“No,” I said.

  “Have you ever served three aces in a row like you did today?”

  I started tapping my foot as I listened to him. “No,” I said. “My first serve was great today.”

  “You were on fire, cariño,” he said. “You ran down the ball almost every shot.”

  “Yeah, but then I hit it into the net half the time.”

  “Because you are not yet who you will one day be.”

  I looked up at him, my guarded heart opening ever so slightly.

  “Every match you play, you are one match closer to becoming the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen. You were not born that person. You were born to become that person. And that is why you must best yourself every time you get on the court. Not so that you beat the other person—”

  “But so that I become more myself,” I finished.

  “Now you’re getting it,” my father said. “You played the best tennis you’ve ever played in your life.”

  “And you’re happy,” I said. “With me. Because I played great.”

  “Because you played the best you ever have.”

  “And every day I will play better and better,” I said. “Until one day, I am the greatest.”

  “Until you’ve reached the fullest of your potential. That’s the most important thing. We don’t stop for one second until you are the best you can be,” he said. “We don’t rest. Until it’s finally true. Algún día.”

  “Because then I will be who I was born to be.”

  “Exacto.”

  My father turned back to the steering wheel and put the car in drive. But before he pulled out onto the road, he looked at me one more time. “Do not wonder again, hija, if I would stop coaching you,” he said. “Do not ever wonder that. Nunca.”

  I nodded, smiling. I thought I understood perfectly what he was trying to tell me.

  “Since today went okay,” I said a few moments later, on the drive home, “I was thinking, about what I did. You know, that worked.”

  My father nodded. “Contame.”

  I gave him a list of the strategies I’d used, a few of my split-second decisions. And then the last one, “También, just before the match, I cleaned the tops of my shoes.”

  My father raised his eyebrows.

  “I think maybe it’s a good-luck thing,” I said. “You know? Like some of the pros do.”

  My father smiled. “Me encanta.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And I think that will help me, you know? I’ll just keep getting better and better. Until one day, when I’m good enough to go pro.”

  1971–1975

  At age thirteen, I entered the junior championships. I shocked everyone except my father and myself when I won the SoCal Junior Championships that year and catapulted myself up the rankings.

  My first time at Junior Wimbledon, I made it all the way to the quarterfinals. The next year, I made it to the final. Quickly, my father and I came to understand that while I was great on a hard surface and could hold my own on clay, I dominated on grass. Winning Junior Wimbledon went from a dream to a goal.

  My father took my already aggressive training schedule and kicked it into its highest gear. We went to every tournament we could, regardless of my school schedule. We flew all over the country.

  Also, I noticed that my father took on twice as many clients when we were home. Occasionally, he would return to the house late at night with a bounce in his step that I found puzzling.

  At first, I thought that maybe he had a girlfriend. But one night, I dragged the truth out of him: He’d been hustling blue bloods at the club. He was making hundreds of dollars in a night.

  When I asked him why, he said it kept his mind sharp. But I knew the prices for renting out grass courts, and flights to New York and London, and the entry fees for tournaments.

  The next time I saw him leave to go play a match, I walked out onto our tiny stoop and called to him just as his hand grabbed the car door handle.

  “Are you sure about all of this?” I asked.

  He looked up at me. “Never been more sure of anything in my life,” he said.

  I took a deep breath. “I want to drop out of school and dedicate my full days to tennis.”

  The Virginia Slims tour was proving to be a significant moneymaker for women who went pro. I was already good enough to compete in some of the main draws. He wouldn’t need to hustle dupes much longer.

  “Not yet,” he said. But I could see the corners of his lips turning up. And I could feel the rest of the sentence, though it remained unsaid. Not yet, but soon.

  * * *

  —

  Unless I was competing, I was out on the court from eight a.m. every morning until early afternoon.

  From about three to five p.m., I took a break to study with a tutor my father had hired from the yellow pages. And then my dad and I went over strategy for about an hour, which would sometimes bleed into dinner.

  After that, if I didn’t have homework, I could do my own thing for an hour or so, and then I went to bed by ten so that I could be up by five-thirty to run, eat breakfast, and study strategy before getting back to the court at eight.

  In the spring of ’73, when I was fifteen, my father and I set up shop at Saddlebrook in Florida so that we could play on their grass courts day after day, sharpening every single shot I had in my arsenal, preparing for my third Junior Wimbledon in July.

  It was at Saddlebrook that I met Marco.

  * * *

  —

  My father had hired me a hitter named Elena to help me work on my returns. Elena was almost twenty and had an incredible serve. I often wondered, as we played together, why she didn’t hone the rest of her game to try to play professionally. But she seemed entirely uninterested. A fact that I was exceedingly unnerved by.

  Instead, every day Elena would show up, hit these incredible serves that made me think faster than I’d ever had to before, and then go on her way.

  One day a few weeks in, her younger brother, Marco, came by the courts.

