Getting a Grip Read online

  During my second month at the Academy, the difference in our backgrounds smacked me right in the face. I was walking to the courts for an afternoon hitting session with Raul Ordoñez, a Colombian pro with unbelievable hands, when I heard a commotion in the parking lot. A shiny red BMW convertible pulled up to the front of the Academy and one of the cool girls with perfect hair was behind the wheel. It was her sixteenth birthday and the car was a gift from her parents. I stood there staring at her in shock. A brand-new car? For a birthday present? My beloved bajadera chocolate paled in comparison. I wasn’t jealous so much as dumbfounded. I couldn’t understand how someone could just be given something like that. Maybe it was the Eastern European work ethic that had been instilled in me, but it just seemed strange to be handed something so valuable just for existing. I left the parking lot thinking how lucky it would be to have that kind of life. But I didn’t, so it was time to get back to practicing my forehand. At that moment I realized I was going to have to make my own luck. There was no other way.

  Although some kids were rich and some were far from it, everyone was there because they wanted to sleep, eat, and breathe tennis. Some had the goal of making a collegiate tennis team while others wanted to be number one in the world. The talent varied as much as the wardrobes. The kids from Eastern Europe had a style that looked as though it was a few years behind the Americans, while those from South America wore everything tighter and shorter than the others. Most kids went to school at Bradenton Preparatory Academy and fit several hours of playing into every day. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. In Novi Sad, none of my friends played tennis, so I could keep that part of my life compartmentalized. On the weekends I’d traveled around Europe, playing in tournaments, but during the week I was a regular kid who loved listening to a-ha on my Walkman and going to my friends’ apartments to play Barbies. The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy was a shock to the system. There was no delineation among tennis, school, and home life.

  My brother and I shared a room in the dormitory. While my new school’s course load was far lighter than at my school in Novi Sad, adjusting to hearing English all day long was a struggle. The teachers spoke too quickly and I labored over my homework every night, frustrated that I couldn’t whip through it as I had back home. Straight As were going to be much harder to get in Florida. Zoltan, whose English was better than mine, would spend time every evening going over new vocabulary words with me. During our first month in the dorm, I got up from my desk and walked to the window.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “You aren’t finished with this chapter yet.” He was helping me study for a history quiz the next morning, but there was something else that had grabbed my attention. A hundred yards away I could see a cluster of tennis courts. They were lit up for playing at night. I’d never seen that back home. We were so aware of using electricity that out of habit I always turned the lights off when I left a room. Lighting up an entire court was unheard of. If you wanted to play tennis, you went during daylight hours during the small window of court time you’d been able to wrangle.

  “Zoltan, look at this!” Reluctantly, he walked over to the window.

  “Yeah, I know. They light up their courts here.” At twenty-one, he wasn’t as easily impressed as I was. Or at least he didn’t show it. For the rest of the night I spent every ten minutes jumping up from my desk to see if the lights were still on. There wasn’t anything that could have impressed me more than those glowing courts. They didn’t shut them off until after ten o’clock. It seemed like a magical tennis kingdom. People could play year-round and all day and night if they wanted to. Maybe Bradenton was even better than Disney World.

  At first, I thrived in the military culture that the Academy was built around. I was expected to work out like a world-class soldier training for the battle of her life.

  A typical day in the Bollettieri Way:

  6 a.m.: Wake up, eat breakfast

  7 to 8 a.m.: Special practice focusing on technique

  8 to 11 a.m.: Hitting session

  11 a.m. to noon: Lunch

  Noon to 4 p.m.: School

  4 to 7 p.m.: Hitting session

  8 p.m.: Dinner

  8:30 to 10 p.m.: Homework

  10 p.m. sharp: Lights out

  RULES:

  No television during the week.

  No phone calls during the week.

  No late arrivals to practice.

  No whining.

