Getting a Grip Page 17
To be a threat on the professional tour, you are forced to be selfish and to put yourself before all others. At the end of a match there is only room for one winner. Being—and staying—in the number one slot intensifies it even more. That inescapable fact has always bothered me. Having a tight-knit group of friends on the tour simply wasn’t compatible with being a top player. Mary Joe and Betsy were the only tennis friends I had during my playing days. Betsy’s singles career had come to a close by the time I turned professional, so our interaction on the court was limited to pairing up for doubles, which I loved. Mary Joe, on the other hand, had been a force at the top of the rankings for much of my career and over eight years we played each other sixteen times. I dreaded our matches. One of my worst experiences was during our quarterfinal match in the 1997 French Open. In the third set there was a terrible line call. We were tied and I felt bad arguing the call but I needed that point. Mary Joe needed it too. It was awkward and uncomfortable and I tried to move past it as quickly as I could by closing out the match. Playing her was never fun and I swore to myself I wouldn’t make any other friends in tennis until after I retired. When you are down 5-3 in the third set and you have to pull out all the stops to harness the kind of aggression it takes to beat the player on the other side of the net, it is much easier to do if you know you aren’t going out for dinner together afterward. If your goal in life is to make friends, the professional tennis circuit is a poor career choice.
Amelia Island was the tune-up for the start of the European season; playing well would make my life easier on the other side of the Atlantic. Within two weeks I’d be on a plane bound for Italy, then France, and then a quick hop over to England for the most famous tournament in the world. If I put on a solid performance now, my seeding would be lower at the French Open and Wimbledon, allowing me to put off playing my strongest opponents until later matches. It was important to show up with my A game all week long. In between sips of my tasteless breakfast protein shake (I’d have much preferred French toast with hash browns, but I was hell-bent on doing everything on Bobby’s list, at least for that week), I envisioned myself stepping foot onto the clay court.
Clay. It’s right up there with dogs and sugar on my list of all-time favorite things. Feeling the soft crunch of earth beneath my feet sends primal chills down my body in anticipation of playing on what feels like home to me. To get tennis-geek technical, Amelia Island uses the American version of clay called Har-Tru, so it’s a little different from my beloved gritty, dusty French Open turf. That crushed red brick in Paris is the backbone of the European and South American tennis landscape. Kids there grow up with their legs covered in beautiful burnt sienna dust—the dirtier your clothes, the stronger a testament to a hard-played match. But American clay is different. First, it’s green. Second, it plays harder and faster than the red clay. European and South American players tend to excel on clay courts, since they grew up with them. I moved to the U.S. when I was still a kid, so I grew up playing on all kinds of surfaces. But I’m a baseliner, so the slow nature of clay suits my game perfectly. Once the ball hits the ground, the clay grabs it and causes it to sit up. The ball gets a high bounce, dangling in the air just asking—no, begging—to be pounded with a power ground stroke. There aren’t any fast, tricky, fancy points to be played on clay. You can save that stuff for Wimbledon’s grass (by far my least favorite surface). Clay is a grueling test of endurance. Players either love it or fear it. I’m afraid of an all-you-can-eat Italian dessert bar but I’m not afraid of grinding out excruciating long points; it’s my specialty. Clay is a very old, very good friend.
