Getting a Grip Read online

  Unfortunately, the tournament schedule is so tight that all I saw in these incredible cities was my hotel room and the tennis court. And my clothes were so tight I wasn’t allowed to indulge in most of the international delicacies. Ordering skim milk or fat-free anything in countries that pride themselves on culinary excellence—real food—would be blasphemous. Simply unheard-of. A fat-free cappuccino in Rome? Good luck. I’d already run into that problem with Peter the year before in Paris. But every hotel restaurant can whip up a plate of tasteless grilled chicken (no oil) and steamed vegetables. So that’s where I ate every meal. My inner foodie was screaming out in protest. The itinerary was amazing, but I didn’t see it from a tourist view. When you have the blinders of professional tennis permanently attached, it doesn’t take long before every city looks the same.

  Case in point: The first time I played in Paris was in 1989, and it became one of my favorite stops on the tour. I can’t get enough of that Roland Garros clay. Every year, after I’d return home from the European swing, my friends would gleefully ask, “How amazing was Paris? Don’t you just love that city? Did you go to Versailles? Montmartre? The Musée d’Orsay? Did you see the Mona Lisa?” I’d just smile and repeat for the millionth time, “Yeah, I didn’t really have time to see that stuff. Maybe next time!” But I knew that wasn’t true. I knew that as long as I was playing tennis, I wouldn’t have a life outside the daily grind of workouts, matches, sponsor obligations, and diets. The moment the French Open was over, I was headed to Eastbourne, the British warm-up tournament for Wimbledon. There is a mere two weeks between the Grand Slam on clay and the Grand Slam on grass. You have to transform from an endurance monster on clay to an agile rabbit on grass, so there isn’t any time for sightseeing in the Latin Quarter. Within hours of leaving Paris, I’d be practicing on one of Eastbourne’s grass rectangles.

  I could find my way from the hotel to Roland Garros with my eyes closed, but I’d never seen Notre Dame or the Louvre. During the car ride from Charles de Gaulle to the hotel I’d get glimpses of the city’s grandeur, but I’d never really seen it up close. It wasn’t until 2005—when I was taking a major break from tennis—that I finally saw Paris the way it is meant to be seen.

  But in the spring of 2000, while I was enjoying my post-Amelia Island victory (it lasted about twenty minutes), being a free-spirited tourist in Paris was the last thing on my mind. At Amelia Island, when the press wasn’t grilling me on the countdown to my retirement, they were peppering Bobby with questions about the shape I was in—or rather the shape I wasn’t in. Over and over he patiently replied, “Our main goal is to get Monica into the best physical shape possible.” The day after the win, Bobby sat me down. He meant business.

  “Monica, how are you doing?”

  “Not bad.” It was true: I wasn’t feeling bad. But I wasn’t feeling good, either. My mind was already on the other side of the Atlantic, fretting over the shape I’d be in for the high-profile Italian Open and whether it was possible to be in Grand Slam shape for Paris. “Look, I know I have a lot of work to do. I know I have to work on my movement.”

  He nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “And my conditioning,” I continued.

  “Yep,” he agreed.

  “And just, I guess . . . What’s your go-to phrase? My ‘overall fitness’? I know I’ve got to get to the ball faster.”

  “You know what you have to do,” he said. “You just have to ask yourself one thing: How bad do you want it?”

  “I want it. Bad.” I did. I wanted to be the player I used to be. I wanted to win more Grand Slams. I wanted people to stop waiting for me to retire. I wanted to be proud of my game again.

  “Okay.” Bobby smiled with the excitement of a new coaching mission brewing in his head. “Here’s the plan . . .”

