On the Line (28 page)

At the Open, I had to get past what the old me, Serena 1.0, might have seen as the indignity of having to qualify for the
first time in my career. The new me tried to look at it as just another hurdle I’d have to take on the way to getting my game
back. And that’s all it was, really—an obstacle. My rank was back in the double digits, at 91, but that was hardly worth celebrating;
I was still a long way from where I wanted to be, so I had that obstacle, too.

My plan was to mess with other people’s tournaments. Wasn’t really any kind of strategy, but I didn’t have a lot of options.
I knew the seeded players tended to look past their early-round opponents, thinking they’d draw low-ranked rookies and wouldn’t
have to worry too much about surviving their first few matches. I knew this because that used to be how I approached my early-round
opponents. I took them for granted. Here at the U.S. Open, I knew these top players wouldn’t be thrilled to face me in the
first or second round, so I tried to play that to my advantage. And that worked well enough, taking me through the first three
rounds with straight-sets victories over Lourdes Dominguez-Lino, Daniela Hantuchova, and a rising star named Ana Ivanovic,
all in straight sets.

It was in Round 16, though, that I needed to ratchet up my game, and I’m afraid I fell woefully short. I was up against the
top-ranked Amelie Mauresmo of France. We’d faced each other a bunch of times, going back to 1999, and she’d beaten me only
once—in Rome, in 2003, at the end of my great run. Now, things were a little different. Amelie was the same dangerous player—big
and strong and smart—and she’d been playing great tennis. Me, I was a wild card, in every sense of the term. No one knew what
to expect from me, least of all myself. I’m sure Amelie wasn’t too terribly happy about running into me so early in the tournament,
but at the same time I wasn’t too terribly happy about running into her, so in this one respect at least we were dead even.

She ended up beating me, but I made her sweat. I took the middle set 6–0, and that’s always a powerful calling card, when
you can break a top player three times in a single set and beat her 6–0. When you’re coming back from nowhere at all, you
take your accomplishments where you can find them, and here I took this one and held it close.

I figured I’d need it before long.

T
hat first trip to Africa led directly to a career turnaround—another Godsend, I’ve come to believe. A lot of people bring
back souvenirs when they travel: crafts, trinkets, art, clothes… Me, I brought back a renewed sense of purpose and a freshly
charged personal battery. Unfortunately, I also brought back a few extra pounds—which, also unfortunately, I added to the
few extra I’d started carrying during my long layoff.

The tennis press was only too happy to point this out when I turned up in Melbourne in January 2007 to prepare for the Australian
Open. I went first to Hobart, Australia, to play in a tune-up tournament. The idea was to get another couple matches under
my belt before the Open and to get my body clock adjusted to the sick time difference. I wasn’t alone in this, of course.
A lot of players spend some extra time Down Under ahead of the Australian Open to acclimate and get settled, especially because
the tournament sits at the front end of the tour season and there’s not a whole lot going on other than a couple of tune-up
tournaments on the continent. It makes sense to settle in there and complete your off-season training regimen at some local
facility so you can hit the ground running once the Open begins.

I was pumped and energized and ready to jump-start my career, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at me. I was seriously
out of shape and nowhere in the rankings—now back down to 94, headed into Hobart. In my head, I was thinking I was back in
the mix and on top of my game, but that’s not where the game was played. What counted was how I’d perform on the court. It’s
not like I was a little kid, tearing it up on the little-kid circuit in Los Angeles. I had to go out and get it done.

I was in a new phase in my thinking when it came to tennis. Now that I’d rededicated myself to my game, the plan was to focus
on Grand Slam tournaments. I would be all about the majors, I told myself. It used to be that every time I’d take the court,
every tournament I’d play, I expected to win. Anything less than a championship was a disappointment, but that’s a sure mind-set
for burnout, don’t you think? The better approach, I’d decided, the more
seasoned
approach, to put myself in position to do well when it counted and where it counted on the women’s tour, were the majors
and a couple of the Tier I events.

