Getting a Grip Read online

  The final was waiting for me, as was the possibility that I could win a tenth Grand Slam. Gavin told me the power to accomplish what others had considered impossible was in my head. If I decided I was going to do it, I would. My prospects looked good. The championship duel was against Arantxa, a player I’d beaten fourteen out of our last sixteen matches. I can do this, I thought. I might actually have the happy ending. It was too much to contemplate so I didn’t let myself think a minute past the present.

  The first set went to a tiebreaker but it flew by in an instant, and before I knew it I was down a set. The French fans’ support of me was as loud as the Italians rooting for a hometown player in Rome. You can’t get much better than that. Anxious to get the momentum back, I came out charging in the second and took it 6-0. Then my happy ending flew right out of my hands.

  I still don’t know why it happened. Maybe the adrenaline I’d been existing on for the past two weeks finally ran out. Maybe I didn’t think I deserved a good ending. Maybe I was just burned out. Maybe I didn’t want it as bad as I’d thought I did. I lost the third set 6-2 and with it my last chance at a Grand Slam. It was like watching myself in a bad dream. I saw the set slipping away, and no matter how hard I tried to bear down and focus on getting it back, I couldn’t. I didn’t have anything left.

  The entire stadium gave me a standing ovation as I packed up my bag and waved my thanks. During her victory speech, Arantxa apologized for beating me, saying, “I wish you could have won, Monica.” You don’t hear that in professional tennis very often.

  I survived the postmatch press conferences without breaking down. I saved that for the hotel. My heart was so broken, I didn’t know which piece to triage first. Thank goodness my mom was there; we went straight to her room, where I cried for hours until I was out of tears. If there was one thing my dad’s long, painful battle had taught me, it was that life isn’t fair. And it’s too short to sit around brooding about it. Just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go forward.

  23

  The Search Continues

  Dave was in perfect shape. And I’m not using the term “perfect” loosely. He was Michelangelo’s David perfect but better. Ridiculous, actually. I didn’t think it was possible to beat Gavin in the race to the bottom of the body-fat chart, but Dave left him in the dust.

  We met at a charity fund-raiser in New York in the fall of 1998 and I liked him instantly. He was warm, funny, helped me put on my coat at the end of the night, and hailed a taxi for me. All marks of a good man. Who says chivalry is dead? An incredible athlete who took care of his body like it was a sacred temple, he’d be a good influence on me, I thought. A baseball player who was battling it out in the minor leagues, he did everything he could to be ready when his big break came. He lived down in Florida, so we spent time together whenever I was in town. One night, after going to a movie (he didn’t order popcorn, so I didn’t either), we went back to his place. I was starving and I opened up his hulking Sub-Zero fridge expecting to find a bachelor’s trove of greasy takeout and frozen burritos. Perfect midnight snacks. Instead I was faced with shelves lined with bottled water, containers of green vegetable juice, cut-up melon, and Tabasco sauce, which, he informed me, was for his eggs. His theory was if he doused the eggs with enough Tabasco, he’d eat less.

  “Want to order a pizza?” I asked. I liked mine straight up, but if he wanted something healthy on his like mushrooms or spinach, I was willing to compromise.

  “No, thanks, I’m good. I’m still full from dinner.” But we’d eaten hours ago, before the movie. We had salads with grilled chicken, hardly enough to get me through until tomorrow, when I’d have to face yet another excruciating workout with Gavin. He must have read the disappointment all over my face. “But you go ahead and order one,” he offered. Yeah, that’s just what I want to do: pig out on a pizza by myself in front of my new boyfriend. Sexy.

  “No, that’s okay. I’m fine.” We hung out on the couch talking and flipping through late-night talk shows until I couldn’t take my stomach growls anymore. I jumped up, thanked him for the night, and told him I had to get home to grab some sleep before my morning practice. He seemed startled by my sudden departure but I didn’t stick around to explain. I rushed home and inhaled two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, half a bag of chips, and a Diet Coke. I should have known it was never going to work out. We were just too different, but I convinced myself that being around his “good” eating habits would help me develop my own. As he geared up for spring training, he tried to keep me on the diets Gavin issued weekly. He’d even eat the dinners of salads and raw vegetables with me, insisting they were enough. Food, he explained to me on umpteen occasions, is just fuel. He never ate pasta and he mixed his protein shakes with water instead of milk. It was like spending time with a food monk. The more restrictive the diet, the more he thrived on it.

