Read: 2026-07-05
Recommend: 8/10
She used to be little more than a symbol to me, but reading her 2017 memoir made her feel much more real. What stood out most was her remarkable mental toughness and extraordinary tolerance for pain. She is also relentlessly driven by her desire to beat everyone else.
She was fortunate to have a devoted father who brought her to the United States to pursue the tennis dream of becoming number one in the whole world. Another interesting takeaway was that, much like Andre Agassi, she does not love (or hate) tennis. Tennis is simply what she does.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
He started by reading everything he could find about the sport and coaching. In the end, he decided he would not be my coach but the strategist overseeing the coaches—a coach of coaches. “Behind all great careers, there’s one advisor, one voice,” he explained. “You can bring different people in to give you whatever you need, but there has to be that one person in control. That’s not a coach. That’s a person who hires and fires the coaches, who never loses sight of the big picture. It does not have to be a parent, but it usually is. If you look at the history of this game, you’ll see there’s almost always someone like that. The Williams sisters had their father. Agassi had his father and Nick Bollettieri. Everybody needs somebody.”
These early years toughened me up. In fact, I think they explain my character, the style of my game, my on-court persona, why I can be hard to beat. If you don’t have a mother to cry to, you don’t cry. You just hang in there, knowing that eventually things will change—that the pain will subside, that the screw will turn. More than anything, that has defined my career. I do not bitch. I do not throw my racket. I do not threaten the line judge. I do not quit. If you want to beat me, you are going to have to work for every point in every game. I will not give you anything. Some people, especially the sort that grew up in country clubs, on manicured lawns, are not used to a girl who just keeps coming.
Tennis is not a game. It’s a sport and a puzzle, an endurance test. You do whatever you can to win. It has been my enemy and my friend, my nightmare and the solace to that nightmare, my wound and the salve for my wound. Ask anyone who has made a life in this game, who was been out on the clay before they were old enough to understand the consequences of a strange early talent. I know you want us to love this game—us loving it makes it more fun to watch. But we don’t love it. And we don’t hate it. It just is, and always has been.
I give my father tremendous credit: he never lost faith, he never gave up, never took the easy way out. What saved us? What made my career possible? It was not all those times he embraced challenges and said yes. Way too much credit is given to the art or act of saying yes. It was all those times he said no that made the difference. Up to this point, yes—beyond this point, no. That was his rebellion, his revolt. He simply refused to let me be part of another person’s scheme. It was me and him and it would stay that way until he found a person he could truly trust. At the moment of temptation—by which I mean the appearance of an easier path—he always said no. And he did not despair about it. Because he’s determined, and because he believed. He believed that his dream for me was destined to come true.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Yuri. “Because if I was in the same situation,” said Bob, “I’d want someone to do the same thing for me.” That’s just what life was like for us in those years. Salt and sugar, bad luck followed by good luck. Every now and then, some bit of greed put us up against it. When that happened, more often than not, it was some person who, for no other reason than just because, saved us with a drive, or a bus ticket, or a place to stay.
But the best parts of my game, those things that made me hard to beat, were mental. They were my intensity, my focus. I could stay after my opponent shot after shot, game after game, never fading, never losing hope, even when I was behind. If there was still a point to play, even if I was down two breaks and facing someone twice my size, I went after it as if I were serving for the match. I’m not sure where this quality came from—my mother, my father, my crazy childhood? Maybe I wasn’t that smart. Maybe, in sports, you have to be dumb enough to believe you always have a chance. And a bad memory—you need that, too. You must be able to forget. You made an unforced error? You blew an easy winner? Don’t dwell. Don’t replay. Just forget, as if it never happened. If you tried something and it did not work, you have to be dumb enough, when the same chance comes around, to try it again. And this time it will work! You have to be dumb enough to have no fear. Every time I step on a court, I believe that I’m going to win, no matter who I’m playing or what the odds say. That’s what makes me so hard to beat.
At a few key moments, I have been spotted and championed by powerful women who came before me. They did not do it for a reward. In fact, they did it anonymously, just interested in giving a leg up to a girl who could play. They did it in service of the game.
You were thinking five or six shots ahead, setting up your opponent, moving her around, using the court like a chessboard, and I don’t think that kind of vision and skill can be taught. You either see that way or you don’t. It was your eyes, like I said. You just understood everything that was going on, the tennis angles and all of that.
For coaches and equipment, court time and travel and trainers and specialists and whatever. Altogether, the budget amounted to something like a hundred thousand dollars a year—money that IMG would get back if I ever made it as a pro.
I remember walking through the halls of stadiums, hotel corridors, crying. I remember the way the other girls looked at me—less with respect than with pity, with joy disguised as compassion, looking down on someone they had once feared.