  He said that if I was going to make a serious run for another Grand Slam, we had to pull out all the stops. My diet had to be perfect 24/7, the intensity of my cardio sessions needed to be ramped up even further, and my off-court agility sessions had to be a daily commitment. No getting out of them—ever. We were operating on a tight deadline and there was no room for error. We were undertaking the making of a champion—or, more accurately, the remaking of a champion—and we had to do it in a month. My fundamentals were fine, but everything else had to change if I wanted to keep up with the younger girls who were dominating the top spots. The days of resting on my natural power from the baseline were long gone. I was about to log more time in the gym over the next four weeks than I had in my entire life. I was at least twenty-five pounds overweight—the Miami bulge was stubbornly staying put on my stomach—and there was no way in hell I was going to be a sprightly little bunny while lugging these unwelcome pounds around. Even with a hard-core workout routine and spartan diet—maybe if I ate like a rabbit I’d play like one too?—I didn’t know how much progress I could make in four weeks. But drastic times called for drastic measures.

  We put together our own tennis “A-Team,” hired guns to take me to my optimum level of performance, or at least the highest level I could get to by the Italian Open deadline. It takes a village to raise a child, and it was going to take a team of athletic wizards to raise my fitness to playing level. Think about it: Tennis is the most individual of sports. Even my dad’s beloved sport of track-and-field has an element of camaraderie. Athletes can train together on the track, but you’ll never, ever see tennis players prepping for an upcoming tournament on the same court. And when you’re performing, it’s just you out there on your side of the net. Baseball, basketball, football, soccer, hockey—you’ve got your team and your coach to depend on (and to help take some heat when things go wrong). Even golfers have caddies to pull the right club and to talk them out of an unwise shot. If you mess up in tennis, it’s just you out there. There’s nowhere to hide and there’s no deflecting the blame.

  But behind most top players there is a small army of coaches, trainers, hitting partners, therapists, and nutritionists enabling that athlete to reach her peak performance. Every morsel of food is calculated to translate into the highest nutritional punch possible. Every exercise is planned to maximize the agility and speed of lateral movement and explosive first-step power. For decades my dad had been my coach, nutritionist, fitness trainer, and sports psychologist, and while I’d worked very hard, he always took a bit of a laissez-faire approach. He always kept it fun and free from pressure, so even when I was working seven hours a day, it never felt like work. After he passed away, tennis really became work. I didn’t know the first thing about building a team around me. My dad had been my team. In two years I’d already been through two coaches and who knows how many hitting partners. Nothing was clicking and my whole tennis game was a haphazard house of cards in danger of collapsing at any moment. I had to figure out how to restructure, balance, and fortify it. I’d take help from as many different sources as possible. You can always learn something new in tennis; it is a game that is impossible to master. That’s the beauty of it. Tactics are forever changing, shot placement and angle creation are forever improving; the second you think you can rest at your current level, you’ll get knocked right off the podium by someone who is working twice as hard as you on the next court over.

  So Bobby put our team together. Obviously he would handle my coaching. A master at technique, Bobby could discern the tiniest flaw in anyone’s swing within a fraction of a second. He’d been trying to change my serve since Oklahoma, and it was finally starting to feel less spastic and more natural. Next we called up my old drill sergeant, Bob Kersee. He’d whipped my lethargic, ice-cream-eating self into shape when I was in the throes of the post-stabbing haze of depression and confusion. I promised myself that this time I wouldn’t throw all my gains away. Vail was seven years ago, a lifetime in women’s tennis. I was different now. I’d lost control in Miami, but I told myself that it was just a blip. I was ready to reclaim my place at the top and I’d do anything Bobby and Bob told me to do. Here was the breakdown:


  7 to 8 a.m.: Drink my fantastic shake; bonus points if accomplished without complaining. You know how sometimes you build up a tolerance to things that you once couldn’t stand? Maybe even come to appreciate or enjoy them? Like Brussels sprouts or broccoli? Yeah, that didn’t happen with the shake and me.