  Nick had been an army paratrooper, and he brought the same regimented discipline to the Academy. It was boot camp, and you had to give 100 percent of yourself to survive and succeed. Every now and then we were treated to a weekend field trip to the mall or the beach, but other than that it was tennis twenty-four hours a day. It was a very insular existence. It was a crash course in tennis as a life instead of tennis as a game. I wasn’t sure if I liked it, but I was so nervous about messing up and losing my scholarship that I did everything I was told. Plus, my English was far from fluent, so I spent the first few months just nodding my head up and down whenever someone said something to me. More than once Nick would spew off a list of things for me to keep in mind, and the only word I’d catch was “dear” (he called every girl “dear”). I’d nod my head up and down, but I wouldn’t say a word. Zoltan would quickly come over and ask me if I’d understood anything. No, I’d answer. Then he’d rattle off the translation as fast as he could before the ball machine started pelting its missiles my way. Nick had a commanding presence on the court and I didn’t want to disappoint him, so it was crucial that I understood his directions.

  The daily regimen at the Academy was grueling for kids, but Nick led by example. Every morning he woke up before five and would have his first workout finished before anyone else was out of bed. No matter what, he was the first one on the court and the last one off. He practiced what he preached and wouldn’t put up with anyone who whined, so I never did.

  In that kind of pressure cooker environment, things become very intense. Making friends proved to be difficult, because everyone was competing against one another. When I first arrived, I hit around with girls who were six years older than I was. It didn’t go well and they usually left the court fuming. I had too much power and I needed to hit against someone who was stronger than I was if I was going to improve. Soon I was hitting exclusively with my brother or the pros who worked at the Academy, so that immediately set me apart from the other girls. I ate lunch with my brother or with my friend Sandra, whose dad, Tony, had approached my dad at the Orange Bowl. One day my brother was busy hitting with the older guys and Sandra was nowhere in sight. As I walked into the cafeteria, I had a minor panic attack because I’d have to sit by myself. I felt like all eyes were on me, although in reality I doubt that anyone was paying attention to me. But try telling that to a late-blooming thirteen-year-old girl who has to walk into a bustling cafeteria alone. I was frantically searching for an open spot to claim as my own when I saw a blond girl smiling and gesturing to the open spot at her table.

  “Hey, I’m Lisa,” she said as she threw her hair into a ponytail with the scrunchie that had been on her wrist.

  “I’m Monica,” I answered.

  “Yeah,” she laughed. “I know.” I didn’t know what that meant. Maybe I stood out because I practiced on the backcourts with the boys and not with the girls. Or maybe because my clothes were different, or because I spoke mediocre English with an accent. I didn’t dwell on it for very long, because Lisa made me feel welcome right away. She was two years older and I loved hanging out with her. Unlike most of the other kids, Lisa was laid-back and easygoing. In all of our meals together in the cafeteria, we never once talked about tennis: she liked it but it wasn’t her life, and I found it a relief to have someone at the Academy who talked about something other than grip technique and upcoming tournaments. A lifelong friendship was formed at that cafeteria table.

  It wasn’t until I’d been practicing for several weeks that I realized there was someth
ing different about me. I thought the other girls didn’t like me just because I wasn’t cool enough, not because I could beat them. I’d been beating kids since I was six years old and it had never prevented me from having friends. But this was different. At the Academy, tennis was a business and the players didn’t accept losing gracefully. It didn’t take long before I was practicing on the backcourts by myself, hitting with my brother or a pro while the older guys practiced on the court next to me. Today they are household names, but back then I knew them as Andre, Jim, and David—the popular, cocky, and cool group of top male players at the Academy. Andre Agassi looked like he was in a rock band, and since it was the eighties, that meant spiky long hair and fluorescent clothing. Girls loved him. He had the rebellious flair of James Dean. He could practice a quarter as much as everyone else and still be the best out there. That’s what being born with natural talent does for you. Jim Courier was a workhorse and lived to play matches. When he wasn’t practicing, he was playing the drums. Everyone was surprised when he won a Grand Slam before Andre, but that’s what a nonstop, hard-driving work ethic will do for you—something that Andre developed later in his career when he mounted one of sports’ all-time greatest comebacks. David Wheaton, the number one junior player in the country, would practice the same drill over and over until it was perfect. His obsession to get it just right was almost as crazy as mine. Zoltan—the guys nicknamed him “Z-man”—practiced and hung out with them, but I barely opened my mouth when they were in the vicinity. What could I say to them? They were popular older boys, and I was an awkward, self-conscious girl who’d just entered teenage-dom and was still all skinny arms and legs. They were three years older than I was, but it was like dog years. They seemed so tall, confident, and old to me.