Anyone can be composed and cool while winning, when everything is going according to plan. But how do you deal with a losing streak? That’s the big question—that’s what separates the professionals from the cautionary tales.
“You had no fear, even at fourteen, when you were playing your first match on the professional tour, at night, on a bad clay court, and things weren’t going well,” he said not long ago. “You were not choking, you were not getting nervous. That loss told me more than any victory could have. Because you did not back off or give in. You did not say, ‘Oh, let me hit some high balls with topspin.’ You just kept going for it and going for it. That’s when I knew that Yuri was right. You were going to be the number one player in the world.”
And, the fact is, you probably need someone like that if you’re going to make it to the top. Maybe that’s the case with every sport, but it seems especially true of the non-team sports, those games to which you have to dedicate your life when you are still too young to really know anything. It usually takes a strong parent. Who else is going to get out there day after day and make the kid work when the kid only wants to go back to sleep or play video games? No seven-year-old in the world will do that on her own, and no twelve-year-old will stay with it when things go bad, as they always sometimes do, unless someone is right there cheering them along. In other words, you might not like all the antics and the TV time of the tennis parent, but, without those parents, you would not have the Williams sisters or Andre Agassi or me. The tennis parent is the will of the player before the player has formed a will of her own.
Losing. I know what losing does to you. I’d learned its lessons on tennis courts all over the world. It knocks you down but also builds you up. It teaches you humility and gives you strength. It makes you aware of your flaws, which you then must do your best to correct. In this way, it can actually make you better. You become a survivor. You learn that losing is not the end of the world. You learn that the great players are not those who don’t get knocked down—everyone gets knocked down—they are those who get up just one more time than they’ve been knocked down. Losing is the teacher of every champion. But winning? On this level? It was entirely new and I would have to learn its lessons, which can be devastating. In short, winning fucks you up. First of all, it brings all kinds of rewards, which, if seen from the proper perspective, reveal themselves for what they really are: distractions, traps, snares. Money, fame, opportunity. Each laurel and offer and ad and pitch takes you further from the game. It can turn your head. It can ruin you, which is why there are many great players who won just a single Grand Slam, then seemed to wander away. They simply lost themselves in the thicket of success. And then there is what winning does to your mind, which is even more dangerous. It completely distorts your expectations. You start to feel entitled. When you win Wimbledon, you expect to win Wimbledon every year.
you are in all these different towns and cities, the most beautiful places in the world, but, unless you now and then force yourself out of the bubble, you see none of it. You are in cities but not in cities. You are in the world of tennis, where the rooms are filled with the same people and the same energy, no matter where you happen to be
I do not have to be the best player in the world to be the best player in the world. I just have to be a little bit better than the other player on that particular day.
I was playing Nadia Petrova, a Russian girl who I didn’t think much of. It was just something about her. Maybe it’s more intense when you’re facing another Russian. It’s like you’re playing for the love of the same parent. That intensity can feel like hatred. I assume, when I stop playing, that everyone will be able to forgive me and that I will be able to forgive everyone, but as long as I am in the game, I need that intensity. It’s never really personal. It’s never really about the other girl. It’s fuel. I need it to win.
My father had always said you need to change it up, get together with new and different people every few years, because it adds energy and revitalizes routine and vanquishes boredom. Boredom, routine—those can be the most deadly foes of all. Eventually, and there is irony in this, Yuri’s advice led me to the conclusion that I had to separate from Yuri himself.
Despite the large amount of support and love I received from people in my life, I felt so lonely and small. And nothing they said could make me feel any better. So I decided to resume my childhood habit of writing in a journal, putting my sad thoughts on paper. As days went by, that paper became my best friend, the only friend I could trust, the only friend I could share with.
What sets the great players apart from the good players? The good players win when everything is working. The great players win even when nothing is working, even when the game is ugly; that is, when they are not great. Because no one can be great every day. Can you get it done on the ugly days, when you feel like garbage and the tank is empty? That’s the question. I’ve been close to flawless on a few lucky afternoons—I can count them on one hand—but it’s usually a question of figuring out how to win with whatever I’ve got. There are so many matches that I’ve won just by figuring out how to sneak by. Grigor has yet to learn how to do that. It’s like if it’s not easy, if it’s not perfect, he does not want to do it.
You need to go twice as hard to look half as natural. You need to double your effort to get the same result. In other words, practice is everything. If you have a bad practice, you will have a bad match. If you let up for one day, you will most likely exit your next tournament one day early. In other words, you pay for everything. If you take a day for yourself here, you give up a day on the courts.
there is no perfect justice, not in this world. You can’t control what people say about you and what they think about you. You can’t plan for bad luck. You can only work your hardest and do your best and tell the truth. In the end, it’s the effort that matters. The rest is beyond your control.