Getting a Grip Read online

  The only argument over tennis that I can remember was when I was seven and my morning hitting sessions were growing in frequency and intensity. I’d fallen head over heels for tennis, and nothing—not even my beloved Barbies—could tear me away from it. My mom—with the vocal and wholehearted support of my dad’s mom, who had been horrified to see my tiny calloused hands during an afternoon of baking in her kitchen—had suggested that I stop playing.

  “But what can I do?” my dad asked as he piled my dolls into his tennis bag. “She loves it. I can’t forbid her from playing.”

  “Shouldn’t she be playing with dolls instead of knocking the stuffing out of them? Sports aren’t for little girls.” My mom came from an era when the thought of girls playing as hard as the boys was ludicrous. When it came to athletics, she was the polar opposite of my dad. He had been a triple jumper and he did it barefoot, as was the norm in those days, taking athletic devotion to a whole other level. She scoffed at moving any faster than a walking pace. He spent years coaching track-and-field athletes in preparation for the Olympics and excelled at every sport he tried: soccer, basketball, running. She had zero athletic ability and zero desire to develop any. I got my love for sports from my dad and my intense dislike of gyms from my mom. She didn’t want to exert herself unless there was a point to it.

  My mom’s complete lack of interest in tennis gave me a good balance. I never once felt the pressure to win her love by winning on the court. She would have preferred reading magazines and trying out new recipes with me to going to a tennis match any day of the week. That’s why, when I told my parents how miserable I was in Florida, I didn’t think they’d actually move there to be with me. I just assumed they’d say, “Okay, honey, come home.” I told them I couldn’t do it on my own and that I wanted to get on the next plane out of Florida. I was thirteen—one of the worst ages to be for a girl—I didn’t have many friends, and I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin. Though puberty hadn’t yet hit me, I was walking around in a body that felt like it didn’t fit. Those extra ten pounds were a symptom of my deeper emotional state, and they took their toll on me.

  “Just hang in there another week and we’ll figure something out,” they assured me.

  “Okay,” I said through my sniffles. I hung up the phone and with some relief started to mentally pack my bags. It was too bad. I’d worked so hard all year and gritted my teeth through unbearable homesickness for tennis, but I didn’t want to spend another moment being miserable. Nothing was worth feeling like that. Not even tennis. I guessed I just didn’t have what it took, but that was okay. I’d go back home, back to my friends, back to my school, and play tennis when the local courts would allow it. Of course, in a perfect world, I’d transport Bradenton’s climate and unparalleled tennis facilities to Novi Sad or I’d magically whisk my parents to Florida. I knew that both options were impossible. My mom had worked at the same accounting firm for twenty-eight years and was just two years away from getting her pension. My dad had been having a lot of success working for a local newspaper and getting his cartoons published around the world. He’d also been awarded a Palme d’Or for his work on a documentary that covered the relationship between politics and sports. Although the economic situation in Yugoslavia was starting to look bleak, they’d created a good life. They had a home, jobs, and relatives there. And they were already in their fifties; they couldn’t start a whole new life in a new country.

  I knew that in Novi Sad my tennis would never get to the level I’d achieve in Florida, but I knew that my parents just couldn’t uproot their lives and move across an ocean to be with me. Could they? The more I thought about how much I’d be missing by leaving this sun-drenched capital of tennis, the more I let myself daydream. What if my parents decided to come? My dad had liked Florida during our tournament trips. Who doesn’t love an eighty-degree day in December? Would they be up for an adventure? No, no, I told myself. Don’t get your hopes up. It was too good to be true, and I didn’t dare speak my hopes aloud to Zoltan. I was holding them like precious cargo in the back of my mind, careful not to bring them out for inspection too often. I knew the chances were almost zero, so I focused on what I assumed was going to happen: I’d be moving back home. When the week was finally up, I called my parents to give them an update on how I was doing. I didn’t even get to say the words “I’m still miserable, I want to come home” before they told me the news: they were moving to Florida. I thought I’d misheard them. I asked my mom to repeat what she’d just said.

  “It’s true,” she said excitedly, as though she could barely believe it herself. “We’ve decided to come out there.”

  Relief flooded my entire body. “But how? Why? What about your jobs? What about Grandma and Grandpa?” The questions came out in a tumble as my shock dissolved into relief. Things were going to be okay. I’d have my family and I’d have tennis too.

  “Slow down, Monica.” I heard my dad’s voice on the line. My mom had passed the phone to him. “Everything will be fine. Don’t worry about us. Just focus on being happy. We’ll be there soon.”

  “But how?” I asked again. I still didn’t understand. I was scared that this was all a joke. I needed to know the details.

  “It’s simple. We love you and Zoltan, we want you both to be happy and we want our family to be together again. It isn’t a sacrifice, it’s what you do for family.”

  “But what about your jobs?” I asked.

  “Your mom and I are taking six-month sabbaticals and I can publish my work from anywhere in the world. The Academy is going to help us get settled. After that, we’ll see how it goes. This is a great opportunity for you, Monica. You have a gift and you shouldn’t waste it. And don’t worry about your grandparents: they’ll be fine. We can call them and write to them all the time.”

