“Because you played the best you ever have.”
“And every day I will play better and better,” I said. “Until one day, I am the greatest.”
“Until you’ve reached the fullest of your potential. That’s the most important thing. We don’t stop for one second until you are the best you can be,” he said. “We don’t rest. Until it’s finally true. Algún día.”
“Because then I will be who I was born to be.”
“Exacto.”
My father turned back to the steering wheel and put the car in drive. But before he pulled out onto the road, he looked at me one more time. “Do not wonder again, hija, if I would stop coaching you,” he said. “Do not ever wonder that. Nunca.”
I nodded, smiling. I thought I understood perfectly what he was trying to tell me.
“Since today went okay,” I said a few moments later, on the drive home, “I was thinking, about what I did. You know, that worked.”
My father nodded. “Contame.”
I gave him a list of the strategies I’d used, a few of my split-second decisions. And then the last one, “También, just before the match, I cleaned the tops of my shoes.”
My father raised his eyebrows.
“I think maybe it’s a good-luck thing,” I said. “You know? Like some of the pros do.”
My father smiled. “Me encanta.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I think that will help me, you know? I’ll just keep getting better and better. Until one day, when I’m good enough to go pro.”
1971–1975
At age thirteen, I entered the junior championships. I shocked everyone except my father and myself when I won the SoCal Junior Championships that year and catapulted myself up the rankings.
My first time at Junior Wimbledon, I made it all the way to the quarterfinals. The next year, I made it to the final. Quickly, my father and I came to understand that while I was great on a hard surface and could hold my own on clay, I dominated on grass. Winning Junior Wimbledon went from a dream to a goal.
My father took my already aggressive training schedule and kicked it into its highest gear. We went to every tournament we could, regardless of my school schedule. We flew all over the country.
Also, I noticed that my father took on twice as many clients when we were home. Occasionally, he would return to the house late at night with a bounce in his step that I found puzzling.
At first, I thought that maybe he had a girlfriend. But one night, I dragged the truth out of him: He’d been hustling blue bloods at the club. He was making hundreds of dollars in a night.
When I asked him why, he said it kept his mind sharp. But I knew the prices for renting out grass courts, and flights to New York and London, and the entry fees for tournaments.
The next time I saw him leave to go play a match, I walked out onto our tiny stoop and called to him just as his hand grabbed the car door handle.
“Are you sure about all of this?” I asked.
He looked up at me. “Never been more sure of anything in my life,” he said.
I took a deep breath. “I want to drop out of school and dedicate my full days to tennis.”
The Virginia Slims tour was proving to be a significant moneymaker for women who went pro. I was already good enough to compete in some of the main draws. He wouldn’t need to hustle dupes much longer.
“Not yet,” he said. But I could see the corners of his lips turning up. And I could feel the rest of the sentence, though it remained unsaid. Not yet, but soon.
* * *
—
Unless I was competing, I was out on the court from eight a.m. every morning until early afternoon.
From about three to five p.m., I took a break to study with a tutor my father had hired from the yellow pages. And then my dad and I went over strategy for about an hour, which would sometimes bleed into dinner.
After that, if I didn’t have homework, I could do my own thing for an hour or so, and then I went to bed by ten so that I could be up by five-thirty to run, eat breakfast, and study strategy before getting back to the court at eight.
In the spring of ’73, when I was fifteen, my father and I set up shop at Saddlebrook in Florida so that we could play on their grass courts day after day, sharpening every single shot I had in my arsenal, preparing for my third Junior Wimbledon in July.
It was at Saddlebrook that I met Marco.
* * *
—
My father had hired me a hitter named Elena to help me work on my returns. Elena was almost twenty and had an incredible serve. I often wondered, as we played together, why she didn’t hone the rest of her game to try to play professionally. But she seemed entirely uninterested. A fact that I was exceedingly unnerved by.
Instead, every day Elena would show up, hit these incredible serves that made me think faster than I’d ever had to before, and then go on her way.
One day a few weeks in, her younger brother, Marco, came by the courts.
Marco was sixteen and over six feet tall, so he was impossible to miss as he stood outside the green chain-link fence, waiting for Elena to be done. Toward the end of our session, I found myself staring at him for the briefest of seconds. He caught my eye, and I quickly turned away.
But after that, he kept coming back to watch.
I did not know what it meant to have a crush—to feel that inexplicable pull toward another person—but by the third day that Marco showed up, I started to feel a lightness in me that was entirely new.
For weeks, Marco would come earlier and earlier to wait for Elena. Sometimes I could feel him watching me, and I would strain to stay focused on my game.
I would will myself not to look at the perfect square of Marco’s shoulders, his deep brown hair, the slight pout to his lips, the way he leaned so casually against the fence. I tried not to imagine what his hands would feel like across my back.
“Keep your eye on the ball, Carrie!” my father said to me one afternoon. “C’mon now!” He shook his head. And my heart sank, but I straightened up and finished strong.
After we were done, my father went to go book our next court time. As Elena packed up her things, Marco came onto the court and approached me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“I’m Marco,” he said.
“Carrie.”
“I know,” he said, smiling. “Everybody here seems to know who you are.”
Elena put her kit over her shoulder and gestured that she wanted to go. Marco told her he’d meet her at the car and turned back to me.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while, but your dad is always around.”
“Oh.” For a moment, I envisioned him asking me out, and my pulse quickened so intensely that I thought I might pass out.
If he asked me out, what would I even say?
My father had told me earlier in the week to expect double sessions on my backhand and my inside-out forehand. And I’d failed—actually failed—the practice GED my tutor had given me the week before. I’d promised my father I’d study all weekend. Answering yes was entirely impossible. And yet the wish that he would ask grew stronger and stronger in my belly by the second.
“Yeah, so…” he said, but then never finished his sentence. I watched his face, desperate to know what he was thinking. I felt a heaviness, a leaded feeling in my hips. I did not even know what it was that I needed so badly from him, but I could feel how much I needed it.
Instead of saying anything further, Marco put one hand against the fence and closed the gap between us. I watched his lips as he leaned his mouth toward mine. When he finally kissed me, I did not hesitate. I kissed him back with my entire body, pressing myself against him, wanting every inch of me to touch every inch of him.
His lips were so soft and his hands felt warm as they traveled from my shoulders down my torso.
I tilted my head back as his mouth went to my neck, and I moaned quietly, forgetting everything except this boy and his hands and how they felt.