurant openings with the other investor athletes: Tiger Woods, Andre Agassi, Shaquille O’Neal, Wayne Gretzky, and Ken Griffey Jr. Hanging out with those guys gave me some of the only lighthearted moments of that year. Tiger had just won his first Masters Championship, and the crossover between Hollywood and the sports world was at its zenith. Restaurant openings were A list celeb-studded affairs. Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Brooke Shields, and Wesley Snipes were all regulars at the parties. I became an expert at donning my “just one of the guys” persona by slipping into a long and flowing, waistless size-fourteen dress. It was easy to disappear into the background. That style became my uniform whenever I had to go out.

  My schedule was crazy, but I talked to my dad at least twice a day and flew home to Florida whenever I had more than twenty-four hours off. But it wasn’t enough. After losing to sixteen-year-old Serena Williams in the quarterfinal of a tournament in Chicago, I returned home and told my dad I didn’t want to play for the rest of the year. I just wanted to spend time with him. It was already November, so I’d only be missing a few tournaments, but he thought my idea was ludicrous.

  “Monica, your life must go on. Go out and live it now. I am happier seeing you like that, not like this.”

  I couldn’t answer him. I was biting my lip to keep myself from crying. He hadn’t been able to eat anything substantial in months, while I was eating everything in sight to suffocate my sadness. He’d been so strong and I felt so weak. I didn’t want to break down in front of him.

  “And you have to promise me one thing,” he continued. “You must promise that even when I am gone, you will keep living your life. You have to: there is no other choice.” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled at me. He made it sound so easy. Just go live.

  My dad knew I’d need a little help to keep going. As he grew weaker, we both knew I needed another coach. I couldn’t handle the upheaval going on in my life while trying to figure out how to operate on my own at the same time. It was too much. “Just go live” was easier said than done.

  Gavin Hopper was the perfect solution to pick up the pieces of my game and get my butt into shape. An Australian fitness buff with a sense of adventure, he’d whipped Amanda Coetzer into extraordinary playing shape, and his fitness skills were legendary. He would be my answer. On a bad day his body fat was 4 percent. He was regimented and unyielding in his workouts but, like my dad, did his best to squeeze as much fun out of them as possible. And the best part was that whether he told me to run a one-hundred-meter sprint or go for a hard sixty-minute run, he’d be doing the exact same thing next to me every step of the way. Not many coaches will do that. I’d never heard of a protein shake before he came into my life. Suddenly I was drinking them twice a day, one for breakfast and one for dinner. They were disgusting. One morning I tried to sneak sugar into it but he was too quick.

  “Absolutely not, Monica. No sugar.”

  “Ever?” I asked. Surely I’d be allowed some every now and then. Sugar was good and it seemed like it was in everything. How could I avoid it? Didn’t it give me energy?

  “Never,” he said adamantly. But he promised me that if I followed his every fitness commandment, I’d get back into the shape I wanted to be in.

  I bought every book that promised to give me a new life, a new body, or both. I was obsessed with losing the weight. I was convinced I’d be happy again if I could just get rid of it. My self-help library was born that year and I digested all the advice I could get my hands on. There had to be a solution. A magic answer was hiding somewhere within those pages.

  I tried meditating to my ideal weight. I spent a week eating unlimited meat and cheese until I was too grossed out to continue. I counted carbs obsessively. I tried visualizing my hunger as a shrinking blue square. I ate carbs before noon and protein until bedtime. I food-combined like a mad scientist. I ate what I thought my blood type wanted me to. But when I got home after a typical day with Gavin—four hours of hitting and two hours in the gym dividing my time between sweating on the elliptical and being miserable on the treadmill—I was too exhausted to care. The minute he left my house every night at eight o’clock I’d take to the couch, armed with bags of chocolate-covered pretzels, and nibble right through them as I read a book or watche
d NBC’s “Must See TV.” That was my world, and knowing I could retreat into it was the only way I could get through my workouts during the day. Besides, I felt like I deserved it. I’d been perfect all day long: it was impossible to maintain that kind of willpower around the clock.