  Six months. So it wasn’t permanent. It was like a test run for the Seles family in Florida. Cool. I liked the idea of that. I started counting down the minutes until their arrival.

  My dad almost didn’t recognize me at the airport terminal. “You’ve grown so much!” he said as he engulfed me in a huge bear hug. I knew he wasn’t talking about my height, but I didn’t care. My family was reunited and I knew I’d be back to my old tennis self in no time. He never made another comment about my weight again, not even when, ten years later, I ate myself forty pounds up the scale during the dark days of my depression. At that point he didn’t care about my weight, he just wanted me to get better.

  The first night in our new apartment was just as I’d been dreaming about. Mom had a sauce simmering on the stove while she was whipping up my favorite salad loaded with feta cheese and olives; Zoltan and my dad were sitting at the dining room table talking about the latest soccer scores from Europe; and I was sitting right in the middle of it all, pretending to do my homework but really just soaking it all in. We didn’t speak a word about tennis all night. I couldn’t stop smiling and I was overwhelmed with the warm, incomparable sense of being home again.

  First things first: My dad and Nick had a long talk, and they both decided that my two-handed forehand should be reinstated immediately. The one-handed was just not going to work, no matter how much I practiced the awkward swing. I was thrilled. It was like being reunited with my best friend. My practice schedule eased up considerably and I started enjoying two days off a week, one more than I’d been having. The number one reason promising players don’t make it past junior tennis is burnout. My dad was very worried about it and he didn’t want to push my still-growing body beyond its limit, so he made those two days off a mandatory rule. But a tired body wasn’t the only way to burn out. It could happen just as easily to your mind. Overdosing on tennis can cause paralysis through analysis, and I’d been eating, drinking, sleeping, and breathing the sport all year. Maybe that’s why the one-handed forehand never worked for me. I thought it to death, so it never really had a chance.

  My dad couldn’t believe how serious I’d become since I left home, so he took out his note
book and started firing off cartoons like an assembly line. I got the fun back into my game. Having a parent as a coach may sound strange and too high pressure, but it is a common thing in tennis, especially for girls. Martina Hingis, Anna Kournikova, the Williams sisters, and Maria Sharapova were, or still are, coached by a parent. There is a protective aspect there as well as a financial one. Having a private coach twenty-four hours a day is a luxury that even the top players on tour don’t have. Good coaches are in high demand, and scoring one for your exclusive use is nearly impossible. When you are still a young teenager who hasn’t even turned pro yet, you won’t have much luck finding a coach who can devote all of his time to you, so it becomes a natural evolution to depend on a parent more and more for coaching support and advice. Sometimes those relationships work, and sometimes they fall apart in a catastrophic manner.

  From the get-go, my dad kept our coaching relationship separate from our father-daughter relationship. Most people were skeptical, and I don’t blame them. If I hadn’t lived it, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible either. Surely, something would have to give, or my tennis or my family life (or both) would be damaged in the end. Many families have been destroyed while attempting the same thing. Somehow it worked. We could clash like cats and dogs on the court over some technical issue (“Approach the ball with your foot like this, not like that! Bend your knees more. More!”), but the second we got off the court, one switch flicked on, one flicked off, and we were like two different people. And if I showed up at practice with a bad attitude, my dad was the only person who could make me laugh within seconds and turn my energy around for the rest of the day.

  If my parents hadn’t come to Florida, I would have been burned out by my fourteenth birthday.

  7

  The Training Wheels of Professional Tennis

  Oh my God, I’ve got to, like, calm down,” I whispered to myself as I walked into the players’ locker room at the Virginia Slims tournament in Boca Raton. I was fourteen years old and fluent in American slang. I’d been practicing tennis out of the spotlight at the Academy for the past year and it had been a long time—almost a year and a half—since my last tournament. I was more than ready to get out and play someone other than a hitting partner. But this wasn’t just any tournament. I was still an amateur but this was my first real tournament with real pros, and I was sick to my stomach as I sat on a bench in a locker room in Boca Raton trying to tie my shoelaces with sweaty hands. A Virginia Slims tournament—the cigarette company was the sponsor of the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) in the seventies and eighties—was a world away from Sport Goofy.

  My first match was against Helen “The Hurricane” Kelesi. She was a retriever with fierce ability from the baseline. Right before the match, my dad told me to just have fun. Ha! Easy for you to say, I thought as I walked to my side of the court on less-than-steady stick legs. The second I hit my first shot, my nerves disappeared. I battled to take the first set 7-6 and then closed the match by winning the second set 6-3. It wasn’t that different from the practice matches I played at the Academy, but it was still surreal. First of all, I was playing a woman instead of Zoltan or Raoul; and second, she was a professional and she was good. Three months after our match, she’d go on to reach the quarterfinals of the French Open. Players were playing for money here, something I’d never done before. Technically I was still an amateur, so I wasn’t playing for cash, but everyone else was. I’d survived my first professional match. I felt relieved until I remembered who I’d be playing in the second round: Chris Evert. As in Chris Evert, one of the greatest players in the history of the game, former number one and now number three in the world, not to mention the best-dressed tennis player I’d ever seen. When I was seven years old, I sat with my nose inches from the television screen watching her win her third Wimbledon title. With adorable color-coordinated ribbons flowing from her hair, she had been my style icon since I was a little girl. I wanted to look just like her: a girlie girl who could really whack a ball. A perfect combination. I didn’t know what I wanted to do more: play against one of the greatest legends of the game or get tips on how to make the perfect ponytail. I didn’t sleep much that night.

