Paulina the Powerful Dominates the Rest. Stepanova Steps Out to Deafening Applause.
Publicly, I kept my face neutral. But afterward, in the hotels and on the long flights, I raged.
“She is in my way,” I told my father.
“It is your first year on the tour,” he said. “Not everything comes the second you want it. Keep your head down and keep working. You will get there.”
I did what he told me. I did everything he told me. Extra training sessions, no Sundays off, studying tapes of other opponents’ matches. I watched Mary-Louise Bryant up against Tanya McLeod, Olga Zeman vs. Amparo Pereira. I watched tape of Stepanova up against everybody. Even me.
And my father and I adjusted. I learned to take it out of the air earlier with Stepanova, slow the game down against Mary-Louise, come out of the gate strong against Tanya McLeod, try to piss off Pereira.
Throughout ’75, I climbed my way up the rankings.
61st
59th
30th
18th
16th
12th
11th
During the fall of ’75, I finally got the chance to go head-to-head with Stepanova for a title when the two of us made the final of the Thunderbird Classic. I’d never beaten her in a meaningful tournament before. But as we got to the third set, I felt a groundedness, an energy, and started to sense that familiar hum in my bones.
When the score was 6–6, we went to a tiebreaker. I kept on her. The tiebreaker went to 12–12, but I could see her slowing. She double-faulted, and then I served an ace.
And it was over. I’d won.
Afterward, during my press conference, it was confirmed that my win had officially broken me into the top ten. I was seventeen years old and the number ten player in the world. I smiled when I heard the news. One of the reporters commented, “We are not used to seeing you smile. You should smile more.” I immediately pulled my lips tight.
In her post-match, someone asked Stepanova, “You and Carrie Soto have proven to be well-matched competitors. Do you agree?”
She said nothing for a moment and then leaned into the microphone. “My shoulder started aching earlier this morning. I played through the pain, but it took a toll. Carrie would not have won otherwise. She does not have the ability to beat me when I am playing my best.”
“Is this a joke?” I said to my father as I watched it on TV. “She was fine! She wasn’t injured! What a crock!”
My father insisted I ignore her, and so I tried.
By the end of the year, I was ranked number four. Stepanova was three.
In an interview with SportsPages, Paulina was asked how she felt about “Soto vs. Stepanova” becoming a rivalry for the ages. We had gone up against each other in the final of two Slams that year, as well as a number of tournaments around the world. Sportswriters were calling it “the Cold War.”
“Carrie Soto, people talk about her a lot now, yes,” Stepanova said. “But she needs to lose about ten pounds or so if she wants to win against me when I am not injured. That is not a rivalry.”
When I read that quote, I put the magazine down and then kicked a trash can in my hotel suite, sending it across the room and making a dent in the wall.
My father shook his head. “Control yourself, hija. You are not competing with her. You are competing with yourself.”
“I am competing with her,” I said. “And I’m losing.”
* * *
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“This is a long game,” my father said to me as we were flying back from the Australian Open in 1976, where I’d lost to Stepanova in the semifinals and she’d gone on to win the damn thing.
“I’m done with the long game,” I said. The flight attendants had just served us a full breakfast, and my father had devoured his. Mine was untouched. “I need to win every single time I go up against her,” I said.
“She is playing better than you right now,” he said. “But you are capable of more. That is your secret, that you have even more potential. We will figure it out.”
I slammed my window shade up. “I don’t want potential. I want wins now.”
Despite the fact that I was eighteen, my father put his hand gently on my shoulder and said, “We are Sotos. We do not yell, and we do not throw temper tantrums if we’re not good enough. What do we do?”
“We get good enough,” I said as I turned my head away from him and settled my gaze out the window. For a moment, I couldn’t remember which country we’d left and which we were going to. I looked down, and that was when I remembered we were over the Pacific.