Beginning in 2009, the WTA tour changed how these events are classified. Now the old Tier I events are known as Premier Mandatory
tournaments, and the lesser events are known as Premier 5 (or Premier) tournaments, but it all amounts to the same thing.
There are big, meaningful tournaments, and small, less meaningful tournaments, and my idea was to focus on the big ones. Everything
else was a tune-up. That was how I set it up in my head, and here in Hobart was one of my first opportunities to put this
new approach to the test. It was a Tier IV event, so a lot of the top players wouldn’t be in attendance, but the main objective
was to get some more matches under my feet. The more I kept winning, the more matches I’d get to play.

Anyway, that was the plan, and it was working well enough. I won a couple of nothing-special matches to reach the quarterfinals,
but then I ran into an Austrian named Sybille Bammer, who was ranked 56th at the time. What a frustrating match! I couldn’t
get out of my own way. I won the first set, but Sybille battled back to win 3–6, 7–5, 6–3, and I thought,
Man, this is bad, Serena. You can’t even get past the quarterfinals in a Tier IV tournament.

So much for my more seasoned mind-set, right?

I was so mad at myself for letting that match get away from me. I went out that night and started running,
Rocky
-style, just like in the movie. It’s almost like I could hear that theme song in my head. The next morning, I got up before
the sun and went out for another
Rocky
run. My mom was staying with me in my hotel room, but I didn’t even tell her I was heading out. I just tiptoed from the room
without waking her and hit the streets. I ran through all these different neighborhoods, up and down steps. I put myself through
some serious paces. At one point, I found this huge park and started doing a series of sprints. I didn’t tell anybody where
I was going or where I’d been. I did it for me. I was tired of losing.

Who knows, maybe this was my way of catching up to the rest of the field.

W
e went to Melbourne that afternoon, thinking at least I’d have another day or two to settle in before the tournament. Unfortunately,
there was a pile of negative energy that found me almost as soon as I unpacked my bags. The biggest drag on my positive frame
of mind was the negative press I’d started to notice as soon as I hit town. I try not to pay attention to what media types
are saying about me, but there’s no avoiding it in Melbourne. The Australian Open is such a giant big deal when you’re Down
Under, it’s tough to tune it out. I’d have to have been deaf and blind to miss all the criticism. The Australian press can
be so mean, so petty. And so loud! The British press, too. The general consensus was that I was a big fat cow. That was what
I kept hearing—in just those terms, too. All the talk in the sports pages was how the championship was a pipe dream for me
because I was so out of shape. My best days on the tour were behind me, they said. I hadn’t won a tournament since 2005. I
was a lost soul who’d been away from the game for too long to get back to the top.

My first thought was,
Moo.

I just had to laugh. It was either that or cry, and I wasn’t about to let these people get to me, so I tried to smile and
press on. On the body-image front, I’d always been comfortable as an adult with how I looked. I’m big and athletic, so I know
I’m never going to have one of those rail-thin, supermodel-type bodies. I’m not some blond, blue-eyed thing. I have big boobs,
and I have a big butt. That’s me—and I love it! But from time to time, like most women, I stress about my appearance. I don’t
want to, but I do. I know better, but I do. I look in the mirror and everything seems too big, too much, too fat… too, too,
too! Most times, I see my reflection and what I get back is hot and sexy and all that good stuff, but I have my low moments,
same as everyone else. I have my worry spots, and here in Australia, carrying all that extra weight, I had more than my share,
so it wasn’t as easy to laugh off these hurtful comments as it might have been at some other time in my career.

Of course, it wasn’t how I looked that mattered. It was how I played, and I reminded myself that even though I’d always played
to win I had to be realistic. I was coming off that long layoff, and the mean-spirited comments about my fitness and my game
were rooted in truth. I
was
a little heavy—maybe twenty pounds heavier than I wanted to be at that point. And I wasn’t
expecting
to win, not with the same confidence or certainty I usually brought to each tournament. Don’t misunderstand, I wanted to
win, but I wasn’t counting on it. Rather, I was putting myself in position to win the next time out, or the time after that.

Even if I had been in top form, in top shape, the tournament draw was stacked against me. As an unseeded player, now ranked
81st in the world, I would have to face six seeded players on the way to a championship. No one had ever done that before,
so there was that to consider. Actually, there was a lot to consider, and I went into my first match thinking it wasn’t so
easy, getting my head around this tournament. So many people were counting me out, the same way they had when I first came
up.

