“Respondeme,” I said. “？Creés que puedo hacerlo?”
He threw his hands into the air. “Why won’t you listen to what I’m trying to tell you, Carolina?”
I stepped closer to him. My breath slowed; my mouth turned down. “Do you think I can beat her, Dad?” I asked him. “Yes or no.”
He finally looked up at me, and I swear my heart started breaking before he even said it. “I do not know.”
I closed my eyes and tried to stay upright, but my legs nearly gave out. I sat down, but then just as quickly, I was back on my feet.
“Te podés ir,” I said.
I ran to my hotel room door and opened it. “？ANDATE DE ACá!” I said to him.
“Carolina,” my father said.
“Get out of my room,” I said. “We’re done.”
“Carolina, you cannot be done with your father.”
“I’m talking to you as my coach,” I said. “Get out.”
My father stood, his shoulders low. His eyelids half closed, suddenly heavy. He hung his head.
“Te amo, hija,” he said as he walked into the hallway.
I shut the door behind him.
In the morning, I got up and went to the court alone. My father flew home to L.A. later that day.
1979–1982
Soon after, I began training with Lars six days a week, even on match days. Within a few months, I’d lost three pounds of fat and gained a pound of muscle, almost entirely in my arms and shoulders.
My serve got bigger. I could run half a second faster. My groundstrokes got harder.
But it was my jump that improved the most. Lars had me getting higher than I’d ever gone. Suddenly, I had better angles on my serves, I was taking balls out of the air faster, and I was returning shots that were nearly unreturnable. I hadn’t seen that big a difference in my performance since the work on my slice. It was now almost impossible to get a ball past me.
By September, I’d beaten Stepanova at the Italian and French Opens, advanced further than her at Wimbledon.
The morning of the first round of the US Open, I went into the locker room seeded second. I knew that if I played Stepanova, it would not be until the final. There were players all around the lockers chatting with one another. I didn’t make eye contact.
Suze Carter, a seventeen-year-old player new to the tour, came up to me. “I hope you win,” she said. “Everyone’s saying that if you take the trophy, there’s no way Stepanova can hold on to number one.”
Ines Dell’oro, a volleyer who had been around a few years, put her hand on Suze’s shoulder. “Don’t waste your breath. The Battle Axe doesn’t talk to us,” she said. “We are beneath her.”
I looked at Suze. “Thank you,” I said.
And then I looked at Ines. “I am ranked number two. And you are ranked—what? Maybe thirty? So in this case, yes, you are beneath me.”
* * *
—
As predicted, Stepanova and I met in the final.
And while the end-of-the-year rankings were still months away, she and I both knew the stakes of the match. It would determine who ended the year number one.
And over the course of two hours and ten minutes, I took the match and championship.
After the cheering and the award ceremony, as I made my way back to the locker room, I saw Lars in the tunnel standing there, grinning. “Prachtig, Soto! Great air, just like I taught you,” he said. “And now, you will end this year best in the world.” He smacked me on my back, and then suddenly he was gone. He’d left to talk to the reporters.
I didn’t take a step toward the lockers. I stood there, unmoving. I was waiting for it to feel the way I’d always imagined it would. For someone to hug me and tell me I had vanquished the enemy like the Greeks against Troy…
But, of course, there was none of that.
* * *
—
That fall, I beat Stepanova at the US Indoor, the Thunderbird Classic, and the Porsche Grand Prix. With her shoulder out of commission at the Emeron Lion Cup, I took her down in straight sets.
In December—having been ranked number one for thirty straight weeks—I flew to Melbourne. The Australian Open started on Christmas Eve. In a little less than a week, the end-of-the-year rankings would come out.
That night, as I sat in my hotel room, hearing Christmas music from the streets below, I finally picked up the phone to call my father. It had been almost eleven months since we had spoken.
“Hello?”
His voice, once such an everyday presence that it was as if it were my own, had been gone from my life. I expected it to sound foreign or strange to me now. But instead, it felt utterly familiar, as if nothing had changed.