  8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.: On-court hitting sessions with Jimmy Arias, a former top player who basically invented the topspin forehand in the men’s game. He and Bobby had grown up together in upstate New York and he’d become a friend of mine. A tennis prodigy, Jimmy was raised by a strict and demanding father, so he took the opposite approach. Like my dad, he wanted to turn everything into a game. Whenever Jimmy and I worked together I always had so much fun. The hitting sessions always revolved around bets. Whoever lost had to do push-ups—the real kind, not the girl kind. Every morning we hit thousands of balls while I refined my angles and brushed up on my power from the baseline. This was the least daunting part of my new routine, since I had a masochistic devotion to hitting balls for hours on end. Along with adjusting to my improved serve, I was also trying to make friends with my new Yonex racket. My old one was a giant relic at 130 square inches, but I adored it and it had to be pried out of my clenched hands. Knowing that I needed more control when facing big hitters and a more powerful serve, I traded up to a smaller and more technologically advanced racket of 110 square inches. It may not sound like a dramatic change, but for the first few days I felt like my best friend had moved away and I had to hang with some new kid I didn’t really gel with.

  12:30 to 1:30 p.m.: Lunch of—you guessed it—plain grilled chicken breast with a side salad of mixed greens, tomatoes, and vinegar. No cheese, no oil, no nuts. In other words, nothing to make it taste good.

  1:30 to 2 p.m.: Deep stretching of my back and hamstrings. Years of pounding my legs back and forth across the tennis court had given me hamstrings as tight as my size twelve pants now felt. This was also supposed to be the time for me to digest my lunch. I was already thinking about what I’d be eating for dinner.

  2 to 3 p.m.: Step onto the treadmill—or “dreadmill,” as I preferred to call it. Set the speed to 3.3 and crank the incline up to level 15. Not all treadmill programs are the same, so how can I best describe level 15? Imagine taking the treadmill and standing it up on its side so that is completely perpendicular to the floor. Now get on it. That pretty much describes level 15. Stay on it for one hour. Bonus points for not throwing up or being dragged like a pancake underneath the belt.

  3 to 3:05 p.m.: Water break. Replenish my fluids and weigh the odds of my being able to sneak out the back door of the gym without Bobby noticing. Realize I have less than a .05 percent chance of escaping undetected. Decide my legs are too tired to try to outrun him.

  3:05 to 5 p.m.: We save the best for last. My days ended with Kersee-created track workouts: two-hundred-meter interval sprints, fast-feet drills between orange cones, and squats with vertical jumps to maximize my core power. Throw in a medicine ball to make it super-fun. Repeat all until I can’t move anymore.

  5:30 p.m.: Return home. Walk in door. Bed seems too far away. Decide couch in family room looks exceptionally inviting.

  7 p.m.: Ah, dinnertime. My long-awaited reward. Wait a minute, what’s this shake doing in front of me again?

  8 p.m.: Drag myself back to the couch, pick up the remote, find something to watch that doesn’t take one iota of brainpower to comprehend.

  10 p.m.: Go to bed. Fall asleep before my head hits the pillow. Dream sweet dreams of pancakes drizzled with syrup. Start all over in the morning.

  While every meal and workout was planned for minimum caloric intake and maximum VO2 expenditure, what was to keep me from screwing up at home?

  My A-Team was one step ahead of me: before we even embarked on the first workout of the new regime, they had a food sentinel standing guard, ready to tackle any salty fat-loaded carb right out of my hands. Chris, a ripped-beyond-belief testament to the value of fitness and a severely restrictive diet, had worked with Kersee for years and was assigned to my troubled case. He was officially in charge of “monitoring my nutrition,” but really he was a food babysitter whose sole responsibility was to make sure no unapproved calories passed my lips. He weighed all my food and we ate—or, more often than not, drank—every meal together. Instead of resenting this new shadow in my life, I was relieved that the pressure was off me. I didn’t have to exercise my own willpower; I left it up to Chris, my food warden. Every minute of my life was planned out for the next four weeks—he even stayed in a guest room at my house so that midnight runs to the kitchen would be impossible. It wasn’t a coincidence that I gave him the room that was right next to the kitchen. I needed that kind of deterrent. Missing a workout would be a catastrophe, a personal shame that would disappoint everyone trying to help me. So I showed up with my game face on every single day. I didn’t want everyone else’s hard work and dedication to go to waste. Besides, it was only four weeks. I could get through it.

