“Excuse me?” I said, standing up. “Recalibrate my expectations?”

  “Carrie,” my father said. “Please listen to me.”

  “No,” I said, putting my hands up. “Don’t use your calm voice and act like you’re being nice. Because you’re not. Having someone on this planet who is as good as me—or better—means I have not achieved my goal. If you would like to coach someone who is fine being second, go coach someone else.”

  I threw my napkin down and walked out of the restaurant. I made my way through the lobby to the parking lot. I was still furious by the time my father caught up to me by my car.

  “Carolina, stop, you’re making a scene,” he said.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is?” I shouted. It felt shocking to me, to hear my own voice that loud. “To give everything you have to something and still not be able to grasp it! To fail to reach the top day after day and be expected to do it with a smile on your face? Maybe I’m not allowed to make a scene on the court, but I will make a scene here, Dad. It is the very least you can give me. Just for once in my life, let me scream about something!”

  There were people gathering in the parking lot, and each one of them, I could tell, knew my name. Knew my father’s name. Knew exactly what they were witnessing.

  “WHAT ARE YOU ALL LOOKING AT? GO ON ABOUT YOUR SAD LITTLE DAYS!”

  I got in my convertible and drove away.

  * * *

  —

  The second I got back to my hotel suite, I sat down on the sofa and grabbed the phone off the side table. I put it in front of me and stared at it for a brief moment before picking up the receiver and dialing.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s Carrie.” My heart rate was rising; I could feel my face flushing. I kept looking at the door, knowing my father could walk through it at any moment.

  “The Battle Axe! Finally!” Lars Van de Berg said. “I have left you countless messages.”

  He’d been calling more and more as Mary-Louise’s career began to plateau.

  “Yes, well,” I said. “It has been a complicated call to return.”

  “Yes, I’d imagine it is.”

  “I’m the number two player in the world,” I said. I cradled the phone between my ear and my shoulder. I hunched over, my elbows on my knees. “I should be number one.”

  “I agree,” Lars said.

  “Javier thinks that being second is a great achievement and I should be proud,” I said.

  “Well, he is your father. I have three children, and I want, very much, for them to be happy,” Lars said. “But sometimes I think being the very best is antithetical to being happy.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly.” I stood up and carried the phone with me to my balcony. I watched the palm trees sway in the wind. There was a breeze coming through, and I was thankful for it, despite the January chill in Florida.

  “Carrie, listen to me. I am one of the best coaches in women’s tennis, you know this. Everyone has known this since I coached Chrissy Salvos to take eight titles in ’62. What Mary-Louise and I have done together is truly spectacular, given her ability. But she is not performing at the level I need.”

  “This would hasten the end of her career,” I say. “If you were to leave her now.”

  “It might. But you cannot worry about that.”

  “She’d be worried about it, if the situation were reversed. She’d be considering my feelings.”

  “Yes,” he said, then sighed. “She would. And she wonders why she never reached her full potential. Look, I have never coached a player with as much natural talent as you. And as coaches, we can’t do our best work without the perfect player. I will never know what I am truly capable of until I have the chance to coach someone as good as you. I need you to do my greatest work. I am a sculptor. And you are the finest piece of clay I could ever work with. I saw that back in ’68 when you first played Mary-Louise. And I will tell you now what I told your father then: He has done a fine job honing your talent. And I can take it from here.”

  I looked back at the door of the suite. “What are you going to do that my father has not done?”

  “Are you ready to have this conversation now?” he asked.

  I stared at the people walking on the streets below me. The cars pulling away from the curb into traffic. The family chatting on the corner while they waited for a walk signal.

  “It is the only reason I called,” I said.

  “Well,” he said. “The gap between the player you are today and the player you want to be—”

  “I want to be the greatest tennis player in the world,” I said.

  “That gap is not big. We are talking about that vital half-percent improvement. And that’s not found in changing your strategy. It’s in shortening the nanosecond of time between getting to the ball and slicing it across the court. It is going to be found in the minute change you make to the angle of your serve. The details are fine, and they are going to get finer. It is going to be nearly imperceptible, the ways we need to change your game. No one will be able to see it from the outside, but Stepanova is going to feel it. Every time she loses to you for the next ten years.”

  I could feel my pulse in my ears; my face felt hot. “Okay,” I said. “How do we do that?”

  “Are you cross-training?” he asked.

  “I run and do drills.”

  Lars laughed. “That’s not enough. Stepanova is right about one thing––you need to lose at least a couple pounds. We need you doing sprints, lunges, weight training. You can jump higher to hit overheads. You rarely do—it’s a weakness in your game, in my opinion. I want to see what happens when you blast off the court into the air. Take out some of Stepanova’s lobs before they hit the ground. We start there and see where we get.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “If we are doing this, I need to know right now that you believe I can bury her. That I can be number one.”

