Bowe looks at me a moment longer. “Huh,” he says. “Wow.”
“What?”
“I…you’re right.”
“You didn’t already know that?” I shake my head. “You’re almost forty. How emotionally stunted can you be?”
Bowe looks at me and frowns. But he has the grace to refrain from pointing out that I am throwing stones from my glass house.
“Why are you coming back?” Bowe says. “Why put yourself through this?”
I shrug. “I just can’t…” I tell him. “I just can’t let her have it.”
Bowe nods.
“Why are you doing it?” I ask. “Why not quit?”
“I don’t know,” Bowe says, sighing. “Maybe I should.”
“But you haven’t. So it must be for some reason.”
“I suppose it must,” he says. He stands up and wipes the dirt off himself. He reaches his hand out to pull me up, but I stand up on my own.
“Let’s go again,” he says. “Two out of three. I’m not gonna win any tournaments playing how I played this morning. And quite frankly, neither are you.”
“You sure you’re ready to play me again?” I ask him as I walk toward the baseline. “Can you suffer the indignity of losing to a woman twice in one day?”
“I told you, Carrie,” Bowe says. “You’re not as charming as you think you are.”
“Okay,” I say, shrugging. “But I don’t think I’m very charming at all.”
Just Because Soto Can Doesn’t Mean She Should
By John Fowler
Op-Ed, Sports Section
California Post
Much has been made of Carrie Soto’s comeback. In her interview with SportsPages last week, Carrie seems to think she has a great chance of winning in Melbourne at the top of next year. “A lot of people think I’m crazy. But I’ve done exceptional things in my career. Remember that.” As if she would ever let us forget.
Soto is just one more in a string of desperate celebrities who cannot live without a spotlight. One would hope by now she would have moved on to starting a family or running her foundation. But no. She’s back on the court.
Over the course of my lifetime, I have watched many of the sports I love become commodified into celebrity-industrial-complex machines, churning out champions who turn out to be no role models at all. Tonya Harding and Pete Rose come to mind. And I write this as the nation waits with bated breath to find out what kind of man O. J. Simpson truly is.
It seems the best we can hope for from our legends is that they merely become self-obsessed image-conscious shills for soft drinks, sneakers, and watches.
And who is surprised? This is but the natural consequence of putting athletes on the front of a Wheaties box all those years ago. When they retire, they cannot stand to be like the rest of us, seeing our own faces only in family photos and mirrors. They yearn for yet another billboard.
Soon, Carrie Soto is sure to show us just exactly what five years of retirement does to a tennis player’s body. But I’m more interested in what those five years have done to her brain.
It appears she is today even worse than she was back then: even more self-absorbed and wickedly ambitious.
If it makes for a good show, then who am I to stand in the way of the spectacle? But I can tell you this: When the players set this kind of example in a gentleman’s sport, no one wins.
Why I’m Thankful for Carrie Soto
Letter from the Editor
Helene Johannes
Vivant Magazine
When I was eleven years old, my mother sat me down at the table and explained to me that I was now too old to wrestle in the backyard with my younger brothers.
“It’s not appropriate anymore,” she said. She had softened the reprimand by making me a warm apple cider. “I need you inside with me from now on, helping with dinner.”
That evening, I sat at the kitchen table watching my three little brothers wrestle as I peeled the potatoes.
My mother has long passed away and my brothers and I are all adults now. But I would be lying if I said that the memory of losing my favorite pastime with my brothers—running around in the crisp fall weather, hearing the crunching of leaves as I tackled one of them—didn’t ache.
Some men’s childhoods are permitted to last forever, but women are so often reminded that there is work to be done.
And yet here is Carrie Soto, daring to play.
I felt a sense of thrill at her announcement last month. And it’s not just me; so many of my friends seem to agree. Carrie Soto is living the dream for all of us, coming back for one last go around the block.