  One blazingly hot afternoon, Nick asked Jim to hit with me. I was so excited. I’d never said more than hi to the guys, and we’d never set foot on the same court, although we practiced in adjacent courts every day. I saw how seriously they took their hitting sessions: they always wanted to obliterate each other. I wanted to make a good impression. I wanted to prove that I could keep up with them. I guess I tried a little too hard, because our hitting session only lasted ten minutes before Jim stormed off.

  “Don’t ever ask me to hit with her again!” he yelled at Nick as he grabbed his bag and left the court without looking back. Uh-oh. I thought it had gone fine, but Jim hadn’t appreciated being run all over the court by a girl half his size. He teases me about it now, but back then I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong. Most people will hit back and forth to each other, but that’s not how I operated. Right from the start, I was hitting it from side to side at crazy angles; I wasn’t making anything easy for him. I figured, Hey, if I’m going to be out here hitting, I might as well hit them like I mean it. Understandably, Jim didn’t appreciate it, and that was the end of my court time with the boys.

  5

  She’s Not All That

  I kept up the appearance of doing okay for the first few months. My introduction to a more-is-better culture (finding out I could get seconds and thirds in the cafeteria was mind-rattling), a confusing language (American slang was a bizarre, unintelligible dialect: it took me a long time to figure out that “Yo” wasn’t a common name in the States, it was just how kids addressed each other), a new intensity of tennis (I was constantly tired: I’d never known that kind of exhaustion before), and the scorching heat (by noon I felt I might melt into a puddle on the court) had been a whirlwind and I was doing my best to keep my head above water. But without my parents around, my foundation was quickly crumbling, and the stress of all the recent upheavals in my life was starting to catch up with me. Then, one afternoon in the cafeteria when I was getting seconds for lunch, I met peanut butter. After my first piece of toast slathered with it, Nutella was forgotten and I had a new best friend. The more I missed my parents, the more I went to the cafeteria. The more homesick I felt, the more peanut butter sandwiches I ate. If I could jump into a time machine and go back to that place I would have taken that young girl aside and said, “No! Stop! This is not the way to deal with what is going on in your life. This is not the pattern you want to set. Believe me, you’ll be sorry one day.”

  My peanut butter consumption went into overdrive when the two-handed forehand that my game had been built around for eight years was taken away. The coaches at the Academy were convinced that I had to transition to the more orthodox one-handed position. Top players didn’t use two hands, so why should I? It was a mistake. It’s very hard to change something like that after you turn twelve. Pete Sampras was able to turn his two-handed backhand into a one-handed beauty when he was thirteen, but he’s Pete Sampras. His case was highly unusual. My fundamentals were strong, but I just couldn’t get used to the strange feeling of a one-handed swing. I felt totally awkward and not connected to my body; I wasn’t used to being out of sorts like that. The new swing wasn’t working for me and it was destroying my confidence. After losing by a horrendous margin (6-1, 6-0) to Carrie Cunningham, a player I’d easily beaten in the days of the Sport Goofy tournaments, serious self-doubt set in. Could I really be a top player? Did I have it in me or had I already hit my peak? Agents who’d been circling upon my arrival stopped coming by to check out my practices. I heard the sentence “Maybe she won’t pan out after all” over and over. I went into a total panic. Terrified my scholarship would be taken away, I tried harder to master my new game, but the harder I tried, the tenser I got. Nick told me not to stress about it, to regroup and just focus on my short-term goals, but I couldn’t. I was no longer experiencing pure fun, the reason I’d fallen in love with tennis that day by the Adriatic Sea. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d broken into uncontrollable giggles. Thirteen-year-old girls should spend most of their time amid laughing fits. I missed my friends, I missed my parents, I missed knowing where and how I fit in. My English was getting better, but this new life was foreign in every way and I was struggling to find fluency in it. I knew something had to give.

