“A delay?” I said, taking another sip of water. “No, absolutely not. If the roles were reversed, she would not grant me a delay in a million years. No.”
The man went to tell Stepanova. I looked over at my father in the box. I could tell he understood exactly what had been asked. He nodded at me.
As we made our way back onto the court, Stepanova stared at me with a scowl. I truly could not believe it. What right did she have to be angry?
“If you really are hurt, you should retire,” I said. “As you always tell the press, I only beat you when you’re injured.”
“Never,” she spat.
“It just kills you to think I might be better than you, doesn’t it?” I said.
She laughed. “You cannot be better than me if I’m always above you in the rankings, druzhok.”
The crowd was cheering for her. She waved to them as she limped to the baseline.
She was brilliant. She knew she was going to lose this match, but at least now she had the sympathy of the world. She’d somehow seized the moral high ground by implying that I was exploiting her injuries for the win.
She had trapped me.
Fuck it, I thought. If she was insisting on playing, then she had to be willing to play on that ankle. And I was going to go after it.
I sent a thunderous serve right to the far corner of the box, making her run to meet it. When she managed a return, I sent it to the opposite side of the court. I watched her scramble to it, limping. The grimace on her face made it clear she was in agony. I took the point.
I could imagine it—could almost feel it—myself. The tenderness of her ankle, the twinging agony that ran through her as she had to turn on it, the awareness that it might buckle again at any moment.
Still, this was match point.
Before Stepanova hobbled back to the baseline, she took a step toward the net and said, “This is the only way you’ll win against me. So I hope you enjoy it.”
“You understand I’m going to run you into the ground, right?” I said, not bothering to keep my voice low. The cameras were on us; the umpire was watching. “I’m gonna make you run so hard on that ankle you’re going to break it in half.”
My heart started to bang against my chest. I walked to the baseline. I took a deep breath. And then I served the ball, as fast as a bullet, right to her fucking feet.
She jumped out of the way—falling onto the ground. She was in tears.
“Game, set, and match. Soto.”
Half the crowd was cheering, and the other half was booing louder than I’d ever heard before.
In the post-match interview, one of the reporters asked me if I felt bad, going after Stepanova’s ankle. I leaned into the microphone and said, “No.”
The room went so silent I could hear my own heartbeat.
The next morning, under a headline dubbing the match “The Coldest War,” one of the journalists called me “the Battle Axe.” Within days, it had become my name.
JANUARY 23, 1979
By the time I was twenty, I had four Slam titles. Two were at Wimbledon, one was at the US Open, and I’d beaten Stepanova in the final of the Australian Open in a nearly three-hour battle, one of the longest and most-watched matches in tennis history.
Our rivalry dominated the sports pages. The Cold War Continues on the Court. Soto Wins Slams, but Stepanova Takes More Titles. Stepanova vs. Soto Gets Ugly in London. And yet, in the end-of-the-year rankings, she still took the top spot.
The rivalry had become so popular—and made such good television—that it made my father famous too. The camera loved the handsome Javier Soto. The papers all printed photos of “the Jaguar” sitting proudly in the players’ box. One of them was captioned The man who taught Carrie Soto everything she knows.
In 1978, he released a book, Beautiful Fundamentals, that hit the bestseller lists and quickly became a mainstay of tennis instruction. There was even a moment when he became a recurring guest on Johnny Carson.
People loved him. And he took to it. He seemed satisfied with what we had done together, what we’d accomplished. His dreams had been fulfilled.
Mine had not.
“I should be number one,” I said to him as we ate lunch at a tennis club in Florida. I’d just beaten Stepanova in the final at Houston at an Avon Championships event. “At this point, I’ve earned it.”
“Let’s enjoy our food, please,” my father said.
“I want to hold the record for the most Grand Slams for any player ever,” I said, my voice rising. “And I can’t do that until I destroy her every time we play.”
“Hija…” my father said, a gentle warning. He maintained his insistence that I never make a scene on or off the court. And I did my best, but it required a great effort. And as a result, sportscasters started referring to me as “stiff” and “robotic.”
I’d seen more than a few op-eds in sports magazines about how Carrie Soto acts more like a machine than a woman and The Battle Axe never seems to enjoy her wins. Other players on the tour would mention in interviews that I wasn’t very friendly. As if I was supposed to befriend the very same women I was defeating week after week.
I would read tabloids in airports, and whenever my name was mentioned, there was always some crack about how I didn’t smile enough.
I can’t tell you how many times I flipped through a magazine only to come across someone trashing me in print. I’d hand it to my father so that I wouldn’t look at it. But five minutes later, I’d take it back and continue torturing myself.
No matter how good I was on the court, I was never good enough for the public.
It wasn’t enough to play nearly perfect tennis. I had to do that and also be charming. And that charm had to appear effortless.
I couldn’t seem to be trying to get them to like me. I could not let anyone ever suspect that I might want their approval. I saw the way they wrote about a player like Tanya McLeod, the way they had contempt for her for trying so hard to be cute. I had contempt for it too.
But c’mon. That’s an awfully small needle to thread.
And the eye of that needle just got smaller and smaller the more successful I became.
It was okay to win as long as I acted surprised when I did and attributed it to luck. I should never let on how much I wanted to win or, worse, that I believed I deserved to win. And I should never, under any circumstances, admit that I did not believe all of my opponents were just as worthy as I was.
The bulk of the commentators…they wanted a woman whose eyes would tear up with gratitude, as if she owed them her victory, as if she owed them everything she had.
I don’t know if it had ever been within me to act like that, but by the age of twenty, it was long gone.
And it cost me.
By the time I was a Grand Slam champion, ranked number two in the world, I had fewer endorsement deals than any of the other players in the top ten. I had no real friendships on the tour or elsewhere.
And while I’d slept around a lot, the longest relationship I’d ever had was with an actor I’d been with a few times at the Chateau Marmont when he was filming in L.A.
He was a huge tennis fan. He’d been there when I won Wimbledon the year before. Maybe it was because of that that I had thought he might actually like me. But after a few weeks, without warning, he stopped calling.
I convinced myself that he’d lost my number. So I tracked down his agent and tried to leave him a message. Upon hearing his agent’s cringing pause, I realized he hadn’t lost my number at all.
So I fucking better be ranked number one. What else did I have?
“Stepanova’s not as good as I am, Dad,” I said. “But she’s still squeaking out way more titles than she should, and that’s how she’s beating me in the end-of-the-year rankings.”
“You go weeks at a time where you’re ranked number one,” he said. “The end-of-the-year ranking is not the best metric.”
“I’m supposed to be the greatest by all metrics,” I said.
My father put his fork down and looked at me as I continued.
“If I am not number one at the end of the year, it is because I did not win enough of the right matches, and thus I am not yet the greatest.”