Getting a Grip Read online

  The next day, as I was psyching myself up for my big dancing debut, I was in for another shock: the preparations were like a prom, a wedding, and a beauty pageant rolled into one. Spray tans, hair extensions, fake lashes, manicures, and endless layers of makeup. All in all, the process took six hours. Sitting in a chair for that long was tedious, but I did learn how to make the nose I inherited from my dad appear smaller. The tricks of shading can work wonders. When it was all over, I hardly recognized my lacquered-up new self and I was exhausted before I even set foot on the dance floor. My outfit was a long, frilly pink ensemble that looked like Cinderella swathed in cotton candy. My eight-year-old self would’ve died for that dress, but the thirty-four-year-old me had very different taste.

  I looked around at my competition—Shannon Elizabeth (actress with never-ending legs), Marlee Matlin (actress with spunky spirit), Priscilla Presley (actress with confident grace), Marissa Jaret Winokur (Broadway star with energy to burn), and Kristi Yamaguchi (Olympic figure skater who looked like she was born to dance)—all decked out in sparkles, spangles, and heels. There was a hum of nervous energy in the air, and with a jolt I realized that I was out of my league. These women all had backgrounds in performing and playing to an audience, while I’d spent my career tuning the crowd out so I could focus on the ball. Without a doubt they’d know how to work the camera, and I didn’t have the slightest idea where it was. Was it too late to back out?

  “Ten minutes until curtain!” the stage manager yelled. Yep, it was way too late. We each took our place for the cast introduction and I was lined up at the top of the stage’s stairs next to Jason Taylor, the stud NFL player who had performed beautifully the night before. I must have looked like I was about to face a firing squad because he took one look at me and said, “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

  “I have no idea,” I managed to squeak out.

  “At least on the football field I know what I’m doing,” he said as we began the dramatic descent toward the audience. I felt so much better knowing I wasn’t the only one who was feeling way out of the comfort zone. If a tough football player was nervous, then my legs had every right to be shaking like a skittish colt’s.

  After the opening sequence, I went backstage to wait for my cue. Jonathan kept telling me to just have fun. He sounded like my dad before huge matches. There was no way I was going to have fun out there. I’d do it, but it wasn’t going to be fun. I was too busy mentally replaying the sequence of steps in my head to remember something as silly as having a good time. Convinced I wouldn’t hear the beat of the music, I told Jonathan to wink at me when it was my cue to start our dance. We took our places on the stage, and before I knew it, he was winking at me.

  Showtime. He twirled me around the floor and I tried to keep up with his flawless fox-trot as best I could. My turns weren’t as tight or controlled as they could have been, but I didn’t miss a step and I didn’t fall flat on my face—a success in my book. Unfortunately, not messing up wasn’t a strong enough showing for the judges. I got the lowest score of the night and was told that I looked “uncomfortable” and “awkward” and that my “core wasn’t strong enough.” How ironic. After years of working to build up my inner core and working out with my trainer, Gyll, to strengthen my physical one, the biggest criticism was that my core wasn’t up to par. Yikes. Thirty seconds of negative feedback wiped out the hesitant confidence I’d built up over the past several weeks of practice. Thirty seconds was all it took to shake me off kilter. After the show, all of the contestants moved through the press line, doing short interviews with the media outlets. To my total shock, halfway through the line, tears started flowing down my face. I finished the rest of the interviews as quickly as I could and rushed backstage to get myself together. The harder I tried not to cry, the more the tears kept coming. Jonathan immediately found me and told me there was no reason to be upset. I’d done everything I was supposed to: our goal had been to get all our steps into the routine, so who cared that we got the lowest score? Big deal. Easy for him to say. He hadn’t been torn apart for being awkward, uncoordinated, and cursed with bad posture in front of millions of households in America. The thing was, I truly thought I’d done well. If I had thought I’d performed horribly, then I would have been fine with the criticism. But my definition of “well” and the judges’ definition of it were not even close. I had never danced before, so my frame of reference was quite different. I was going to have to accept it. I went to my hotel that night upset and rattled. I took a look at my puffy eyes in the mirror and went into reality check mode.

  Why are you being so hard on yourself? This is a dance show. It’s supposed to be fun. So what if you got a little criticism? Nobody’s perfect. Shake it off and do better the next time. Your core, the inner one, the one that’s the most important, is strong. It’s going to take more than some dance judges to throw you off balance. Just get right back out there and try again. I turned on the video camera and watched Jonathan perform our moves from the mambo, our next dance. I had a few days to get it together and come back with a vengeance. I showed up at our rehearsal in the morning bright-eyed and on a mission. But I was momentarily thrown off course by the Hungarian bakery downstairs from the studio. The aroma of fresh baked goodies wafted through the air and tempted me like crazy. It appealed to all of my childhood cravings. After some especially disheartening practices the previous week, I had slipped into an old bad habit and indulged in some key sugary purchases. They hadn’t done me any good. No, not this time, I told myself as I walked right past the open door. Pastries will not make me a better dancer.