  I once asked Dave what he did when he got stressed out. How did he resist the urge to reach for a candy bar at the end of a horrible day?

  “Candy bar?” he asked. “Why would a candy bar make me feel better? I just go to the gym and sweat it out. I love the gym. It’s like my sanctuary.”

  In a flash, I saw the vast difference in the way we approached food. Dave may have been extreme, but I was totally dysfunctional. He used food as energy to accomplish what he wanted to achieve in life. I used food as a drug to help me forget about the bad things in life. Instead of fueling me, food was hindering me from reaching my goals. Working out was a sanctuary for Dave. Working out was a much-dreaded necessity for me. He used food to get through the workouts. I used food as a reward for surviving the workouts. Dave was giving everything he had to achieving his dream and I was throwing mine away. His simple answer to my candy bar question woke me up. I knew that my approach to food needed to change but I didn’t know where to start. I wanted to be more like him, but I wasn’t willing to subsist on egg whites and watered-down protein shakes. Was there a middle ground? How was I going to find it?

  By the spring of 1999, my travel schedule and Dave’s devotion to training for his season kept our relationship from progressing. Instead of rubbing off on me, his restrictive habits pushed us further apart. My tendency toward excess was just incompatible with his way of life. I was awed by his dedication but I knew that I was incapable of giving up my extreme for his. Food was still my solace, and I knew that I couldn’t give up pasta forever.

  I also parted ways with Gavin. Throughout 1998 he’d done his absolute best to get me back to my Grand Slam winning form, but we fell short of our goal. My ranking was still bouncing around in the top five but I couldn’t reclaim the dominance I once had, no matter how hard I tried. After my French Open heartbreak, I didn’t come close to making it to another Grand Slam final.

  By July, I was fluctuating between being twenty-five to thirty pounds overweight. I was out in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon and the U.S. Open and made it to the semis of a couple of Tier I tournaments. There were two victories in the fall: I won the Canadian Open and the Toyota Princess Cup in Tokyo. Guess who my opponent was in both finals? Arantxa. Why couldn’t I have done that in Paris?

  Gavin had done everything he could to get my mind focused on tennis, but I actually thought about food all day long. The more restrictive the diet, the more I obsessed over it. From the moment I woke up in the morning I was thinking about what I’d eat for breakfast, how I’d be able to last through a practice until lunch, and then how I could exert enough willpower to make it to dinner without hitting the vending machine. My existence was divided into making it to three different four-hundred- to five-hundred-calorie meals a day. I’d find myself looking at the clock at three in the afternoon, mentally urging it to go faster so I could have my dinner of half a potato and a piece of steamed salmon.

  Gavin had even taken to issuing strict instructions to the hotel kitchens not to bring me any food when I dialed room service. There went my evening entertainment! And I’d grown accustomed to walking into my hotel room a
ccompanied by the manager, who would then swiftly empty out the minibar. Gavin was doing my body and my wallet a favor: I’d left countless tournaments with an astronomical minibar charge to my credit card. Gavin knew me and was well aware I was not to be left to my own devices.

  We didn’t part over my failure to get ripped; it was just a matter of logistics. While Gavin had been coaching me, he continued to work with Mark Philippoussis, a top player on the men’s tour, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to balance his duties to both of us. There are very few tournaments that overlap between the men and the women, so Gavin was running around like a madman. The second he’d leave to meet Mark at an ATP tournament, I was like a kid whose strict parents had gone out of town for the weekend. My rebellion consisted of refusing to do the five-hundred-sit-ups /one-hour-bike-sprint series he’d given me and chucking my diet right out the window. We parted on good terms and I decided I’d had enough of coaches who worked me to death. I needed something new. I needed to go back to basics.