  My mission impossible became possible. I was, far and away, in the best shape I’d been in since my stabbing. Score one for the team! In one month I lost eight pounds and had broken that impenetrable twenty-pound barrier. I was now only 19.5 pounds over my target weight. I really counted that .5 pound: it was of the utmost importance and I even did two extra miles on the track and twenty minutes in an unbearable sauna the day before I left for Rome to reach that elusive number. Italy, here I come!

  Curled up in my airplane seat on Alitalia, I fluffed the tiny pillows, wedged them in between my head and the window, and settled in for a good night’s sleep. I don’t need three Tylenol PMs and two glasses of wine to get through a long flight. The moment the plane hits its cruising altitude, I am out like a baby. Airplanes are a quiet bubble of peace for me, an isolated sanctuary at thirty-five-thousand feet. Instead of counting sheep, I thought about Rome. And I thought about my dad. While Paris owned the biggest share of my best championship memories, Rome laid a sentimental claim to a big piece of my heart.

  28

  Roman Holiday

  I’ve never done a “real” spring break. I’ve never been to Cancún or gone on a booze cruise with a crew of giggling girlfriends. The closest I got to wet T-shirt contests and trays of Jell-O shots during my teens was watching snippets of MTV’s Spring Break while I was kicking back in a hotel room during some tournament or other. Instead, from the time I was sixteen, I did spring break Roman style, with my family. An extra scoop of gelato after dinner was as crazy as I ever got in Rome, but it was a fantastic place to play. As the first stop on the European swing, it was where I greeted my old friend—real red clay.

  The first time I went to Rome I was, like every tourist, awestruck by the magnitude of its, well, its everything. In most cities I never had the chance to see the sights, but in Rome I couldn’t help it. Everywhere I looked, my senses were assaulted with the sultry, sophisticated, over-the-top grandeur that is the Eternal City. Over here, look, the Spanish Steps! Over there, see, that’s the Pantheon! The Forum! The Coliseum! and just try walking twenty feet without running into another famous fountain or mosaic. It was beauty overload, and it stretched beyond the city’s architecture and swept up its inhabitants too. Impossibly chic women teetered down the ancient streets in five-hundred-dollar stilettos while the men strutted by in designer sunglasses and expensive loafers. A lingering glance and hint of a smile was considered flirtatious without being slimy. Italians just appreciate beauty.

  In late spring, the rising temperature brought a burst of flowers and a flood of people to the outdoor cafés. Why be inside when there is so much beauty to be appreciated in the Piazza di Spagna? It was a perfect time to be in Rome. I didn’t spend many hours indulging in the café life, but I did spend an awful lot of quality time with some chiseled Roman studs. During the tournament my dad and I always set up shop in the Stadio dei Marmi (Stadium of Marble). With his track-and-field background, my dad had a nose for sniffing out the nearest training facility no matter w
here in the world we were. But in Rome, he didn’t have to go very far. The tournament is held in the Foro Italico, an enormous sports complex on the banks of the Tiber River. Amid the tennis courts, swimming pools, and cavernous Olympic Stadium sits the majestic—and almost always empty—Stadio dei Marmi.

  I’ve worked out on dozens and dozens of tracks—some were devoid of lane lines and overgrown with weeds, while others were impeccably cared for under the watchful eye of big university sports programs—but nothing compares to the sight that greets you in this stunning Roman stadium. The bright green field is encircled by a dusty red track. The marble stands can seat twenty thousand spectators, and at the very top there are sixty white marble statues of athletes perched on individual tiers. Some are nude while some are covered with a discreet fig leaf, and all of them are engaged in some sort of physical endeavor. Representing the sixty provinces of Italy, they make an intimidating group of twelve-foot-high übermuscular specimens of athletic greatness. If that doesn’t channel your inner gladiator, I don’t know what will. It did the trick for me: some of the best workouts with my dad happened under the haughty gazes of those frozen-in-time athletes.