What I wouldn’t give to run on that track instead of the sand beside it.
I turn my head north, focused on the miles of beach before me.
“？Y bien?” my father says.
Muscle fatigue leads to a lack of agility. You can’t hit your marks as accurately. Your shots don’t have the same sharpness. You can’t get high enough to hit your angles.
He is right. I need to do this.
“Está bien,” I say. “Five miles. I’ll see you soon.”
My father gives me a captain’s salute and then gets back in his car. I watch as he makes his way onto PCH and then drives away from me.
I look down at the sand. I take in a deep breath and start jogging.
It is effortless at first; it always is. And then suddenly, my breath is thicker, my legs feel heavier.
Forty minutes in, I am convinced I must have run the whole five miles already. My father is messing with me; he must have driven ten miles out.
My thighs are killing me. I’m panting. But I can’t slow down—I have to keep the pace my father gave me. I have to be able to do this. This run is something I can control.
The sand is growing hotter, burning the bottoms of my feet. The glare of the sun is blinding. Sweat drenches my forehead, getting in my eyes, soaking my T-shirt.
I clear my mind; I listen to my breath. And for a moment, I stop thinking about the misery of what I’m doing. I think, only, of Nicki Chan.
She is the daughter of Chinese parents, born in London, who picked up a racket at the age of six. A left-handed player, she had an advantage from the beginning. And she was good, maybe even great, at various points throughout her junior career. She turned pro and did fine. I remember playing her. I remember beating her. But then, in 1989, she took half a year off from the tour and completely revamped her game with a coach named Tim Brooks.
Nicki’s groundstrokes became brutal, her serve deadly. She no longer played what we call percentage tennis—always hitting the safe shot. Instead, she opted for the wild, risky shots, each one a cannonball, her stamina unparalleled.
In her new incarnation, she’s a player who dives for the ball, jumps high into the air. She goes into splits on clay, slides like a baseball player into first base.
Her form isn’t always perfect; her shots are sometimes ugly. But she does the one thing we are all out there to do: win.
Unfortunately for her, it’s a bitch on her body. She injures herself more often than most players—a twisted ankle, a sprained elbow, a weak knee, a back problem. She is thirty-one now, and it’s hard to say how much longer she’s got. But there is immense beauty in her game too, the wild desperation of it, the brutality. She is not a dancer. She is a gladiator.
I wonder what she’s doing at this exact moment. I wonder if her ankle is healing. Will she be ready for Paris? Or is this the injury that takes her down for good?
Does she know yet which it is? Is she scared? Is she as anxious as I am to see what this year holds? Or is she thrilled by it all?
I hope at least a part of her is thrilled. It is all so thrilling.
“That was abysmal,” my father says as I finally approach where he is standing on the beach. “It should have been at least ten minutes faster. We come back again ma?ana.”
I can barely breathe. “Bueno,” I gasp. “Ma?ana.”
* * *
—
My life becomes:
Five miles in the sand every other morning.
Forty-yard sprints on the days off.
Hitting against a machine spitting balls at me that are as fast as 80 miles per hour.
Playing against hitters for hours on end.
My father clocking my serves with a radar gun and shaking his head until I hit at least 120 miles per hour.
And then, when the sun begins to set and evening takes hold, watching tape.
My father and I watch my matches in Melbourne to figure out what I could have done better. We watch Cortez, Perez, Odette Moretti, Natasha Antonovich, Suze Carter, Celine Nystrom, Petra Zetov, and Andressa Machado at the IGA Classic in Oklahoma City.
My father’s jaw tenses as we watch Natasha Antonovich dominate in the final against Moretti. He doesn’t have to say anything—I already know his concern.
Antonovich plays like I used to. She’s fast, with a full arsenal of shots. It will not be easy for me to go up against her in Paris, if I have to.
“I think we should go to Indian Wells,” my father says as we turn off the TV one night. “See these players up close again, look for their weak spots. Train to defeat them.”
“All right,” I say. “Sure.”