  I mamboed myself to the point of exhaustion for the next three days and, taking the advice of the costume designer, decided to make my appearance a little more va-va-voom. My dress for the second dance was a gold-spangled number that barely covered my rear. I’d seen how hot Shannon Elizabeth’s outfit had been and I knew I had to sex it up a little more, but there was only so much va-va-voom I felt comfortable with. The designer and I compromised on the hem length and I loved the finished product. I showed up for the second show ready to shake my stuff. Jonathan gave me one piece of advice: Smile.

  “No matter what you do, just smile. If you miss a step, trip over your own feet, mess up a spin, just smile. If you smile enough nobody will ever know.”

  “Okay, got it: Smile,” I repeated back to him.

  “And especially on the split. Look right into the camera and smile as if your life depended on it,” he added.

  The music started, Jonathan winked at me, and we were off. I channeled my inner vixen and strutted all over the dance floor with as much conviction as my heels would allow. I smiled until my face hurt, and when it came time for the split, I searched for the camera. Damn. There were six of them. Which one was I supposed to grin seductively into? I took a wild guess and did my best. I finished the number without any of my bracelets flying off and hitting Jonathan in the face—again, a success in my book, but I knew it was unlikely to impress the judges. I was right. I got the lowest score again and I knew I was destined to be booted off first. Luckily for me, Penn Jillette was kicked off at the same time, so I didn’t have to brave the rejection solo. Misery loves company. And I was pretty miserable for the first few days. People recognized me all over the place—at the grocery store, the gas station, the airport—and they were incredibly kind to me. The only thing I’d wanted to do was stay on the show for at least a week, and I was mortified that I hadn’t been able to do it. But nobody seemed to remember just how dismal my performance was. They told me how great I looked and how gutsy I’d been to try something new. I was disappointed in my performance and crushed that it had been in front of millions of people, but those lovely dance-show-watching strangers were right—I had been brave to give it a go and my legs had looked pretty good in that gold dress.

  If I’d done the same thing five years earlier, I wouldn’t have come back for the second dance. I would have returned home to Florida, cried, eaten, cried some
more, eaten even more, and hidden from everyone for weeks. I would have carried the sting of those comments around with me like a scarlet letter. I would have avoided social situations and spoken to few of my friends. The humiliation would have been too much. But I was a different person now, and it took only a few days of moping around before I realized that I was fine. I’d faced my greatest fear, performed despite a case of nerves that was worse than any I’d had before my Grand Slam finals, subjected myself to the judgment of total strangers, and taken criticism without falling apart in front of millions of people. In the end, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared it would be. If you don’t take risks in life, you won’t get anything out of it. If my core could take that and still be in one piece, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t take on.

  2

  Girls Don’t Play Tennis

  Most professional athletes can remember the exact moment they were introduced to the sport that would be their destiny. For me, that day started with the smell of salt water tickling my nose. As we did every summer, my family was spending our vacation by the Adriatic Sea, and in the mornings a breeze would blow through the bedroom window and gently wake me up. Hanging at the beach for a precious two weeks a year was practically mandatory for European families, and we were no exception. Every August, we’d pack up the car and head to the coast. Two weeks of sun, sand, and surf. It was heaven. The summer I remember the best from those lazy seaside days was when I was five years old. I was a little pipsqueak of a girl who never stopped moving. Buzz, buzz, buzzing around all day long. It used to drive my family crazy. One morning I got up, threw on my swimsuit, quickly ate breakfast at my mother’s insistence, and was dashing out the door as fast as my legs could carry me. As always, I’d planned on spending the day on the beach building intricate sand castles with moats to protect the princesses I imagined resided inside and the handful of crabs I recruited to act as their guards. But something grabbed my attention before I could make a run for the beach. It was my dad packing up a bag with cool-looking toys.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To play tennis,” my brother, Zoltan, answered. He had a bag too.

  “Can I come?” I’d already forgotten about the castles waiting to be built outside. All I heard was the word “play” and I didn’t want to be left out of any fun.

  “Of course you can come,” my dad said, smiling. “Go put on your shoes and we’ll meet you outside.” I tore into my bedroom frantically searching for my sneakers. My mom found them for me and helped tie the laces nice and tight.

  “Have fun,” she told me, kissing my forehead and whisking me out the door, happy to have a little peace and quiet for herself. It didn’t happen often. My mother, Ester, worked long hours in an accounting firm and whipped up three homemade meals a day for our family, and those two weeks were the only time she had to relax. As a five-year-old, I didn’t understand what it meant to need a vacation, but I’m sure my mom did. I ran outside and caught up to my brother and dad. We walked down three different streets until we got to the local court. Jumping around like my shoes were on fire, I couldn’t wait to get started. Started at what, I had no idea, but I knew something fun was about to happen. My dad and Zoltan unsheathed their rackets and started hitting a ball back and forth. It seemed to go on forever. I was getting bored sitting there; I had thought this was going to be a lot more fun. When my brother put down his racket to get a drink of water, I took advantage of my chance. I ran over, picked it up, and started imitating what I’d seen him do.