All these negatives added up, and I remember lacing my sneakers in the players’ lounge, going through all my last-minute preparations
and thinking there was a lot of pressure on me to do well here. I’d meant to kind of sneak up on the tournament in a no-pressure
sort of way, but that clearly hadn’t happened. Of course, I was putting a lot of this pressure on myself, but some of it was
external. And then, just to add insult to insult, I received an upsetting visit from a Nike representative, who told me in
no uncertain terms that if I did not perform at my accustomed level the company might drop me from my sponsorship deal. This
guy actually came right out and said, “You really have to do well here.” In the players’ lounge, right before my first match!
To which I answered with something like, “Are you serious?” I couldn’t believe it, that this was what this man was telling
me, right when I was getting ready. So that was another distraction I really didn’t need going in to a major tournament.

Understand, it’s not that I shy from pressure. Throughout my career, I’d always responded well to pressure. In fact, I play
some of my best tennis when I’m up against it. Plus, I was always putting pressure on myself—to be better, to do more, to
win. My dad used to say, “The only pressure you feel is the pressure you put on yourself.” But here it was coming at me from
all sides. Here it was gaining on me.

In the back of my mind, I suppose I knew my sponsors could not have been too happy with the deals we’d made just a couple
years earlier. I wasn’t exactly returning big dividends for them on the court. For the past six months, I wasn’t even playing.
I could see how I’d put them in a difficult spot, but that didn’t mean this one rep had to put it on me in just this way.
At just this time. Now there was this anxiety that I was going to be dropped by my sponsors, and on top of that there was
all this other anxiety that came from hearing about my weight, about my lack of focus, about really needing to have a good
showing. What’s a good showing? It depends. For my sponsors, for serious tennis fans, a good showing would have probably been
making it to the quarterfinals, but for me, it was making it to the finals. Anything less, and I would have felt like I could
have done more.

Despite all these misgivings, I didn’t have too much trouble with my first-round opponent, a seeded Italian player named Mara
Santangelo. I put her away, 6–2, 6–1. Then I faced a qualifier from Luxembourg named Anne Kremer, who pushed me to a tiebreaker
in the first set, but I managed to power past her in straight sets anyway. It’s tricky, playing a qualifier in a major tournament,
because the way it sets up is they have to be playing great tennis just to earn a spot in the draw. Anne Kremer had already
won three qualifying matches before the main draw got underway, and she’d won her first-round match as well. She was clearly
on a roll, playing like she had nothing to lose and everything to prove. That was my approach, too, only she was fitter, faster,
and hungrier. That’s what I was up against in that first set.

The welcome news here is that it didn’t seem like the extra weight I was carrying would get in my way. No, I wasn’t as quick
on my feet as I usually was, but I was quick enough. And I wasn’t fatigued. This last was key. That second-rounder was a difficult
match, but I came out of it feeling fresh and strong. I’d been worried how I would hold up in a long, grueling battle, and
here I’d passed my first test, so that was a good sign.

The one bad sign was a blister that very quickly developed on my foot. I hadn’t seen that one coming, but I should have. See,
one of the fallouts from all that time away from the game was that my feet weren’t hard and calloused like they usually are
when I’m on the court every day. This could have been a major problem, but thankfully my mom knew just what to do. It was
such a nasty, massive blister, it’s a wonder I played through it, but somehow I’d get to the end of each match and then start
walking on my heels, so I wouldn’t make it worse. It became a pattern for the balance of the tournament. I looked like a creature
from
Night of the Living Dead
the way I shuffle-walked off the court. At first, one of the trainers tried to cut it open and drain it, but that only made
it worse, so my mom took over. She put some zinc on it to dry it out, but that wasn’t so effective. The only relief came when
she had me soak my foot each night in a bucket of superhot water, which she filled with Epsom salts. It was excruciatingly
painful, but I told myself it was just another hurdle to get past. Then she’d wrap it with these special pads, and I’d try
to put it out of my mind until the next round was over.