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.