  In 1999 I went to Australia alone. No coach. No hitting partner. The previous year had been a nightmare and I just needed some solitude. Shortly after I lost my dad, my beloved aunt Klara, the talented seamstress who had made me dozens of beautiful tennis dresses when I was little, succumbed to cancer as well. There had been so much death, sadness, and tragedy. I needed some quiet. I needed some time that was free of drama, with nobody telling me what to eat or what to do or how many more reps I had to churn out until I could leave the gym. I just wanted to be alone to collect myself and to hear myself think. I needed a window of calm. Once I arrived in Melbourne I hired a local pro to hit with me. There wasn’t any pressure; I was there because I wanted to be there. Nobody was relying on me to win. If I did well, it was going to be for myself.

  My run through the tournament went smoothly until I met Martina Hingis in the semifinal. She was seeking redemption after my Roland Garros victory the previous spring, and she got it. She beat me 6-2, 6-4—my first loss in Melbourne. During the plane ride to Tokyo for another tournament, I started to think that maybe this was how I was supposed to be. Maybe I would never get my old body back. Maybe I’d never get my old career back. I’d never reach the number one spot again and I would be wearing those formless size fourteens for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to accept that as my new reality, but maybe it was just the way my life was going to be. I wanted to look like the other girls, but I didn’t know how to get there. So I just kept trucking along with the tour schedule, pulling my baseball cap down low and trying to fade into the background.

  When I got back to Florida, I recruited two old friends from my junior playing days in Europe to be my hitting partners and coaches. The guys and I went way back and I knew I could trust them like family—not to improve my game, necessarily, but definitely to improve my mind-set. They encouraged me to work out with them but never said a word about my fitness or my weight. We were like kids again, joking around on the tennis court and keeping each other in stitches. I hadn’t laughed that much in a long time. I’d been so down in the dumps, I needed to have a little fun.

  My friends had been on the ATP tour, so they knew the traveling drill: sleeping in different hotels from week to week didn’t faze them in the slightest. And they were the hottest guys in tennis. But that’s not why I hired them, honestly. After our morning warm-ups at tournaments, players who had never said a word to me in the locker room were suddenly hit with an infusion of friendliness. “Hey, Monica! How’s it going? I was just wondering, um, who are your hitting partners these days? Are they single?” they’d ask. I thought it was hilarious. I’d never been so popular.

  For a couple of months I added one more person to our little laid-back crew. I wanted to approach my tournaments feeling more relaxed, but I still didn’t know how to eat on my own. I wanted to be in decent playing shape before the French Open, so I hired a nutritionist to monitor me. Peter had come highly recommended by a few tennis coaches and I was excited to learn everything he had to teach me. The first thing he did was put me on a very restrictive diet of no more than 1,200 calories a day. No sugar, no white flour, no soda. It was just like the days of Gavin. I still thought that if I surrounded myself with the right people—healthy, spartan types—their good habits would eventually become mine. Peter calculated every calorie and had meals planned out in great detail. When he freaked out every time I reached for the butter, my first reaction was to be annoyed and resentful. Then I’d remember that I’d hired him for exactly that reason. I was paying him to keep the butter away from me.

  But Paris would be our undoing.

  “Whole wheat. You know, it’s brown and grainy. Not like this,” Peter said, picking up a croissant and looking at it as though it had just insulted his mother. The waiter stared at him. “Whole wheat,” Peter enunciated slowly. “Do you have any whole wheat bread?”

  “Non, monsieur.” The waiter shrugged his shoulders and walked away. I don’t know if he misunderstood Peter’s question or he was just tired of being barked at in English.

  I focused on stirring my cappuccino. We’d tried to order one with skim milk and had failed just as miserably. We were sitting at a café close to the hotel and I was trying to focus on my third-round afternoon match against María Antonia Sánchez Lorenzo, a righty from Spain who was one of the few players to have a two-handed grip like mine. I looked across the table at Peter, who had pushed his flaky white croissant to the side. I knew better than to ask him if I could have it. Peter hadn’t done much traveling before, so he was thrown into an absolute tailspin when we left the States. He looked pretty miserable. I didn’t know how much longer he could take staying in cities that didn’t have air-conditioned rooms and skim milk at the ready. As it turned out, not long at all. After I won my third-round match, he’d had enough. He packed up his suitcase and returned to the States.