Instead of staying in a nondescript hotel room, I spent the week at a house close to the tournament site so I could cycle to the courts. Jumping on my bike brought back the best memories from my childhood. After downing my protein shake, I kissed my mom and Ariel good-bye, grabbed my tennis bag, and hopped on my bike. The wind was whipping through my hair as I cruised along the streets. The sun was warm on my bare arms, and for just a moment I felt like a kid again. I felt like I was on my way to meet my friends for a game of soccer. For one moment, maybe just a fraction of a moment, I felt like everything in the world was okay. Then the stadium courts came into view and I was jolted back to reality. I had matches to play and a title to defend. It was time to put my game face on. My first match was against Anna Smashnova, a player I’d never faced before; but if her name was any indication, I was in for a good fight. I mean, come on, Smashnova? You couldn’t invent a better name than that for a tennis player. The only thing I knew about Anna was that, like me, she was a baseliner who was at home on clay courts. I also knew that she was from Israel and had gone to military school. Having a soldier’s mentality was sure to add another layer to her game. And she had a tactical edge. Her husband, Claudio, had briefly worked with me in 1997. I’d known him from our junior playing days at the Orange Bowl tournament, which he’d won. He was a friend of mine and he knew exactly where my balls would be landing. Anna, known to be one of the nicest and most professional players on tour, would be well prepared. She came out for our warm-up and I was struck by her size. With eight inches in my favor, I towered over her; but I’d soon find out that, like Amanda Coetzer, her height was no indication of her power. Her arms were absolutely ripped. I could’ve done triceps dips eighteen hours a day and I wouldn’t come close to looking like that. She was a powerhouse waiting to burst onto the court. And that’s exactly what she did, coming at me with everything she had.
I had to struggle to stay focused in the first set. It was close, but I managed to bear down and take it 7-6. When you battle it out so hard and the set comes down to a single point, the person who ends up on the losing side often feels mentally destroyed. Once that momentum is snatched right out from under you, the adrenaline that was coursing through your veins moments before takes a nosedive and it is painfully hard to get back into the match. Anna couldn’t and I took the next set 6-0. I did my job for the day and headed back home for—at Bobby’s request—a meal of steamed chicken and spinach. I still had four more matches to get through.
That night the rain started and it didn’t let up for two days. When tennis tournaments are rained out, there is a lot of sitting around. Because all the tournaments are scheduled back-to-back, if a few days are missed due to bad weather, the tournament organizers have to squish all the remaining matches in as quickly as possible the moment the rain stops. I sat around for two days looking at the gray clouds, flipping back and forth between the Weather Channel and the local news, and doing my best to stay away from the kitchen. Is there anything better than a huge bowl of popcorn and a mug of hot chocolate to keep you company during a storm? If there is, I have yet to find it. Exerting superhuman willpower, I left the bags of Newman’s Own Butter Popcorn sitting unpopped in the cabinet and continued my workouts and hitting sessions with Bobby while we waited out the storm. The thing about rain delays is that you have to maintain a constant state of focus. You get very little notice before your match starts, so you stay in this no-man’s-land of being in a highly competitive state of mind without knowing when the heck your match is going to start. Sitting around waiting for a match can be more exhausting than playing it. By Friday evening the forecast for the weekend looked promising.
“Are you going to be ready tomorrow?” It was Bobby calling to check in on me after our last hitting session of the day.
“Yes, I’ll be ready.”
“Make sure you eat right tonight.”
“I’ve got it under control.” I glanced at the water boiling on the stove and the stalks of broccoli waiting for their scorching steam bath. A sad, limp little chicken breast was lying on the counter. The thought of eating that food for the umpteenth time depressed me. Especially when I knew there was a fantastic steak-and-seafood place with a stunning view of the ocean just a few blocks away. Fuel, Monica, I told myself. It’s just fuel. Don’t get all emotional about it. You aren’t here on vacation. You’re here to work.
“All right,” Bobby said. “Get a good night’s sleep. See you in the morning.”
I tossed and turned that night, unable to quiet my mind over the constant rumblings of my stomach. You aren’t hungry, I repeated to myself like a mantra. You aren’t hungry. But my stomach wouldn’t listen to me. It felt empty and lonely and abandoned. Where are my good friends? Where are my loyal chocolate chip cookies and barbecue chips and fettucine? Where did everyone go? I miss them! Those were the wrong questions. What I should have been asking had nothing to do with food and everything to do with my father and my future. Will I ever fill the void left by my dad’s death? Will I ever be the tennis player I once was? If I’m not, what will that mean? Who will I be? But I didn’t ask those questions that night and I wouldn’t for a few more years. All I could hear was my stomach. I glanced at the clock. It was 4:30. I was relieved. Only two more hours until I could eat breakfast.