  That’s not entirely true. Gavin could keep it up. I would have given anything to have his discipline, and I was convinced that some of it would rub off on me. It never did. “Just chew some gum if you’re hungry,” he’d offer. Or my favorite: “Pour yourself a glass of hot water and put some lemon in it for a treat.” Yeah, right. That sounds delish. I spent three days doing that after a minor injury prevented me from practicing. I wasn’t expending calories on the court, so I wasn’t permitted to consume them at home.

  Gavin was hard-core. He had no emotions attached to his eating. It was cut-and-dried: Don’t sabotage an entire day’s work in one sitting. But by the time eight o’clock in the evening rolled around I’d go crazy, giving in to my hunger pangs and roiling emotions. I had a million justifications: I was tired, I was sore, my dad was dying, I was lonely. And night after night I’d consume thousands of empty calories while barely tasting a single one.

  This unconscious eating was destroying all of my progress to fight the extra lumps and bumps that had settled onto my pear-shaped body. I worked so hard in the gym, but I’d mess it all up in one binge. My dad was getting worse and I didn’t know how to handle my emotions. They were too painful to confront, so I ate more. I’d go to bed feeling numb and with a stomach stretched to capacity, and I’d wake up the next morning furious with myself and with a wicked food hangover, thinking, Now I have to work out even harder to make up for last night. I’d angrily put my gym clothes on and storm out the front door. I’d train harder to compensate, then go home and do it all over again. It was madness.

  When winter gave way to spring, I had to make a decision. In between my torture sessions with Gavin I’d played in only a couple of tournaments, so I could spend as much time as possible with my dad. But the European swing was about to start—the most important part of the season—and I hadn’t made up my mind about going. My dad couldn’t speak anymore, so he wrote down a few words on a piece of paper. Don’t be silly. Get on a plane to Rome now. I did what he wanted me to do, but my heart was breaking as the plane took off.

  My first day in Rome, I was inundated with my memories of being there with my dad. It just didn’t feel right to be walking along the Viale dei Gladiatori heading toward the stadium without him next to me. So I threw all of my energy into obeying Gavin’s dietary commands (I’d had an unprecedented two-week spell of pretending carbs didn’t exist and managed to lose eight pounds) and killing the ball in my first match. It worked: I beat Silvia Farina, a Milan native who was in the midst of a breakthrough year, in two sets, 6-2, 6-1. Anytime an Italian player took the stage at the Italian Open, the crowd lost its mind. Even though they weren’t in my corner, I loved it. My adrenaline was pumping just the same.

  The next day I got up early to get ready for my match. I was pitted against Sandrine Testud, the hard-hitting righty from France whom I’d fallen to in a humiliating early exit from Wimbledon the year before. But before I could leave my room, the phone rang. Don’t panic. It’s fine. It’s nothing. It’s probably just Gavin telling me to get a move on. But it was my brother, and right away I knew it was the call I’d been dreading.

  “Monica, it’s Dad. He’s bad.” The phone started shaking in my hand.

  “How bad?” I didn’t know if I wanted to hear the answer.

  “Get on a plane as soon as you can,” he answered. His voice was deep and croaky from exhaustion. It was too late to catch a flight home that day, so there was no point in defaulting. Even though my head was already on the other side of the Atlantic, I went ahead and played the match. I don’t remember much about it. Sandrine beat me in three sets and I had to bite my lip during the changeovers to stop myself from crying. I struggled to find sleep in my hotel bed that night. It felt too stiff, then too soft, then too cold, then too hot. I was a grief-stricken Goldilocks in Rome.

  The trip home took over twelve hours, but it felt like twelve days. I’d never felt so alone. Replaying every moment I’d shared with my dad, I was in a panic trying to commit them all to permanent status in my memory. He spent thousands of hours hitting with me when I was little—not because he wanted to groom a prodigy, but just because he saw how much I loved it. Even after a long day at work, when most of the dads in my neighborhood were reading the newspaper or enjoying a cold beer, the moment my dad walked in that door he was ready to play. He’d change into his workout clothes and I’d tug on his arm all the way down to the parking lot, where he’d once again set up our makeshift net. I thought about how happy he looked at the restaurant in Paris after my first Grand Slam win. He and my mom were bursting with pride. We laughed through the whole night as my dad whipped out a cartoon of me holding the trophy above my head and Astro’s face popping out of the huge silver cup.