  “Good, Monica!” my dad called to me from the other side of the net. He hit a ball my way. I’d like to say that I fired a two-handed crosscourt backhand from the baseline. I’d like to say that in that split second a star was born. But I can’t. I missed the first ball. And the second, and the third. Zoltan, showing an amount of restraint and patience that is unusual in thirteen-year-old brothers, let me go on like that, swinging his racket wildly as I ran back and forth across the court not making contact with anything. But my dad noticed something right away. The racket was nearly as big as I was but I was handling it as though it weighed nothing. My swing wasn’t sending any balls over the net, but the form wasn’t half bad. We played all afternoon, Zoltan and I taking turns with the racket, and I never got tired. Some sports prodigies are born with superb hand-eye coordination, abnormally flexible shoulder joints, or extremely efficient red blood cells. Me? I just had freakishly strong wrists. Years later, my dad would insist it was because, as a toddler, I walked around our apartment carrying his four-kilogram dumbbells everywhere I went. I don’t remember for sure, so I’ll have to take his word for it. The three of us spent the rest of our vacation at the tennis court together.

  When we got home from the Adriatic, I begged my dad to keep playing tennis with me. While Zoltan was an active player in European junior tournaments, my dad had only hit around a couple of times in his life. He played more during that vacation than he ever had before. But he had a hard time saying no to me, so he figured out a way to make it happen. Our hometown of Novi Sad—a medium-size city nestled on the banks of the river Danube—had only four courts, and kids weren’t allowed on them until they were twelve years old. The tennis club had an elitist attitude that could have rivaled Wimbledon’s Centre Court. There was a mandatory dress code of all white, and it was difficult to secure a court time, nearly impossible to find the financial means to pay for it. It was a far cry from the everyman sport of soccer, the most popular sport in my country, where all you needed was a ball, a patch of grass, and the will to run.

  “No problem,” my dad told me after the club would not let a five-year-old play on its courts. He took a ball of string down to the parking lot in front of our apartment building, cut a long piece off, and tied the ends to cars placed about ten feet apart. Voilà! We had our own private, free, always available court where dress whites were optional. I devoted every afternoon to playing in that parking lot. After a month my dad saw I was serious about it—and that Zoltan’s patience with loaning out his rackets was growing thin—so one weekend he got in the car and drove seven hours until he crossed the Italian border, where the closest equipment store with child-size rackets could be found. He’d done the exact same thing for Zoltan seven years earlier, so he knew the drill. He picked out the best one he could find, had it wrapped up, jumped in the car, and drove straight back home the same day. I was thrilled with my new racket and carried it with me everywhere. My dad and I continued to play every single evening, staying outside until my mom called us in for dinner. Even then we’d stay outside a little longer until she’d call us a second time. Then we knew she was serious. We didn’t dare test her a third. Over dinner Zoltan would tell us about his upcoming tournaments and I’d hang on his every word. I loved tennis with every bit of my heart.

  Until winter rolled around. I decided I’d had enough tennis and what I was really meant to do was ice-skate. I retired from my illustrious parking-lot career and asked my parents to sign me up for ice-skating lessons. You’d think my dad might have been a little annoyed, after jumping across country borders to support my tennis obsession, but he was just as happy to take me to the rink at five in the morning as he’d been to drive to Italy. He didn’t care what I did, as long as I was doing something that made me happy. Ice-skating was great, until I fell on my butt the first time. Waking up before sunrise in an attempt to beat the hockey players to the rink (I had to claim my little area of ice before their pucks went flying all over the place) got really old, really fast. And falling on my bony backside was not easy. Ice hurts. A lot. I was spending more time skidding on the ground than standing upright, and I had the bruises to prove it. The dresses in ice-skating were gorgeous—that had been my original motivation in deciding to be a skater—but they just weren’t worth those kinds of sacrifices. After two weeks I hung up my skates, and by the summer I’d come out of retirement and started playing tennis again.

  Every morning was the same. My mom left early for work
but she always made time to get our breakfast ready. I’d eat it in front of the television while watching my beloved Tom and Jerry cartoons, then hurry down several flights of stairs in our apartment building with my racket in hand. I’d practice hitting against the brick wall of our building over and over again. Ice, rain, snow, wind—no matter what the weather was like, I was out there. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the people who lived on the first floor. Never once in all my years of using that wall as a hitting partner did they ever complain. They were either extremely kind or extremely hard of hearing. Either way, I owe them a huge thank-you. Every now and then my dad would lean out over our balcony railing with a cup of coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other. A political cartoonist, he had to be up to date on everything going on in the world and was rarely seen without his nose in a book or an international paper of some kind. If he leaned over just so he could catch a glimpse of my scrawny arms swinging my racket over and over. Both hands on my backhand, both hands on my forehand. When I first started going to tournaments, coaches pulled my dad aside.

  “Karolj, you aren’t going to let her keep playing like that, are you?” they’d ask.