  When Peter left, I briefly panicked. I’d been playing well throughout the tournament and I didn’t know if I could control my eating on my own. Just relax, I told myself. It will be fine. I knew I’d lose my willpower as soon as I stepped into a restaurant, so I stuck to room service because I knew the menu backward and forward. I cruised through the next two rounds and made it to the semifinal, where I had one of the best matches of my life against Steffi Graf. It was our last classic battle. Like Hingis, she was a tough competitor who always brought her A game to every meeting. Looking every bit like the model track athlete, she could get to balls that the male players couldn’t. Just one point could decide the entire match, so I had to stay focused and aggressive the entire time. It was the usual hard-fought back-and-forth duel that we’d been waging for a decade. We always played long three-set matches and the winner was anyone’s call. That day it belonged to her. After winning the first set in a tiebreaker I ran out of steam. She took the next two sets 6-3, 6-4. It was the last time we ever played each other. Over the years people have asked me how I viewed playing her. Was it different facing her because of the stabbing? Did I take any of that emotional pain onto the court with me when she was standing on the other side of the net? The answer is no, I never did. I never went into our matches angrier or more emotional than I did others. I couldn’t. Tennis forces you to leave all of your issues off the court. It doesn’t matter if you have a migraine or your period, it doesn’t matter if a family member just died, it doesn’t matter if you just had a fight with your boyfriend; you have to put your game face on the moment you step onto that court. It is just you out there and you have no excuses.

  That semifinal loss was an interesting end to our history. Steffi and I had met on the courts of Roland Garros a total of four times. In my first semifinal appearance when I was fifteen, she beat me. In the next two matches we met in the finals and I won them both. And finally, in our last match in the stadium that I loved so much, we met again in the semifinal, just as we had a decade earlier. It seemed a fitting conclusion to our rivalry, which—although it never reached the level everyone had thought it would—w
as always hard fought by both of us.

  I had a decent run at the end of the year: appearances in the finals of the Canadian Open and the Toyota Princess Cup. Serena Williams took me out in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, and Mary Joe Fernandez and I were steamrolled by the Williams sisters in the doubles quarterfinal match. Serena went on to win the tournament—the first Grand Slam for either of them. Their stranglehold on the top of tennis was rapidly taking shape.

  24

  The Virtues of the Peanut

  February 2, 2000

  Dear Monica,

  I’ve been a fan for years . . . ever since you won the French Open in 1990. Your power game is thrilling to watch. I have a favor to ask: I’m trying everything to bulk up. I’ve been drinking tons of protein shakes and lifting weights until my body is exhausted but I just can’t seem to put on the mass. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that you’ve bulked up quite a bit. You’re a strong, heavier-set woman, which I find very attractive, and I’d love to know what your secret has been to getting bigger.

  Many thanks,

  Bob

  I threw the letter down on the couch. It landed on top of the bag of peanut-butter-filled pretzels that had been keeping me company all afternoon. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was this fan asking me what my secret was to being overweight? Did he think I was trying to look like this? I suppose the note was intended to be complimentary—he said he was a fan and that he found me attractive—but the only words that leapt from the page were “heavier-set” and “bigger.” They might as well have been in capital letters and highlighted in bright pink with arrows pointing to them, because my brain zeroed in and obsessed over them immediately. I’d never met the guy in my life, but suddenly I was worrying about what he—and every other tennis fan—thought of me. Was Bob calling me fat? No, of course not. But that was how I interpreted it. “Heavier-set” didn’t translate into hitting the ball with more power. “Heavier-set” meant fat. Was my changed body shape the first thing people noticed now? Was my tennis secondary? In my mind it had been prioritized like that since my stabbing—first fix my body, then worry about tennis—but I’d had no idea that the public thought that way too. Great, I thought, now I’ll have to find even baggier outfits to wear during tournaments. I wrapped up my beloved pretzels, got out a pen and piece of paper, and wrote my great admirer a reply.