Mornings were always easy for me, dietwise. I was an impeccable eater from the moment I got out of bed until the early evening. But as soon as the sun started to set, I was in my danger zone. I turned into a food vampire. My hunger was insatiable. So when I woke up a minute before my alarm went off, I felt unusually hopeful and optimistic. I practically skipped to the kitchen in hot pursuit of my protein shake, which I drank down with a good dose of self-righteous pride. I felt far more proud of myself for making it through the night without cracking for carbs than for winning my first match three days earlier. Disordered eating had turned into disordered thinking.
The rain delay meant there were only two days left in the tournament. Which meant I had to play my third-round match in the morning and, hopefully, get to the quarterfinal in the afternoon. Sunday would be a doubleheader of the semis and the final. That was a lot of tennis to plow through in two days. I charged over to the courts, ready to take on my next opponent. Corina Morariu had won the Wimbledon doubles title with her best friend Lindsay Davenport the previous year, so I was ready for a strong competitor right out of the gates. I was so ready, in fact, that I took the match 6-3, 6-1 and immediately started thinking about my afternoon with Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario. We’d played against each other dozens of times, starting way back in 1989 when I was a clueless, gawky fifteen-year-old and she was a seventeen-year-old hotshot from Barcelona who had just stunned the world by upsetting Steffi in the finals of the French Open. Over the years, I had a very good record against her with the 1998 French Open final as one of the only glaring failures.
Maybe I was channeling my frustration at not beating her at Roland Garros. Maybe I was in a hurry to get the match over before the skies opened up again. Maybe the protein powder from my second shake of the day had a little more kick than normal. Or maybe I was just having a plain old good day. Whatever the reason, I went out on the court and forced my legs to do battle for the second time that day. I beat her 6-1, 6-3 and got ready to set my sights on the next day’s repeat of back-to-back matches. But not just yet. The press had to pepper me with the same old questions one more time. It would have been much easier to walk around with a sign that said, NO, I AM NOT RETIRING. Instead we went around and around in the same circles we always did in the postmatch press conferences.
Them: “How is your foot?” (Translation: You looked sluggish out there.)
Me: “Fine, thanks.”
Them: “How’s your ankle?” (Translation: There must be some reason you looked slow on the court today. What was it?)
Me: “It’s doing much better.”
Them: “How much longer do you think you will put up with these injuries?” (Translation: Can you give us a firm retirement date?)
Me: “As long as I feel like I can play—which I do—I plan on doing just that.”
Them: “How’s your fitness coming along?” (Translation: Are you ever going to lose the weight?)
Me: “I know I have to work at it. My coach and I are making it our main focus right now.”
Them: “Do you think your fitness is affecting your game?” (Translation: If you dropped twenty pounds, you’d run a heck of a lot faster on the court.)
Me: “Again, I know my fitness is something I need to work on. I’ve been spending tons of time in the gym, something I’ve never done before.”
Them: “Monica, you’ve already won nine Grand Slams, the last one in ’96. What do you think your chances are of capturing another?” (Translation: Face it, honey, your glory days are long gone. Can’t you get into commentating or something?)
Me: “Well, if I didn’t think my chances were good, I certainly wouldn’t be out here.”
Them: “Have you thought about settling down?” (Translation: Retire already!)
Me: “Settling down?”
Them: “You know, getting married, having kids, that sort of thing.” (Translation: Okay, seriously, it’s time to get off the court.)
Me: “No. That isn’t what I’m thinking about right now.”
They could have recycled the transcripts from every press conference over the past three years and it would have been exactly the same. Maybe one or two questions would be about the match. The rest were about the shape I was in or when I was going to retire. It didn’t matter that I’d just won two matches against extremely strong opponents. Instead of focusing on what I was accomplishing in the present, they were focusing on what I wouldn’t accomplish in the future. Retire, retire, retire. It became the dreaded R word for me and I eliminated it from my vocabulary. Nevertheless, I was constantly reminded of it whenever a journalist crossed my path.