  “If I am your coach and you do not become the number-one-ranked player for the year,” he said, “I will be disgusted.”

  A shield was forming over me, a hard edge. “Okay,” I said. “I will call you soon to discuss this more. Don’t say a word. To anyone.”

  When I turned back into my suite, my father was standing by the coffee table.

  He was staring at me, his eyes wide and tearing up. I had never seen this version of him before.

  “What have you done?” he said softly. His voice was barely a whisper. It cracked as it escaped his mouth. “Carolina.”

  “I cannot have a coach who is less ambitious for me than I am for myself,” I said. My voice was strong and clear despite the fact that I could not look at him.

  “You’re misunderstanding me if you think that’s the case,” my father said. “Y lo sabés.”

  “I don’t know that,” I said.

  “Cariño, since the time you could hold a racket, I have told you that you have the potential to be extraordinary,” Dad said. “I do not know what more ambition a person can have for their child.”

  “You said you believed I was born to be the greatest,” I said. “And now, suddenly, I’m supposed to settle for what I have. For second best.”

  “That’s not what I said. I said that you are already great. That you have achieved everything I dreamed for you.”

  “Why? Because you’ve sold enough books now?”

  My father’s jaw dropped. “How could you say that?”

  I didn’t respond. He already knew. If a coach needs clay, my father had made me his.

  “When I see you play, I see perfection,” he said. “I see the player I always believed you could be. So be happy, right here and now. Because of what you have done, who you’ve become. And not on some condition of being number one.”

  “But why stop striving now, Dad? You’ve raised me to be the very best. That means number one. And I’m not yet. Why are you changing the rules?”

  My father sat down in the chair next to him. But I could not sit down.

  “At least be honest,” I said, shaking my head. “Decime la verdad, papá.” My eyes were burning and starting to tear. “Do you not believe I can do it?” I asked him. “Do you not think I can knock her out of first place?”

  He closed his eyes and sighed. I stared at him, wiping away the tear that fell out of my eye. “After all this time,” I said, “have you given up on me?”

  He did not open his eyes. He did not respond.

  “Respondeme,” I said. “¿Creés que puedo hacerlo?”

  He threw his hands into the air. “Why won’t you listen to what I’m trying to tell you, Carolina?”

  I stepped closer to him. My breath slowed; my mouth turned down. “Do you think I can beat her, Dad?” I asked him. “Yes or no.”

  He finally looked up at me, and I swear my heart started breaking before he even said it. “I do not know.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to stay upright, but my legs nearly gave out. I sat down, but then just as quickly, I was back on my feet.

  “Te podés ir,” I said.

  I ran to my hotel room door and opened it. “¡ANDATE DE ACÁ!” I said to him.

  “Carolina,” my father said.

  “Get out of my room,” I said. “We’re done.”

  “Carolina, you cannot be done with your father.”

  “I’m talking to you as my coach,” I said. “Get out.”

  My father stood, his shoulders low. His eyelids half closed, suddenly heavy. He hung his head.

  “Te amo, hija,” he said as he walked into the hallway.

  I shut the door behind him.

  In the morning, I got up and went to the court alone. My father flew home to L.A. later that day.

  1979–1982

  Soon after, I began training with Lars six days a week, even on match days. Within a few months, I’d lost three pounds of fat and gained a pound of muscle, almost entirely in my arms and shoulders.

  My serve got bigger. I could run half a second faster. My groundstrokes got harder.

  But it was my jump that improved the most. Lars had me getting higher than I’d ever gone. Suddenly, I had better angles on my serves, I was taking balls out of the air faster, and I was returning shots that were nearly unreturnable. I hadn’t seen that big a difference in my performance since the work on my slice. It was now almost impossible to get a ball past me.

  By September, I’d beaten Stepanova at the Italian and French Opens, advanced further than her at Wimbledon.

  The morning of the first round of the US Open, I went into the locker room seeded second. I knew that if I played Stepanova, it would not be until the final. There were players all around the lockers chatting with one another. I didn’t make eye contact.

  Suze Carter, a seventeen-year-old player new to the tour, came up to me. “I hope you win,” she said. “Everyone’s saying that if you take the trophy, there’s no way Stepanova can hold on to number one.”

  Ines Dell’oro, a volleyer who had been around a few years, put her hand on Suze’s shoulder. “Don’t waste your breath. The Battle Axe doesn’t talk to us,” she said. “We are beneath her.”

  I looked at Suze. “Thank you,” I said.

  And then I looked at Ines. “I am ranked number two. And you are ranked—what? Maybe thirty? So in this case, yes, you are beneath me.”

  * * *

  —

  As predicted, Stepanova and I met in the final.

  And while the end-of-the-year rankings were still months away, she and I both knew the stakes of the match. It would determine who ended the year number one.

  And over the course of two hours and ten minutes, I took the match and championship.