  Drawing was his work, but he never left it at the office: he took that talent everywhere. Even after I’d left my childhood far behind, my dad still used cartoons to get his coaching points across. When he was sick and could barely talk, he’d communicate with me no matter where I was in the world by faxing drawings of me with a racket and my little dog somewhere in the picture. My cartoon self was unfailingly happy—much happier than the live version of me—and his pen usually caught my dog in midair antics. Along the margin he’d scribble match pointers like Move your feet and Bend your knees, and at the bottom of the page he’d always end with Good luck! and Have fun! A few days before I received the call from Zoltan, the concierge had stopped me in the hotel lobby and handed me a fax. It was from my dad. Another note of coaching advice, but I couldn’t make any of it out, his hands were now so shaky. But he’d insisted on sending it to me just so I’d know he was with me no matter how many time zones away tennis took me.

  I didn’t want to forget a moment of it, so I replayed every thought over and over in my head. It was the longest flight of my life. After arriving home, I was able to spend six days with him before he passed away. It wasn’t nearly enough.

  22

  C’est la vie

  Sitting on the bed in my hotel room in Paris, I was trying to muster up the necessary focus for my first match. For the past year I’d been logging thousands of air miles while crossing back and forth between Florida and the rest of the world to spend as much time with my dad as possible, while still trying to hold on to a top-five position. The ranking system is an unforgiving mathematical equation that leaves no room for family emergencies or time to grieve. When my dad was sick, I didn’t care about falling rankings or losing endorsements. I just wanted to be with him, even though he was trying to push me back out the door, telling me not to worry. Telling me, for the hundredth time, to go live my life.

  When he passed away I didn’t know what to do. The French Open was less than two weeks away and I knew that, more than anything, he would have wanted me to play in it. Gavin was already in Paris helping Mark Philippoussis, a fellow Aussie, prepare for his first match. I’d originally planned on arriving in Paris on Thursday so I’d have four days to get acclimated. But Thursday had come and gone and I was still sitting at home. On Friday I called Gavin and told him I still didn’t know what to do. We’d just had the memorial service for my dad and I didn’t know if I was up to playing in such a high-pressure environment. What if I broke down in the middle of a match?

  “Just sleep on it,” he told me.

  I did. And when I woke up on Saturday morning, I knew I had to leave Florida. I wasn’t being brave; I wasn’t that strong or unselfish. I hopped on the plane for one simple reason: I couldn’t stand staying in our house a minute longer. The memories kept flooding back and I felt like I was being suffocated. No matter where I looked in the house, something reminded me of him so much, it felt like the air was being sucked right out of my lungs. So, just like I did for years
after my stabbing, I ran away from my feelings by rejoining the tour. New cities, new people, new food, new hotels—everything. I needed a major distraction and I needed it immediately. I kept pushing forward so I wouldn’t have to stop and think that I’d just lost my father, best friend, and coach all at once.

  My brother couldn’t come, so my mom, who had just lost her husband of thirty years, packed up a suitcase and came with me. My dad was the gregarious life of the party who could make light of any situation, but my mom has a quiet, steady inner strength that I know I can rely on. There was no way I could have gone to Paris alone. We arrived at the hotel, and as we were getting out of the taxi she slammed the door shut on her finger. Snap! It broke and we had to get her to a doctor before we even unpacked! I spent all day Sunday stretching and hitting, psyching myself up for Monday’s match. I wanted to lose myself in tennis.

  The next morning I put my dad’s wedding ring on a gold chain around my neck and tucked it inside my shirt. Despite the media’s predictions, I steamrolled through the competition and found myself facing a semifinal match against Martina Hingis, number one in the world and a ferocious player who had beaten me the last five times we’d faced each other. I had been practicing hard for the past few days with Gavin, but the odds weren’t in my favor. I didn’t care. This was nothing compared to what I’d gone through with my dad. I was ready to play.

  I went out with an aggressive game from the first point. I capitalized on her inconsistent serves, nailed my own, and kept my unforced errors to a minimum. The game I brought was calm, controlled, and strong—the exact traits I’d been missing in myself. I could tell it was getting into Martina’s head. She started scolding herself and angrily bounced her racket off the clay. I knew I had the match if I wanted it. It was over in two sets, 6-3, 6-2.