“I will be two months better of a player than I am today,” I say.
A Jeep pulls into the driveway and Bowe gets out. He looks older and grayer than the last time I saw him, weathered—like a leather wallet that has lightened and wrinkled at the folds. He sees us and waves as he heads toward the court.
My father pats me on the back. “Let’s see what this thug over here has got left in him. He’s already ten minutes late.”
“Be nice, Dad.”
“I will be perfectly nice to his face, you know that,” he says. “But it is my God-given right to complain about him behind his back.”
* * *
—
One of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening.
But Bowe swiftly puts any of my resentments about that to rest. He looks like shit and I take him in straight sets.
When the match is over, he sits on the ground, staring at the racket in his hand. “You demolished me,” he says.
“My daughter is one of the very best in the world,” my father reminds him.
“Yes, I know,” Bowe says. “But still.”
My father rolls his eyes and goes inside to get more water. I sit down next to Bowe.
“Today went well for me,” I say. “I’m not going to lie.”
Bowe looks up. His brown eyes are so big and wide, and his hair is cut close to his head, gray creeping across his temples. His skin is sun-beaten. It has been a big ten years.
“You played well,” he says. “You’re not all that far from the Carrie I knew.”
I am surprised by his magnanimity. I would not possess it in his position.
“Thank you,” I say. “There is still a long way to go. Still seems like I’m running through mud out there.”
Bowe nods. “I know what you mean.”
“And it is not enough to be good,” I say. “It’s not even enough to be great. I have to be…”
“You have to be better than you’ve ever been,” Bowe says, “to go up against this crop of women. I’ve seen some of them. Chan’s a killer, but Cortez is deadly too.”
“I know,” I say, feeling myself tense up.
“Look, I’ve been in this part of my career for years now. Competing against people half my age, practically. Some of these women you’re going to face are twenty years younger than us. They have brand-new knees—fresh from the factory. Brand-new everything, not a stress fracture on them.”
“That is not helping—”
“Brand-new hearts too. They haven’t been shattered yet, haven’t taken a beating over and over. New hearts bounce back faster.”
“You’re not—”
“You know what my heart is—no, my soul? It’s like an old mattress that’s been bounced on so many times that now, if you put your hand on it, it leaves a permanent imprint. That’s what my soul is now. Just a big old mattress showing every dent.”
“Were you always so good at self-pity?”
Bowe laughs. “Why do you think I drank so much?”
I turn from him and let a tennis ball roll away from me, just watching it drift farther and farther into the court.
I say, “Listen, I can’t get better unless you get better. I need to play somebody good, and I need it now. So quit it with the crying and try to play the game.”
Bowe looks away. “I don’t know. It might be better to get someone else. Somebody on the WTA.”
I sigh. “It’s not that simple.” I look at the net, rattling in the breeze, and then back at him. “Nobody on the WTA will play me.”
Bowe’s eyes go wide. “Are you serious?”
“Bowe, I’ve heard it enough times; I don’t need it from you too. Nobody likes me––I get it.”
Bowe catches my gaze. “I always liked you.”
I roll my eyes. “Being attracted to me and liking me are two different things.”
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.