As soon as I hit twenty-two I felt like people were just waiting for me to step aside. I’d already been at the top, won the prestigious tournaments, and being in the top ten, or even the top five, wasn’t good enough. If I wasn’t winning Grand Slams like I used to, then it was assumed I was on the downward slope of my career arc. And if I wasn’t going to be at the very top, then I was taking a coveted top-ten spot from an up-and-coming, more promising, and more marketable teenager. But I wasn’t ready to retire at twenty-two, and four years later I still wasn’t ready. I’ve never been a quitter. It’s not in my DNA. After getting through the stabbing and my dad’s death, I knew I could withstand a lot. A group of journalists that was impatient with my playing form and my inability to recapture the glory of my Grand Slam days wasn’t going to pressure me to close the chapter on my tennis career. I wasn’t going to quietly ride off into the sunset of Floridian recreational club tennis until I was good and ready.
When I woke up on Sunday morning, I thought about one thing: the booing of the crowd in Miami after Martina Hingis had wiped up the court with me. It still made my cheeks flush with anger and embarrassment. I wasn’t going to let that happen again. Paola Suárez, a twenty-three-year-old from Argentina, was waiting to take me on in the semifinal. Over the next few years she would crack the top ten and be the number one doubles player, but at Amelia Island she was a new opponent for me and I didn’t know what to expect. My goal was to win the match as quickly as possible so I could rest before the final later that day. I won the match 6-3, 6-2 and immediately went home to regroup. Playing three matches in twenty-four hours is hard on your body and even harder on your mind. As I stretched my hamstrings on the floor of the family room, Ariel came up to lick my face. “Hi, girl.” I ruffled her fur. “Just one more to get through. No problem right?” She gave me an excited little bark and ran back and forth across the room. I took it as a good sign.
The final was against Conchita Martínez, a Wimbledon champion and patient baseliner who was notorious for ruining her opponent’s rhythm. She had the ability to mix up the pace and spin of her shots at a dizzying rate, leaving the player on the other side of the net scratching her head and wondering what had just hit her. Like Arantxa, she and I had a long history, so I knew exactly what was waiting for me. Before I set foot on the court, my mind wandered again to Kate Bailey, the local woman who had stood guard over her beloved tree. Kate had claimed guardianship over that ancient tree, looked the townsmen in
the eye, gripped her shotgun a little tighter, and stood her ground until they left. That was exactly what I had to do today. The court was my tree, the impatient journalists the townsmen, and my racket my trustworthy weapon. The analogy was a bit of a creative stretch but tennis is such a mental game. You have to play games like that in your head to keep you focused and in the moment. Besides, it worked! I took the match with the same score as the semi, 6-3, 6-2.
If this was my official kickoff to the European season, then the future looked brighter than it had in a long time. Just three months earlier I had been playing in a Tier III tournament, thinking it was going to be the last time I’d lace up my shoes as a professional. With this win, the horrendous memory of being booed off the court in Miami quickly faded into the distance, and I could see Rome on the horizon. Four weeks until the Italian Open. It was time to get ready to take on Europe.
27
The A - Team
Amelia Island gave me a desperately needed shot of confidence. If Oklahoma City had been a small nudge on my long, steep climb back, Amelia Island had given me a sizable push. But it wasn’t necessarily indicative of how things would shake out once I got to Europe. The season over there is three months long. Twelve weeks of living out of my suitcase, packing, unpacking, and packing again, eating in a different restaurant every night, and getting on another plane every seven days. The list of tournaments reads like a college grad’s dream backpacking trip. It also reads like a gourmand’s menu of gastronomic delights: Budapest (Castle District and cabbage rolls with loads of paprika), Berlin (Brandenburg Gate and apple strudel), Warsaw (beautifully restored Old Town and cheese and potato pierogi slathered in sour cream), Rome (Coliseum and gnocchi with Gorgonzola sauce), Antwerp (Rubens House and chocolate, chocolate, chocolate), Madrid (Retiro Park and arroz con pollo), Paris (Champs-Élysées and hot, flaky croissants with a cup of café con crème), London (Bond Street and Yorkshire pudding with gravy), and Prague (Gothic towers and apricot dumplings).