Page 14 of Carrie Soto Is Back

“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 enteredthe 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 eighta.m.every morning until early afternoon.

From about three to fivep.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 grasscourts 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.

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