I look down at my yellow sneakers on the green turf. Maybe this whole season has been leading here. Maybe I just needed to come back to Wimbledon.
I stand up, trying to find one of the facility managers to get a ball machine. But when I scan the area, I see Nicki Chan walking past my court.
I pretend not to see her at first, but it soon becomes clear she’s not the type to let me get away with that. Why are people like this? Honestly. Let’s all just walk by each other all day and not stop to small-talk.
“Carrie,” she says, smiling, extending her hand.
“You practice here?” I ask. “I would have thought you’d—”
Nicki shakes her head. “This place is a bit quieter. And I needed some focus. I booked a court out here for the next few weeks until we all head over to Wimbledon Park. You did too, then?”
“Yep.”
Nicki laughs. “We both had the same good idea. All right, well,” she says. “Maybe one of these days we can grab a drink.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I mean, no, I’m probably not going to do that.”
Nicki laughs again. And I find it irritating, that laugh. It feels performative, like some false unflappability. “You know what somebody on the tour told me about you back in the day?” she asks.
“Oh great, here we go.”
“No, no, it’s not bad. Just…she said that you seem tough, you seem cold. But really, you’re one of those players who keep to themselves because you feel conflicted when you have to kick somebody’s ass.”
“I just think it keeps it a lot simpler…to not care too much for anybody.”
Nicki nods. “I understand.”
“You don’t feel that way?” I ask.
Nicki shakes her head. “I’d wreck my best friend in cold blood on national television.”
* * *
—
The next morning, I’m awake at four. I can’t stand to lie here, turning from one side to the other, fluffing the pillow, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Paris.
How I fucked it all up.
Handed Nicki that record.
I get out of bed and go into the living room. Ali put the matches I requested on VHS tapes and sent them over. I shuffle through the box until I find the one I need.
Soto vs. Antonovich.
My chest tightens as I put the tape in the machine and press play.
It’s painful to watch. I hate how helpless I am to prevent what I know will happen onscreen. But it is my only way of ensuring that it does not happen again.
Right from the jump, I’m fast but I’m sloppy. My pace is so hurried, I’m not setting up my angles. I’m running for shots I know I can’t get.
I have to will myself not to turn off the television.
The second set, I’m just plainly making bad choices. Not disguising my shots well. Hitting a groundstroke right to her. Sending a slice way too short. I’m choking. Just choking out there.
All because I’m trying to prove to Antonovich that she’s not faster than me. When I can see it so clearly on the tape.
She is faster than me. That’s exactly what she is.
* * *
—
I head down to the courts hours earlier than I’d planned. There is no one there. I’ve got the place to myself. And so I start hitting against the ball machine.
Part of what I love about a grass surface is how it requires such quick thinking. Other players may be able to run faster from one side of the court to the other. They might even be able to hit the ball so it moves faster across the net. But what I have always been good at, the challenge I have always taken pleasure in rising to, is thinking on my feet on a tennis court.
You have to ask and answer a series of questions in rapid succession: Where is the ball going? What way will it bounce when it hits? How do I want to hit it back? And where do I need to be standing in order to do that?
When I was a child, my father focused on the fundamentals—the stances, the form.
Look at the ball, turn, swing.
Look, turn, swing.
Look, turn, swing.
Look, turn, swing.
With a serve, it was legs bent, arms up, toss, hit, follow through.
Legs, arms, toss, hit, follow.
Legs, arms, toss, hit, follow.
Legs, arms, toss, hit, follow.
Hour after hour, day after day, the same drills. Sometimes not even hitting an actual ball but just doing the motions, feeling the routine of it. My dad would even make me do it in front of a mirror, watching each movement in my body as I flowed through the form.
I remember getting so frustrated at the repetition—the sheer boredom. My father made me practice long after I’d perfected it. And I would rail against him when I was a kid, but he would not be swayed from his plan, even one session.
“Do you think about breathing?” he asked me one afternoon on the courts when I was complaining. “You are breathing, with your lungs, every second you are alive, no?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But do you think about it?”
“No, my body just does it.”
“Think about how little else you could do if you had to think about how to breathe every time you did it.”
“Okay…”
“I want your form to be like breathing. Right now, hijita, you are still doing it with your mind,” he told me. “We will not stop until you have done it so many times, your body does it without thinking. Because then, you’ll be free to think of everything else.”
I don’t know if I understood it then or just resolved to do as I was told. But when I joined the junior circuits and then the WTA, and I looked at the other women I was playing, I could see how slowly most other players reacted.
My father had crammed my forms, my stances, my strokes into my mind with such repetition that it made its way into my cells. It lived in my muscles and joints.
It’s true, still, today.
And so, with every ball that comes at me, my mind remains free to run through every single shot I have in my arsenal, to consider the flaws in the court. I can better anticipate a bad bounce, or find a shot my opponent isn’t expecting.
And then comes the moment when I make contact with the ball—and in that split second, muscle memory takes over.
Grass has always been perfect for that type of play.
As I stand here on the court, up against the ball machine, meeting each ball after the bounce, I am fluid. My body is just doing this. It is almost as if I’m not even here. This grace, this flow, this effortlessness––this is 1983 me.
When the machine runs out of balls for the fourth time, I stop. All hundred of them are strewn about on the other side of the court.
I am sweating and breathless. I look at my watch. I’ve been out here almost three hours—but I would have sworn it was twenty minutes. And for one brief moment, it feels like I am Carrie Soto.
“Hello.”
I turn to find Nicki watching me through the fence, one hand gripping the grate. Goddammit.
“Oh. Hi.”
“I came this early to avoid you,” Nicki says, laughing.
“Sorry, been out here since about five a.m.”
Nicki nods. “It is stunning,” she says. “Watching you play.”
I walk toward her. “Yeah, well, I am very good.”
Nicki laughs again. “Yes, you are. The beauty of your form is…it’s breathtaking. I remember it always being that way. You could see it even on TV back in the day. Just now, as I was spying a bit…” She shakes her head. “It’s gorgeous tennis.”
How am I supposed to respond to that? “A drink, tonight,” I hear myself say. “If you still want. At the Savoy.”
Nicki nods. “I’ll be there.”
* * *
—
Later that afternoon, I’m on the phone in the living room of my suite, looking out the window. “No sé, papá, pero…I just…I’m feeling that hum. I’m feeling like this could be it. This one could be mine.”
His voice is small. “It will be, hija,” he says. I keep pressing my ear harder into the receiver, as if by pressing hard enough, I can force myself through the line and be right next to him. “It will be.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Bien, bien. Pero do not worry about me. Bowe is coming later this morning. I’m going to demolish him in another round of chess.”
“And what does Dr. Whitley say?”
“She says everything is great. Stop worrying,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “Está bien.”
I don’t say what I’m thinking. You are all I have.
* * *