  Marco was sixteen and over six feet tall, so he was impossible to miss as he stood outside the green chain-link fence, waiting for Elena to be done. Toward the end of our session, I found myself staring at him for the briefest of seconds. He caught my eye, and I quickly turned away.

  But after that, he kept coming back to watch.

  I did not know what it meant to have a crush—to feel that inexplicable pull toward another person—but by the third day that Marco showed up, I started to feel a lightness in me that was entirely new.

  For weeks, Marco would come earlier and earlier to wait for Elena. Sometimes I could feel him watching me, and I would strain to stay focused on my game.

  I would will myself not to look at the perfect square of Marco’s shoulders, his deep brown hair, the slight pout to his lips, the way he leaned so casually against the fence. I tried not to imagine what his hands would feel like across my back.

  “Keep your eye on the ball, Carrie!” my father said to me one afternoon. “C’mon now!” He shook his head. And my heart sank, but I straightened up and finished strong.

  After we were done, my father went to go book our next court time. As Elena packed up her things, Marco came onto the court and approached me.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “I’m Marco,” he said.

  “Carrie.”

  “I know,” he said, smiling. “Everybody here seems to know who you are.”

  Elena put her kit over her shoulder and gestured that she wanted to go. Marco told her he’d meet her at the car and turned back to me.

  “I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while, but your dad is always around.”

  “Oh.” For a moment, I envisioned him asking me out, and my pulse quickened so intensely that I thought I might pass out.

  If he asked me out, what would I even say?

  My father had told me earlier in the week to expect double sessions on my backhand and my inside-out forehand. And I’d failed—actually failed—the practice GED my tutor had given me the week before. I’d promised my father I’d study all weekend. Answering yes was entirely impossible. And yet the wish that he would ask grew stronger and stronger in my belly by the second.

  “Yeah, so…” he said, but then never finished his sentence. I watched his face, desperate to know what he was thinking. I felt a heaviness, a leaded feeling in my hips. I did not even know what it was that I needed so badly from him, but I could feel how much I needed it.

  Instead of saying anything further, Marco put one hand against the fence and closed the gap between us. I watched his lips as he leaned his mouth toward mine. When he finally kissed me, I did not hesitate. I kissed him back with my entire body, pressing myself against him, wanting every inch of me to touch every inch of him.

  His lips were so soft and his hands felt warm as they traveled from my shoulders down my torso.

  I tilted my head back as his mouth went to my neck, and I moaned quietly, forgetting everything except this boy and his hands and how they felt.

  And then suddenly, we could hear the crunch of the gravel that was my father walking back up the path. Marco pulled his hands away.

  It was over almost as quickly as it had begun. Marco whispered, “I’ll see you around,” and then took off just as my father came back. My father picked up his racket and stood across the court from me and started calling out the shots he wanted to do.

  I hit the ball the same as I always did, but inside, I felt flushed and in possession of my first real secret. It was like opening the front door and letting fresh air into the house.

  For the next month, every day after training, Marco would be there. Whenever my father and Elena weren’t around, he would kiss me in the corner of the court. I felt embarrassed by how much I looked forward to it, by how desperate I was to feel more of him, how often I thought of him when he was gone.

  I felt such an insatiable need for him to touch me, a hunger for his body. It felt exactly like the hunger I felt to win. The sense that at the center of my being there was an unfillable void. There would never be enough matches to win. There would never be enough of Marco.

  And it wasn’t one-sided. He seemed to need me too. I could tell in the hurried way he grabbed me, in the look on his face when I had to leave. I felt bright and shiny for maybe the first time in my life, glowing with the knowledge that I was wanted.

  I’m stunned at what Marco and I got away with in those small pockets of time that spring in Florida, just how far things went. Eventually, we found our way to the back of his parents’ old sedan, parked in the far corner of the parking lot.

  Marco opened up a whole slice of the world for me, a whole new thing my body could do. And I felt consumed by it. I could torture my body all day—making my muscles so tired that my whole body felt heavy. And then in just a few minutes, Marco could lighten every limb, loosen my chest.

  “Are you my boyfriend?” I asked him one afternoon in June, pulling my shirt down and fixing my hair. The start of Junior Wimbledon was only two short weeks away.

  “I don’t think so,” Marco said. “We don’t hang out or anything.”

  “Well, maybe we could,” I said. “After the tournament. It’s in a couple weeks, and when it’s over, I could convince my dad we should come back here.”

  “I don’t want you to come back here just for me,” Marco said as he kissed me on the lips. When he pulled away, he was smiling. I loved his smile—the way his dimples were barely there but I was close enough to see them.

  “But if we like each other…”

  “Sure,” he said. “But it’s good, how it works now. Where we both do our own thing but then do…this.” He kissed my neck, and all over again I found myself closing my eyes, on the verge of surrendering.