  Homesickness had buried itself deeply within me, and the seven hours of daily practice weren’t enough to combat my peanut butter sandwich therapy. Ten extra pounds appeared on my body in the blink of an eye. I was a slow-maturing waif who could stand to put a little meat on my bones, but the rapid gain on my frame completely changed my body shape, and with my new chubby cheeks I started to resemble a chipmunk. The whispering about what had “gone wrong” with me was turning into loud gossip everywhere I went. After overhearing a group of cool girls with perfect ponytails talking about me in the cafeteria at lunch, I hit my breaking point. I ran to my room, collected all the quarters I’d been saving for the monthly phone call to my parents (e-mail, international calling through your computer, Web cams, and instant messaging have revolutionized being away from home; my frantic call was back in the digital Stone Age), and dialed my home number as fast as I could. After nine months of keeping a stiff upper lip at the Academy, I gave in. Each ring seemed interminable. I bit my fingernails as I waited for one of my parents to pick up. The second I heard my mom’s voice, I broke down in tears.

  6

  Back to Basics

  There have been several times in my life when I’ve been overwhelmed with the extraneous. Pressure mounts to the point that I can’t see straight, I feel pulled in a million different directions, and I have a hard time figuring out how to make things better. After many, many years and lots of trial and error—more error than I’d like to remember—I’ve come up with a three-point plan for surviving these tempests in life:

  1. Clean house. This means getting rid of everything that isn’t essential in your life right at that moment.

  2. Don’t be afraid to say the magic word. It isn’t “please.” It’s “no.” People won’t be as upset as you think they will be.

  3. Embrace the power of being you, without apology. It’s a power that is too often overlooked and squashed by others and by you.

  I didn’t know any of this wh
en I was standing outside with the phone in my hand, sobbing to my parents an ocean away, but I had an idea that whatever I was doing wasn’t working. My life had become too complicated and I needed it to revert back to the simplicity I’d thrived on when I was home. Cartoons in the morning, practices with my dad, and dinner with my family. That’s all I needed. Nine months of built-up emotion burst out and my parents were caught off guard. Every call they’d received up to that point had been a fake. It was expensive to call Europe, so we spoke every three to four weeks. It had been easy to put on a happy face during our few phone calls. I’d told them over and over that things were going well, that I was adjusting without any problems, that my tennis was great. Finally, in one big gush, the truth came out. I’m sure they wanted to get on the next plane to the States but they had their jobs and their lives to think about. They couldn’t just pick up and go, could they?

  Most tennis parents get lumped into one group: overbearing, money-hungry publicity hounds who are living vicariously through their kids. But not all tennis parents are the same. There are a lot who stay far away from the game, letting their kids handle everything on their own. Others sacrifice everything to help their kids succeed—not because it is the parents’ dream, but because it is their kids’. Mine fell somewhere in the middle of the last two. It didn’t matter what I chose—it could have been rock climbing, drama, or oil painting—they would have supported me completely. Without them, I simply would not have had the career I did. Grand Slams would have remained a far-off dream, and I never would have set foot in Roland Garros Stadium. But, together as a parental team, they never pushed me too hard or put pressure on me. They were like yin and yang: if one got too wrapped up in the pressure of the tennis life, the other would step in and put it into perspective. When I was on the tour, at least one of them would travel with me—which, as a teenager, is an invaluable emotional support to have. They protected me without coddling me, and when my fame grew exponentially and I was doing magazine shoots and filming television ads, they kept my ego in check. My dad lost his own father at a young age, and my mother left her family at the age of twelve to get a better education, so they personally knew the power of being self-reliant. From the beginning, whether it was going to a junior European tournament instead of a friend’s birthday party or leaving home for Florida, they made it clear that whatever I chose they’d support me, but it had to be my choice. I forged my own path, but they gave me unbelievable backup.