  After the cheering and the award ceremony, as I made my way back to the locker room, I saw Lars in the tunnel standing there, grinning. “Prachtig, Soto! Great air, just like I taught you,” he said. “And now, you will end this year best in the world.” He smacked me on my back, and then suddenly he was gone. He’d left to talk to the reporters.

  I didn’t take a step toward the lockers. I stood there, unmoving. I was waiting for it to feel the way I’d always imagined it would. For someone to hug me and tell me I had vanquished the enemy like the Greeks against Troy…

  But, of course, there was none of that.

  * * *

  —

  That fall, I beat Stepanova at the US Indoor, the Thunderbird Classic, and the Porsche Grand Prix. With her shoulder out of commission at the Emeron Lion Cup, I took her down in straight sets.

  In December—having been ranked number one for thirty straight weeks—I flew to Melbourne. The Australian Open started on Christmas Eve. In a little less than a week, the end-of-the-year rankings would come out.

  That night, as I sat in my hotel room, hearing Christmas music from the streets below, I finally picked up the phone to call my father. It had been almost eleven months since we had spoken.

  “Hello?”

  His voice, once such an everyday presence that it was as if it were my own, had been gone from my life. I expected it to sound foreign or strange to me now. But instead, it felt utterly familiar, as if nothing had changed.

  “Hola, papá. Feliz Navidad.”

  The line was quiet for a moment, and I wondered, briefly, if he’d hung up.

  “Feliz Navidad, cariño. I am so incredibly proud of you.”

  My chest began to heave, and I could not stop the tears from falling down my face. He was quiet as I caught my breath.

  “Pichona, you have to know that whatever happens between us, I am always proud of you. Always watching you.”

  “I miss you,” I said.

  My dad laughed. “You think I’ve been having such a grand old time?”

  I dried my eyes.

  “But you are doing beautifully,” he said. “So you keep going. You fight for what you want. Like you always have. And I’ll be here for you.”

  * * *

  —

  I ended the year as the number-one-ranked player on the women’s tour. When it became official, I popped open a bottle of champagne by myself in my hotel room. But then I couldn’t bring myself to pour a glass for only one person.

  After the Australian Open, I flew to my father’s house. When he opened the door, he was holding two glasses of Dom Pérignon. I hugged him and drank the whole glass right there at his door.

  Later, I unpacked my bags in his guest room. My father seared steaks on the grill. And we tried to find a new way of speaking.

  Should I ask my father why there was a women’s razor and an extra toothbrush in his bathroom? Was he going to ask about the tabloid photos that had recently started appearing of me being spotted outside hotels with a few different men?

  Instead, our conversations only went as deep as “It feels wetter this winter than in the past, yes?” and “Oh, so you’ve been drinking Fresca now instead of ginger ale?”

  But my second day home, he came into the living room and asked me if I wanted to go out for ice cream sandwiches.

  “Ice cream sandwiches?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t remember when you were a kid and you always wanted an ice cream sandwich or a sundae?”

  “That…doesn’t sound like me.”

  My father sighed and picked up his car keys. “Come with me, por favor, hija.”

  I looked at my watch. “I mean, I should get to the courts soon to practice.”

  “It will take a half hour,” he said. “You can spare a half hour.”

  That afternoon, I sat in the front seat of my father’s new Mercedes and ate an ice cream sandwich beside him as we people-watched. “These are good,” I said.

  He nodded. “I’m sorry I never let you have one.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m better for it.”

  I could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t sure that was true. And I thought, See, Dad, this is why you’re not my coach anymore.

  But after that, something broke open between us. We went to the movies together. We went out to eat. I bought him a new panama hat. He gave me his old chessboard, “because you must always keep thinking four moves ahead.”

  On my last day before heading back out on the tour, I was packing when my father came and found me. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” he said as I gathered pair after pair of Adidas. They were my biggest endorsement deal after Wilson rackets, and I had been designing a shoe line with them, the Carrie Soto Break Points. While I was not as popular as Stepanova or McLeod, I did have my fans. You couldn’t deny that when I was playing, you were going to see a show. And the number of spectators—and thus endorsement deals—were starting to reflect that.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You’re getting higher and higher out there on the court, reaching for Stepanova’s lobs.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. I stopped packing and looked at him. “And it’s working. I’m beating her every time now.”

  “But you’re landing hard,” he said. “Maybe during clay season it won’t be too much of a problem, but on the hard courts coming up…”

  “I’m landing fine.”

  “Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. You need to bend your leg more when you land. I’m worried your knee—”

  “Lars says it’s fine. Without adding in that height, I’d never—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Lars with you,” my dad said.

  “And I don’t want to talk about my tennis game with you.”

  “Está bien,” my father said. And he left the room.

  * * *

  —

  We talked on the phone every day I was on tour in the early eighties. And we started opening up about things we’d never discussed before.