  What little I knew of Marco outside of our time together mystified me. He got Cs in school and didn’t play a single sport. His mother and father never kept track of where he was. All he did was play guitar and try to get his band together in his garage to practice. I could barely imagine his world, and yet I could not stop trying.

  I liked the way he talked a lot but never said much. That he never took anything seriously. That nothing ever felt like a big deal. Sometimes, I pictured being with him outside that car. I pictured me sitting across the table from him at a restaurant and having him reach his hand out for mine. For other people to see that he chose me. “I’m just saying, if we wanted to, we could figure it out,” I said.

  “It’s not like you even have time to go to a party with me or do anything I want to do. You’re obsessed with tennis.”

  “I’m not obsessed with anything,” I said. “I’m dedicated to winning. And I work hard at that.”

  “Right,” Marco said. “And so let’s just keep doing what we’re doing.”

  I did not like his answer, but the next afternoon, I met him right back in that car with a smile on my face.

  Maybe Marco and I would never go out to dinner. Maybe I was not the sort of girl who became a girlfriend at all. Maybe I was the type of girl you kissed when no one was looking and that was it. If that was the case, then fine. I would not demean myself enough to want more. But that did not mean I could not have the rest, that my body did not deserve what he could give it.

  When we left Saddlebrook for London, I knew I would probably never see Marco again. But I did not cry. As I watched the plane lift up above the clouds, it seemed obvious to me that there would be other Marcos—that Marcos were easy to find now that I knew to look for them.

  But then as the plane leveled out, I glanced back at my father, who was talking to the flight attendant. I couldn’t quite make sense of him. I kept staring at his face, trying to understand why he looked so foreign to me now.

  There was a space between us that had not ever been there before, a gulf for which there would be no bridge.

  * * *

  —

  Weeks later, I won Junior Wimbledon. I went on to win the next three juniors events. All the coverage started touting me as “the Next Tennis Phenom.”

  My father cut out the headlines from the sports papers. They said things like Upstart Carrie Soto Proves Unstoppable. He put them in frames and hung them up in my bedroom. When they ran an article with the headline is Javier Soto’s Style the Future of Women’s Tennis? he hung that one on the fridge.

  Our phone started ringing so often we had to get an answering machine. Journalists wanted interviews; a racket company was offering me an endorsement deal.

  And there was also a representative from the Virginia Slims tour. In her message, she suggested that it was time for me to enter the main women’s draw.

  My father and I looked at each other.

  My moment was here.

  1975–1976

  The morning of my first match on the Virginia Slims tour, my father gave me a pep talk before I went into the locker rooms. “You can talk and joke around with the other players if you have to,” he said, “but remember they are not your friends, they are your…”

  “Enemies.”

  “Opponents,” he said.

  “Same thing,” I said.

  “And like we talked about, everyone will be looking at you, looking to see if you’re as good as they’ve heard. Ignore all that. Just be good––don’t try to prove it.”

  “Bueno, entiendo.”

  As I turned to go into the locker room, the door swung open and hit me hard in the shoulder. Out walked Paulina Stepanova.

  Eighteen years old, six feet tall, white-blond hair and arms like cannons—she had come out of nowhere. A baseliner from just outside Moscow, she was the kind of competitor I was not expecting. She had just joined the tour two months prior and had already gotten to the final in the Australian Open.

  As Paulina walked by, she barely looked at me. “Izvinite menya, I did not see you there. You are so short.”

  I gave a tight smile and then turned to my father. “I want to beat her to the ground.”

  * * *

  —

  My first year on the tour, I clinched some big titles and quickly turned pro, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars. I was up against some of the biggest names in tennis, women I had looked up to for years, like Amparo Pereira, and players who had long eluded me, like Mary-Louise Bryant. But it was Stepanova the newspapers were talking about.

  Paulina the Powerful Dominates the Rest. Stepanova Steps Out to Deafening Applause.

  Publicly, I kept my face neutral. But afterward, in the hotels and on the long flights, I raged.

  “She is in my way,” I told my father.

  “It is your first year on the tour,” he said. “Not everything comes the second you want it. Keep your head down and keep working. You will get there.”

  I did what he told me. I did everything he told me. Extra training sessions, no Sundays off, studying tapes of other opponents’ matches. I watched Mary-Louise Bryant up against Tanya McLeod, Olga Zeman vs. Amparo Pereira. I watched tape of Stepanova up against everybody. Even me.

  And my father and I adjusted. I learned to take it out of the air earlier with Stepanova, slow the game down against Mary-Louise, come out of the gate strong against Tanya McLeod, try to piss off Pereira.

  Throughout ’75, I climbed my way up the rankings.

  61st

  59th

  30th

  18th

  16th

  12th

  11th

  During the fall of ’75, I finally got the chance to go head-to-head with Stepanova for a title when the two of us made the final of the Thunderbird Classic. I’d never beaten her in a meaningful tournament before. But as we got to the third set, I felt a groundedness, an energy, and started to sense that familiar hum in my bones.