  Before the match my dad and Nick told me to just have fun—again that advice! My dad would keep saying it to me for the next ten years; he probably thought it would eventually sink in through sheer repetition. It never did. I love tennis, but I can honestly say that I never once had fun during a match. I had loads of fun preparing for matches, but playing under pressure? Beating someone else? It just wasn’t for me. I was born with an unshakable people-pleasing personality, and I never loved winning at someone else’s expense. I loved winning points, but I hated seeing the other person upset at the end of the match. Focus, motivation, drive—I had all those things. But the desire to wipe up the court with my opponent was never part of my game. Worried about buckling under pressure but not wanting to make the person across the net angry, I never had much fun out there. So when I got that advice, I just nodded and promised them I’d try. I didn’t have to try for very long. Chrissie took the match in two sets, 6-2, 6-1. I was thrilled I hadn’t been shut out. My only goal at that point was not to throw up on the court from nerves, so I’d say that I exceeded my expectations that night. I mean, she was Chris Evert and I was a fourteen-year-old girl who was so paralyzed by self-consciousness and nervousness in the locker room that when a player tried to talk to me, the only words I could squeak out of my mouth were “Hi” and “Uh-huh” before I cranked Duran Duran up on my Walkman as loud as Simon Le Bon could go. I played in two more tournaments that year, making it to the second round in one and the semis of the other, but other than that I kept a very low profile, honing my game in the backcourts at the Academy and avoiding talking to any of the older guys. They’d all joined the pro tour by then but still came back to practice at the Academy in between tournaments, so they seemed even older, stronger, and cooler than ever.

  When I think back to those days, I don’t think of myself as a teenager who was about to turn professional. I was an athletic phenom, but mentally and physically I was still a little girl, at least two years behind my biological age. Flat-chested and gawky, I was a long way off from growing into my looks. I felt much closer to childhood than adolescence, much less womanhood. At fourteen, my favorite thing to do when I wasn’t playing tennis was to watch cartoons. Nobody else my age did that. When I left home right after turning thirteen, I think I stayed stuck in the same place emotionally. Trying to catch up with everything I had to learn in a new country, compounded with the pressure of performing, stunted my growth into the next phase of being a teen. My time was so consumed with tennis and my life was so insular. I was still a kid with very few social skills and not much confidence off the court. All I wanted to do was play tennis, listen to my Walkman, and watch cartoons in the morning. My life had changed dramatically since I left Novi Sad, but in some ways it was exactly the same.

  8

  The Big Time

  It is a decision every promising player has to make: to turn professional or to go to college. In some sports you can do both, but in tennis, especially on the women’s tour, your best years fly by before you hit the legal drinking age. If you’re going to make a run for the top, you can’t spend four years in college. It’s a sad truth about tennis. On February 13, 1989, it was official: I was going to give the pro world a shot. The crazy traveling circus of the WTA tour was about to sweep me up in all of its frenetic energy and not put me down for several years. Turning pro when you’re barely fifteen turns your life upside down, and if your feet aren’t planted firmly in reality, they’ll get kicked right out from under you. You have to have the steadiest of support systems and an honest team who will tell you what is what. There is a danger in professional sports of being surrounded by too many yes-men, too many people who just tell you what they think you want to hear. That doesn’t help anybody and it can make you lose all touch with reality. I didn’t have that problem.
Even after I won my first title at the Virginia Slims tournament in Houston, the first thing my mom told me to do when I got back home was to clean my room.

  The title was a big deal not only because it was my first but also because I had to beat Chris Evert. I’d gotten through the first four rounds, including a redemptive victory over Carrie Cunningham (6-0, 6-1), almost the same score she’d beaten me with at the Academy, but my confidence vanished the evening before the final. Worrying about how badly Chrissie had beaten me in our last match the year before, I was convinced I’d be jettisoned off the court in two sets. I didn’t think I’d be able to win, but I at least wanted to look cute. It was, after all, my first appearance in a final, and it was against the player who always looked as if she’d just stepped out of the pages of a glamorous sports magazine. Clothing sponsors had yet to come knocking at my door, and I didn’t have anything in my suitcase that was special enough, so I begged my dad to let me buy a new outfit from a vendor at the tournament site. He agreed without too much reluctance.

  A red shirt was hanging up in one of the clothing booths, and I knew it would be perfect. It was adorable. I took it back to our hotel and laid it out on my bed as though I were getting ready for the first day of school. I had a white skirt and white barrettes that would look great with it. Unlike all of the other players, my outfit wouldn’t be covered with logos. In the morning, when we got to the tournament site, I told my dad how nervous I was—more than I’d ever been before. The possibility of doing better than I had in our previous match-up seemed small.